Review | iPhone Roundup

Portable fun…

iPhone Roundup

More portable offerings, dissected by Jennifer Allen.

Time for more iPhone games, then. This time around, there’s an explosive third-person shooter, a mahjong sim, a game of glowing balls, and a game with the word “crap” in the title.

Caster HD

Elecorn | £2.99

Caster HD feels rather ambitious for an iPhone game. It’s an “intense high speed third-person shooter with explosive effects and massive terrain deformation” game, according to the iTunes description. It’s not quite as exciting as this, admittedly, but it is quite fun.

You play a Caster who has to save their homeland from a great threat. You do this by running around shooting anything that moves. It’s a simple concept but it does make for an entertaining distraction, even if it feels a little too brief at the moment. The controls work well, with one side of the screen covering movement and the other controlling the camera. The levels are a bit bland, though, and it’s easy to lose interest. Terrain deformation technically does exist. You can fire at the ground and it changes the shape of the terrain briefly. It’s not very useful, though, and is really nothing more than a distraction.

Caster HD isn’t bad, but it’s not overly thrilling either. The developer promises that more content will be available soon, so at least there’ll be more to do in the near future. Oh, and if you’ve got an iPhone rather than a shiny new iPad, save yourself £1.20 and buy the regular Caster rather than the HD version. It looks exactly the same. 5/10

KL Mahjong

Gamefront Singapore | £0.59

I’m not very good at “proper” mahjong. I played it once upon a time with some friends, and was subsequently beaten into submission. I enjoyed it, though, and I’m pleased to see more Mahjong games around rather than just the usual Shanghai variety, which is an entirely different game.

KL Mahjong is based on the Malaysian rules, one of the fastest types, and is rather intimidating at first. It’s a bare-bones affair with only a brief help section available to teach you the rules. A tutorial would have gone a long way towards making KL Mahjong more welcoming. There is at least Bluetooth multiplayer functionality, which is a handy addition, plus three different difficulty levels to play against.

Despite this, the learning curve is steep, and even at a meagre 59p it’s clearly a game that’s more appropriate for experienced Mahjong fans than someone trying to get the hang of things. 4/10

The Glowing Void

Assyria Game Studio | £1.19

The Glowing Void is just the sort of game to remind you how a simple concept can be ridiculously good fun.

The goal is simple: you have to fill up 70 per cent of the screen with glowing circles. These circles get bigger the longer that you hold your finger on the screen, the catch being that you also have to avoid red dots that are bouncing across the place. As you progress, more red dots appear, making it an increasingly tricky affair. It’s fun, though. Brilliant fun, actually. It’s the sort of game that you’ll find yourself playing for five minutes whenever you can, even if it is ultimately completely pointless. You can at least compare high scores via Twitter, Facebook and Agon Online.

It’s perhaps slightly expensive at £1.19, considering the limited content: there are only two modes, and both are very similar. But what price can you put on mindless fun? 8/10

Crap of Defense

iFun4All | £1.19

There’s reverse psychology afoot here, as Crap of Defense isn’t crap at all. Granted, in a really petty sort of way, it irritated me that the game is full of the use of Z instead of S (missionz, optionz, creditz – you get the idea), but I’ll forgive it as it is good fun.

A tower defence game, Crap of Defense is, much like other great iPhone games, a simple idea that’s well-implemented. The graphics are minimalist but very charming, using childlike doodles rather than traditional sprites to represent the invading hordes of soldiers that need blowing up. Using a tank in the bottom corner of the screen, players must decide whether to fire fast with a quick tap on the screen, or fire hard by holding down for longer. Timing is also crucial in order to hit the optimal number of soldiers. There’s a scattering of powerups on offer as the game progresses through its 24-level campaign, and no huge surprises, but that’s what makes Crap of Defense so fun. You know exactly what to expect, and it never disappoints. There’s enough to do here to make the £1.19 price tag excellent value. Simple, ridiculously compelling and most definitely not crap. 9/10