Happy Halloween fellow AppTrawlers!

Aptly we are overrun with monsters today in the form of the new game by Origin8, creator of BioSub, Sentinel and Poker Buddy. MonsterKill is a tower defense game with a monster twist.  The aim of the game is to protect your gate from the rampaging hordes of classic horror types such as Frankenstein, Dracula, Wolfman, and the mummy.  In your arsenal of weapons are a series of spells which are cast by motioning different patterns on the screen.

The spells:

• Slice and dice them by motioning the finger left to right
• Summon lightning by drawing a ‘Z’ on the screen
• Reign down fireballs with a ‘V’ action
• Freeze them with an inverted ‘V’

The graphics are lovely and the game has a well thought out and polished feel, each of the characters move very well and the premise of the game is simple and enjoyable.  The shop feature allows you to repair and upgrade your gate or wall and improve your spells.  The sound effects are fitting, funny and even a bit catchy.

There are three game modes which include:

• Normal: Work through the levels upgrading your abilities and defences
• Endless: Same as normal but with no level limit… it just keeps going!
• onslaught: The player is given 20 tokens to stock up and you have to fend off 101 monsters that attack

The only niggly problem i found was that the controls can be a little un-responsive sometimes and whilst trying to do a lighting bolt they get hit by an ice block.  However this only really happened at the craziest moments when overrun by the enemy.

Overall, the game is extremely well realised and you can tell a lot of thought and love has gone into the game.  The graphics and sounds are great and the control method, despite being un-responsive at times is new to the device and genre and adds a refreshing twist.  If you are looking for a halloween related game, you can’t go wrong with this one.  The price is great at the moment so snap it up before it goes up.

The post Halloween Special – Review: MonsterKill appeared first on AppTrawler.

Namco’s Garters & Ghouls made its way into the App Store last night and is the latest twin stick shooter to arrive on the scene. You play as the freshly reanimated Marie Dupois fighting against an evil force known as “Thrum” who has caused the dead to rise under its control. It’s your task to close the portals of the underworld that spawn the various zombies, werewolves, and demons that are rampaging across the countryside.

The game plays a lot like iDracula and other similar games, with two virtual joysticks that control your movement and shooting. Along the way you come across different weapons and powerups, and throughout the land are shops run by the “Steam Queens” where you can buy upgrades for your character’s health, movement, weapon damage, and other things.

The main content difference between Garters & Ghouls and similar iPhone games is that the gameplay is structured around 25 distinct and large levels and framed in a slowly revealing storyline.

The task for each level, however, remains the same throughout: you must destroy the enemy-spawing portals strewn across the map. Still, going into a level with a specific number of portals to destroy gave me a greater sense of purpose than other pure survival shooters. There is some very light planning involved in avoiding getting caught in the crossfire between demon-spawing portals, and there are a variety of enemies which do get more difficult as well as a number of weapon upgrades.

The game’s difficulty, however, ramps up slowly, so it can feel like you are just grinding your way through the game. And if you listened to our last podcast, you would have heard that Eli Hodapp’s issue with the game was the repetitive and lengthy nature of the levels. While I don’t believe its any more repetitive than many of the existing survival shooters we’ve played before, I had also hoped the levels would provide more variety in gameplay.

Meanwhile, a number of other factors keeps the game squarely in the “good, but not great” category. The controls and animations are adequate, though not especially smooth, and the targeting of the enemies and portals requires you hitting just the right spot. This gives the enemies a 2 dimensional feel. The 1.0 version also suffers from some occasional crashes, though if this occurs only your in-level progress is lost and you can resume at the beginning of the level.

The post Out Now: Garters & Ghouls appeared first on AppTrawler.

Indeed, Paramount has dug up an old film licence, providing us with a Pet Cemetery game.

Stephen King should be spinning in his bed.

Granted Pet Cemetery isn’t one of his best books, and the film wasn’t all that either, but this iPhone game should be hit over the head with a shovel and buried deep in a lead-lined grave.

Of course, there’s always something lost in translation between different media, but the deconstruction of a tale of grief and dealing with loss into a weak top-down tap-shooter doesn’t mark out developer Last Legion or publisher Paramount as wanting to do anything but cash in on Halloween.

That’s fair enough. It’s the quality of the game that really stinks, however.

For one thing, each of the very short levels is effectively the same, with set spawn points – typically house doors and bushes – from which either townsfolks or zombie kids and animals (bird, cat, dog) randomly emerge.

Each follows a linear, preset course to its predetermined exit point – usually another door.

The bad guys don’t have any artificial intelligence, attacking only when they collide with something edible that’s directly in their path. Indeed, because of the way characters spawn, it sometimes seems that the living are chasing the dead.

I know the reanimated are supposed to be stupid, but, really, come on.

Your job as the lone protector of the living is to frantically tap on anything that’s not a townsman until it dies in a splat of green.

Your only obstacle in this task is the number of characters on the screen and the ‘reload’ button in the bottom left of the screen that you have to tap to keep the bullets flowing. Various power-ups also appear that earn you bonus points and extra health. Occasionally you get a bigger ammo pack, too.

Your health level drops, either when the living are eaten or the dead escape without being shot, until it’s Game Over. If you avoid that fate, at the end of each level your kill and save totals are totted up, providing you with a score that can be sent out to Facebook or emailed to a friend.

And that’s it. There’s no variation in terms of the location, the enemies, the people you’re saving, let alone the gameplay as you progress. You just keep tapping away until you complete the game or die in the process. The latter is preferable to the former.

“Fifteen levels of fright” is the official marketing line. The real verdict rhymes with that.

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The concept behind iPossessed is that you have an iPhone or iPod Touch that is possessed by the Devil.  It makes scary noises and a blood-red pentagram appears on the screen once the program is started.  If you own an iPhone, the device vibrates uncontrollably.

To use the app effectively, you leave your iPhone on a table with friends or hand it to a friend.  You can set a timer to start the program after a set number of seconds.  Through the same options, you can choose to use the pentagram background or turn on or off certain sounds.  Then you leave the vicinity and let the fun begin.

I have one or two problems with the app.  There should be more background options and more sounds that come with it.  Perhaps the developers can add those in a future release.  Why not have a background that is identical to the iPhone or iPod Touch background but uses animation to drip blood?  Also, you can’t deactivate the image and sounds once they begin without stopping the application.

If you’re a practical joker, then this app is virtually a must-have.  It’s cheaper and more reusable than a whoopee cushion.

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