Our rating: :: ALL’S FAIR IN WAR GAMES :: Read Review »
Shadowgun: War Games is an upcoming free-to-play multiplayer shooter that’s essentially just an Overwatch knock-off. There are hero characters with special abilities, and you compete in 5-v-5 game modes where the goal is to use superior team tactics to win the day.
Depending on who you are, this might sound exciting, but given my time with the closed beta for the game, I wouldn’t get your hopes up. Although War Games looks nice and pretty, it doesn’t feel that different from other mobile shooters that have already tried the same thing (i.e. Modern Combat Versus).
Our rating: :: PREMIUM BUT NOT PERFECT :: Read Review »
At the end of last month, Codebrew Games announced an update coming to their popular city-builder, Pocket City some time this month. In this update is the promise of expanding your city out into other regions, enacting policies, and more. The full info on the update—as well as a link to sign up to test these new features—can be found here.
I’ve spent the last week or so testing out this new content for Pocket City, and it makes for an undeniably better game. That said, I wasn’t super impressed with Pocket City when it first released, and this update doesn’t suddenly change my entire impression of the game. It’s still got some rules that feel too restrictive, but it finally allows you to build public transit that makes sense, which was one of my primary grievances with the original version of the game.
Something to note about this new update to Pocket City is that it doesn’t provide much to new players. To start enacting policies or expanding between regions, you have to level up your city to at least level 28, which takes some doing. Even when you get there, it doesn’t feel like it shifts the gameplay too much. In fact, after I got the ability to pass policies to improve my city, I routinely forgot to actually do it because my city was cruising along just fine without their benefits in play.
If you’re eyeing this update to Pocket City as a way to really deepen the experience of playing it, I think you’ll be disappointed. That said, this December update—whenever it drops—improves the base game and adds a couple more layers to Pocket City that make it more interesting than it was previously.
I spent the better part of my weekend playing Flappy Royale. I didn’t necessarily want to. I just felt like I had to. It’s a hypnotic experience that’s way too easy to just keep playing.
Flappy Royale is the brainchild of Orta Therox, Em Lazer-Walker, and Zach Gage. It's a very simple idea: Take the the rules of Battle Royale games (e.g. PUBG, Fortnite, Apex Legends) and apply them to Flappy Bird. 100 players play as birds that jump out of a bus. From there, they must fly between as many pipes as possible until one player is deemed the champion.
The game controls pretty much exactly like Flappy Bird did back in 2013. The only real differences are the hopping out of the bus (presumably inspired by the Fortnite Battle Bus) and 99 ghost birds flapping on screen with you, all competing for the number one spot.
This latter element—the ability to see other players play while you do—is the secret sauce that makes Flappy Royale such a tantalizing challenge. You can always see your competition flapping alongside you, and you want beat all of them. If you can’t do that, maybe you settle for getting a top 50 finish before diving in again to see if you can do better.
Although it’s not officially released, anyone can go and download the beta release of the game here. In this early state though, the game is already quite popular. Here are some stats Orta Therox shared about the game over the weekend:
Oh… Damn. I was doing the stats wrong.
600,000 games were played on mobile native. 1,300,000 games were played on web.
Current Flappy Royale statistics: 20 games started per second right now, with 600,000 games so far. Looks like folks average about 50 plays per session.
2 million games of Flappy Royale is really impressive, especially considering it populates each of those games with 100 players. Where it starts feeling downright magical is when you consider that all of these matches start pretty much instantly.
The way Flappy Royale eliminates any sort of queue times for matches is ingenious, and probably another big reason for the game’s stickiness. Instead of filling matches with bots or waiting for 100 live players to play a level at once, the game pits you against the ghost data of the last 99 players who played the level before you. In other words, you’re always playing against other people, but you don’t have to wait for them to log in for you to do so.
Right now, Flappy Royale really feels like it has huge potential. It successfully distills the most thrilling aspects of Battle Royale into a really tight mobile package. A lot of this has to do with how quick and easy it is to play ten rounds without blinking, so here’s to hoping the game doesn’t get too bloated with extra features or monetization schemes before it officially releases.
Marvel Super War is the latest MOBA from Netease, but it’s not something you can just go and download on the App Store now. The game is in a closed beta, meaning you have to download it from a special link here and the developers are still ironing out some kinks before officially releasing the game to mobile players everywhere.
I’ve spent a decent amount of time with Marvel Super War over the past week, and I let me say, it’s not half bad. This is to say that it’s really neat to play as heroes and villains like Thor and Magneto, but this game feels a little too... familiar.
Steam Link has finally released for iOS! That’s right, you can play your epic backlog of PC games on the go now. Well… sort of.
While the Steam Link app was announced seemingly ages ago, it only got actual approval for release last night. Check out the video above to see what it looks like in action, and be sure to ignore my amateur Into the Breach skills. For some more detailed written impressions, see below:
Just like every Thursday, today we're taking some time to let you know what we think are the best games that have come out over the past week. We've had hands-on time with all of them, so you can trust us when we tell you that we're pretty clued up on this.
That said, you might disagree. That's cool, you can do that. But if you do, we'd love to hear why in the comments section at the bottom of the article. Maybe you've spotted something that you love, and you want to share it with the world? That's just one of the many services that the comments section can provide.
Thursday is the day when most games come out on the App Store. So every week we like to spend Thursday telling you what the best of those games is. In a way we're providing a wonderful service, since it means you don't have to play anything rubbish in order to find the gems that have landed on iOS over the past seven days.
This week we've got a shooter, a twitchy arcade racer that features giant worms, and one of the strangest auto-runners that we've ever had the privilege of playing. Of course, with this being a pretty short list, there's a chance we've missed something out. If you think that's the case, then do let us know your own suggestions in the comments section at the bottom of the article.
Every Thursday here at 148Apps we like to make sure you're caught up with all the amazing mobile games that have come out over the past seven days. And today is no different - what you're reading right now is our break down of what we think are the top 5 games for iPhone and iPad that came out this week.
It's an interesting mix too, with an intriguing endless runner or two, a puzzler that's put its gloves back on, and an adaptation of a classic board game that's sure to get more than one or two fingers twitching with joy. If you think we've missed anything, then feel free to chuck your own suggestions in the comments section at the bottom of the article.
Well, once again we've reached Thursday, which means it's time to have a look at the awesome games that have popped up on the App Store over the past seven days. We've got horror, we've got vampires, and we've got at least one game we still don't really understand. So that's a first.
Obviously loads more games have come out this week, and there's a chance we might have missed something in our trawl of the App Store. If that's the case, and you know of another awesome game that people should be playing, do let us know in the comments section at the bottom of this article.
Fantasy football is massive, which is something the AAF understands. It's a new American Football league that's two weeks into its first season. It's designed to serve a number of different masters - for one thing it's positioned itself as a second chance league, a place where NFL players who didn't make the cut can play meaningful games and prove that they're worth another look.
But it's the technology that the league uses that we're going to have a look at today - namely the app that you can grab right now from the App Store or the Google Play Store. The reason we're interested? Because you can now play along with the games live, tracking moves and making predictions on the fly.
Even if you're not a fan of American Football, it's a really interesting new way to engage with sports that could well become more and more popular if the AAF manages to take off over the next few weeks.
How is it already Thursday again? My oh my, doesn't time fly when you're playing the very best mobile games out there? We certainly hope it does, because we've gone ahead and written a list of what we think are the top 5 best games for iPhone and iPad that have landed on the App Store over the last seven days.
This week we've got two very different platformers, a .io game that shouldn't be anywhere near as much fun as it is, as well as a couple of games that like to play by their own rules. They're all really good though, and if it was up to us you'd read this article and then go and play all of them and have a lovely old time.
You've no doubt heard of Apex Legends by now. It's a new take on the battle royale genre developed by Respawn, and published by EA. It went live on EA Origin, PS4, and Xbox One last week, and it's already been generating a lot of buzz around the non-mobile gaming world. More interestingly though, it's also started a similar amount of buzz in the much more important mobile gaming world too.
That's because there's a very good chance that the game is going to be coming out for phones and tablets in the not-too-distant future. This isn't hyperbole either, it's straight from the horse's mouth. If the horse is EA and its mouth is a quarterly earnings call. Which, for the purposes of this article, they are.
Well this has come out of nowhere. Here we were, waiting with baited breath for the release of Mario Kart Tour, and Nintendo has gone and pulled the rug out from under us. The Italian plumber's next appearance on the App Store isn't going to involve carts, or karts for that matter - it's going to involve white coats and stethoscopes. Because Dr. Mario World is on its way to mobile.
The news dropped last night, and it's fair to say we're a bit shocked. It's been a good long while since Nintendo even released anything on mobile, after a splurge of games over the past couple of years, but we'd never even heard that Dr. Mario was on its way, let alone that it was going to overtake Mario Kart Tour to become the next big N franchise to make it onto the App Store.
It's Thursday, which means that most of the new games that are going to come out this week, have come out. There's loads of them, as ever, so we've picked what we think are the three best that have landed on the App Store over the past seven days. And we think we've got a trio of proper smashers for you this week.
If you like shooting, escaping, or the painful drudgery of the working world, then there's going to be something here for you. We've got a port, and two games that are making their debut on the App Store. And all three are an awful lot of fun.
Since this is such a short list, there's a chance we've missed your favorite game off. Don't get angry though, just let us know in the comments section at the bottom of the article - after all, we all love mobile gaming.
On Friday we always have something really important to do. Namely, it's when we prepare you for the next seven days, letting you know what we think are going to be the top games coming out over the next week. Forewarned is forearmed after all, so consider this us throwing a bunch of arms at you. But not in a weird way.
It's a pretty short list this week, but we expect more games to sneak up on us over the weekend. While it might not be the longest list in the world, the games on it are shaping up to be really rather special.
:: ALL’S FAIR IN WAR GAMES :: Read Review »
