I know at least a few of my regular readers sport iOS devices, so I thought I’d take the opportunity to share a few titles I’ve downloaded and actually wanted to keep recently. Since my day job sees me downloading and reviewing a metric fuckton of iOS and Android games (all right… five) every week, I get exposed to a lot of great stuff… and a lot of crap, too, but we’ll leave that to one side for the moment.
Without further ado, then, here are a few iOS games that you may wish to check out if you have the chance.
Rebuild
Rebuild is a game about zombies. But wait! Don’t dismiss it just yet. While the whole “zombie” thing is incredibly played out now, a few games recently have provided a pleasingly different take on surviving the undead/infected hordes. One of these is Facebook game The Last Stand: Dead Zone, which is a surprisingly deep RTS/RPG that is worth taking a look at even if you typically hate Facebook games. But we won’t get into that now, as we’re talking about iOS games.
The other is Rebuild. As the name suggests, the game is about, well, rebuilding. Beginning with a custom character and a small cadre of survivors (all of whom can be renamed) it’s up to the player to recapture a town (which can also be renamed) from the groaning, brain-obsessed ones. This is achieved in a turn-based manner, with each turn representing a day.
Each day, you can assign survivors to locations that surround captured territory and give them a job to do according to where their skills lie. You might want them to scavenge for food on a farm, or search for survivors in an apartment building. Killing zombies clears the way for building specialists to capture territory, and once captured the survivors gain the benefit from whatever building the captured territory contained. Survivors can also be equipped with items (including dogs) in order to boost their stats and make them better at their jobs, and the zombies will occasionally attack the main hideout, meaning you’d better have left some people behind on defence duty.
Rebuild is a simple but deep turn-based strategy game that is in the remarkable position of being a zombie game that is actually both original and worth playing. It’s easy to understand but also easy to mess up, meaning it will take time to figure out and determine the perfect strategy. Each game is randomly generated and may take place on one of several different map sizes at several different difficulty levels, so there’s plenty of replay value here, too.
Grab it here.
Necronomicon
H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos makes for great games, whether they’re of the board, card or video variety. Necronomicon is no exception.
Necronomicon is a solitaire card game that pits players against the deck. The game takes place on two rows of five spaces: the top five belong to the forces of darkness, while the bottom five belong to the ever-present “investigators” — humans from disparate walks of life who are thrown into conflict against the Old Ones.
The basic mechanic of Necronomicon is in battling these cards by placing them in adjacent spaces — forces of darkness at the top, plucky humans on the bottom. Each monster and investigator card has a Defense and a Sanity rating. If one card has both Defense and Sanity higher than the other, it defeats its opponent immediately, scoring points for the player if the investigator won, losing points if the monster won.
If one or both of the stats are tied, however, an element of luck comes into play. Both sides make an attack roll, with the highest roll defeating their opponent. These attack rolls may be modified by playing additional cards onto the investigators and monsters — these cards may also be placed on spaces before investigators or monsters show up, allowing you to set up battlegrounds that benefit the investigators and hamper the monsters. Thematically, these extra cards represent weapons, allies, magic spells, potions, curses and all manner of other goodness.
The game’s end is determined by an evil portal thing in the corner of the screen. If the monster row is full and the player draws a monster card, the portal takes damage. If it takes three points of damage, the game ends in a loss for the player. However, if the investigators row is full and the player draws another investigator, the portal heals a point of damage. If the portal is undamaged and gets healed, it is sealed and the player wins.
Necronomicon is quite difficult to describe and even the in-game instructions don’t do a terribly clear job of explaining how to play. But after a couple of games, it becomes quick and simple to play, and a great little solitaire card game that doesn’t take long to get through a session of.
Grab it here.
DOOORS/100 Floors
I’m lumping these together because although they’re developed by completely different people/teams, they’re almost identical in concept.
The two games are “room escape” games, an offshoot of the adventure game genre that has no plot and simply requires that the player find their way out of a series of rooms via increasingly-esoteric means. Both games make full use of the iPhone’s multitouch screen and accelerometer, and both give you absolutely no help whatsoever, which will ensure you get infuriated as you poke, prod and pinch at the screen, tilt the phone side to side and shake it just to see if anything happens.
While sometimes the solutions are irritatingly obtuse, successfully figuring out the correct way to achieve something is immensely satisfying.
To say much more about these games would be to spoil the infuriating puzzle-solving therein, so I shall leave it at that.