More_Badass
Member
Each month, the iOS GAF community hosts a thread for new game releases, rumors and discussion that define the fast-moving world of iOS gaming.
The OP will contain games that released both towards the end of the previous month and games that have released during the current month.
All the games listed will have been highlighted by the GAF community in one way or another. This way you can keep tabs on the best games and at the same time curate an excellent resource to look back on to find games you may have missed.
If you're a developer who wishes to have your game featured, please talk about your game in the thread and if the GAF community at large likes the game then your wish just might be granted. Please note that there's a difference between posting about a game you made and just advertising your game with no further interaction with the community, this thread is not for the latter and such advertising behavior is frowned upon.
Site | Trailer | App Store
An epic vision of the future, AG Drive takes you on the ride of your life as you drive blazing fast anti-gravity race craft and race against opponents on spectacular tracks that dive over and under an Earth city of the future
The world of AG Drive is real and full of life - witness huge futuristic highway systems come to life, with air traffic filling the skies as spaceships land and take off, and spotlights sweep the skies. The stunning, unparalleled visuals of the world of AG Drive were possible to be realized only because of the ZORG 3D engine.
Holy cow at AG Drive!!! The game is GORGEOUS, runs buttery smooth on my 5s and is a joy to play. Absolutely the best Wipeout-like on iOS. This should not be passed up for $4.
Guys...AG Drive
The best F-Zero/Wipeout-like I've played since Repulze. The sense of speed and the visuals are...wait for it, GLORIOUS™
And the best part? 100% premium. The devs switched from freemium during the soft launch to paid with no IAP for the worldwide launch
Just to be clear, it's all racing, no weapons. But there's a nice variety of race types (duels, elimination, etc.), the controls are tight, the sense of speed and visuals are great, and there's a hefty amount of content.
Edit: there is a slight offensive element, since each vehicle has a special ability (shockwave that slows down racers, electric AoE blast that knocks racers away, etc)
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Site | Trailer | App Store
Join Alto and his friends as they embark on an endless snowboarding odyssey. Journey across the beautiful alpine hills of their native wilderness, through neighbouring villages, ancient woodlands, and long-abandoned ruins.
Along the way you'll rescue runaway llamas, grind rooftops, leap over terrifying chasms and outwit the mountain elders – all while braving the ever changing elements and passage of time upon the mountain.
Alto's Adventure is really fun!
Sure it's an endless racer but damn does it have style. Just gorgeous! The time of day changes each run so eventually you're snowboarding at night with a crescent moon in the sky and lights on in the houses, and then the sun starts to slowly rise on the next run! It all looks really great.
They've got the usual three challenges you need to complete to level up and coins to collect to buy things from the shop. You can do tricks in the air and you have to land properly or you'll crash.
I dunno, I haven't played a runner in a long time and I think this one's great. Soothing music, too.
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Site | Trailer | App Store
A physics platformer about size, speed and momentum unlike anything you’ve ever seen before!
Grow, shrink, roll, leap and climb in this unique puzzler featuring over 150 challenging mazes one-of-a-kind gameplay that includes portals, inverted gravity, vehicles and more! Share your times with friends on the global leaderboards and become a time/space legend!
...Totally worth checking out. Its a puzzle platformer, but easily one of the better ones of the recent past, polished AND interesting enough to get into my highly recommended category even. The basic mechanic revolves around growing and shrinking your ball, and how that affects mass, momentum and some other aspects that are very cleverly used in the levels. Swirling around the level is very satisfying and its generally really pleasant to play and solve. Definitely check this out as well.
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Site | Trailer | App Store
Use sound to explore mysterious environments and escape from an unseen evil through 80 ominous levels.
Based on our Ludum Dare game You Must Escape, which is featured on PC Gamer's list of 100 best free online games.
Best experienced with sound enabled. Stereo headphones are recommended.
So yeah, Dark Echo is awesome
A black screen, with your white footprints the only color amid the surrounding dark. Hold the screen to move toward that direction. Each step illuminates the world through sounds, lines emanating from your steps and against the wall. Without sound, you are blind. Find the exit. Except it's not so easy, because you are not alone. Things lurk in the darkness, drawn by the sound of your movement. Hunting you.
Dark Echo is a masterful execution of minimalist design. Each step is tense, drawing you forward through the necessity of sight and the need to explore. The visuals, stark lines contrasting against black, are simplistic yet work so well. The sound design is atmospjeric and incredible. Listen to the game's advice and use headphones. Your echoing footsteps. The gruttual growls of those things that lurk in the dark. Water splashing underfoot, or dripping overhead.
I loved every minute of it (played about an hour).
It's brilliant, very engaging and incredibly immersive (I've a soft spot for sounds heavy games but I'm really liking the visual feedback).
I really hope there is a mystery/story to discover...seems like it.
Great game.
Dark Echo is really fantastic. The whole take on using sound is truly unique and fun mechanic. Also looking forward to seeing what mysteries lie ahead.
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Site | Trailer | App Store
All bump. No grind.
Dinofarm Games - creators of 100 Rogues - are pleased to present Auro: A Monster-Bumping Adventure.
Auro introduces a whole new kind of gameplay: Bumping! What's that? Why, it's the strategic use of movement, magic spells, and straight-up bumping to kill monsters to gain points, and become a master Bumper!
Set in an original fantasy universe, guide the brash, spoiled Prince Auro through procedurally generated dungeons, with only a handful of tactical spells - and your wits - to protect you.
Now it's finally in shape for prime time. I need to get back to it and put more time into it with the latest updates. Quite a difficult game that looks simplistic at first thinking all you do is bump enemies off the playing field, but it's much deeper than that (the tutorial alone is 31 levels!).
Wow. The tutorial is much better than it used to be in Auro. Great to see when a game truly evolves.
Regardless, I always knew Auro had the chance at greatness and it feels like, at least the current Android version, it finally has.
Looking forward to diving into this again with a fresh perspective.
Don't go into it thinking it's a Hoplite clone. It's way deeper than that game. Without strategy and knowing your enemies, you will get nowhere in this game.
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Site | Trailer | App Store
Odd is not like the other robots. After failing a standardized test Odd ends up in the recycling bin. Help Odd escape the robot factory using building blocks, electricity, and physics!
Each level in this contraption puzzle game presents a new challenge. Build a bridge across a (small) abyss. Design and drive an unsafe car. And ride a robotic centipede, like you always wanted to.
This is astonishing. GOTY stuff, on 1st Feb
Picked it up. Cute and cleaver so far. Looking forward to digging into it more later.
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Site | Trailer | App Store
Midnight Star is an epic sci-fi shooter designed from the ground up for mobile. Build your arsenal, develop your skills and compete against thousands of other players online! Set 120 years into our future, Midnight Star takes players aboard the MSRV-Joplin, a research vessel newly outfitted with military weaponry to explore a mysterious signal coming from within our Solar System. When disaster strikes, they're transported across the universe to take part in an epic war whose outcome will determine the fate of humanity...
At the moment I'd say it's the best rail shooter I've played on iOS. Might even go as far as to give it the Metroid Prime seal of approval
Midnight Star is also growing on me. Wish it had been a premium title, but certainly is one of the better rail shooters on iOS. It too had some nice twists on the usual tap to shoot found in similar titles.
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Started playing Nobody Said It Was Easy earlier and if you want to get your hard-as-nails retro platformer fix, I recommend checking this out
It's not auto-run, which I had expected after seeing some gameplay. You can only move in one direction and need to hit walls to reverse, but you can stop and decide when to move forward. This allows for level design that wouldn't be possible in games like Bitless and Run Roo Run.
The game really impresses me with the variety of mechanics it introduces and how it smartly builds on its simple core gameplay. Oh, you thought simply dodging spikes and jumping gaps was tough? Now do that while controlling two people simultaneously. Enemies to avoid, switching platforms, gravity swapping, and more. Controls are responsive and tight and the game is tough. You will die dozens of times.
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Trailer | App Store
Yet It Moves is an award-winning puzzle platformer now available on iPhone and iPad for the first time!
Tilting the world turns walls into floors, slides into platforms, and stacks of rocks into dangerous hazards.
Navigate through a colorful paper collage world and unlock new levels by solving puzzles.
Three levels in (four if you count the tutorial) and I can say that Yet It Moves is one of the best physics platformers on IOS. Honestly it feels like a game built from the ground-up for touch. Very natural and simple controls and smart uses of the mechanic too.
I picked this up as well and completely agree with this. There's also been platformers that play with gravity, but this takes it to another level. There will be times you will die because you don't know what awaits you of you decide to just fall through a crack. Either careful small movements or trial by dying are your options.
Great game cleverly adapted for touch.
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Site | Trailer | App Store
Hero Emblems is a JRPG that mixes “Side-Scrolling beat' em up” and “Match-3” features. Set in the middle-ages fantasy world of sword-fighting and wizardry, it is an adventure of 4 brave warriors who wield different emblem powers and their attempts to stop the re-awakening of the God of Evil.
OMG! Hero Emblems is sooooooooooooo good! Such a great rpg/puzzle/brawler-mix!
I've tried to fight it, but Hero Emblems owns my soul. It's super addictive and a novel take on the JRPG paradigm. I just made it to the third continent and this will definitely be in my top 5 of 2015.
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Honestly, Hero's Emblem isn't the most amazing game ever. The story is generic as all hell, the characters are trite and the only unique thing it has going for it is how but used the match-3 mechanic in battles. This part about the game works very, very well, because you have to think about every match you make and can't do things just willy nilly. Matching pieces does not afford you points. It will either heal you, increase your defense, attack the opponent, or unleash a skill. There is, of course, an element of randomness to deal with, but the game seems mostly fair. It's rare that a board feels unfair, and the challenge from the game truly comes from playing the game at its own game. The game is unrelenting and unforgiving, but it is incredibly rewarding and when you do well and beat that boss, you feel like you actually did what had to be done to win and didn't win by just pure luck and randomness.
That's why I love the game. I will say the game is doing a very good job at pissing me the fuck off enough to stop playing for a bit, but I have no plans on giving up.
PittaGAF can be a little hyperbolic at times, but Hero Emblems really is a superb game (game being the main word here, rather than a match-3 puzzler). My weekend was taken up entirely by it with more than 10 hours being played.
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Site | Trailer | App Store
In a future where cars are obsolete, the Gunbrick has become a worldwide sensation!
The Gunbrick - A gun one side... a shield on the other.
Encounter wasteland mutants, crazed nerds, law enforcement and all manner of cube based adversaries. Roll your way through this action packed puzzle platformer.
Gunbrick is fantastic! Such a simple premise used masterfully. Nice change of pace to have a new platformer that concentrates on thinking things through rather than how fast you can dash through levels. Last time I felt this excited about a puzzle platformer was probably Penumbear.
Love Gunbrick, but I'm finding the beginning stages to be quite tedious. Mostly because it sticks to the same formula most games do in introducing new elements. I see the next thing coming a mile away, and I just want to move beyond it.
I'm just being an old curmudgeon, really. It's a beautiful and very clever little game. Highly recommend it!
Gunbrick is really good, it's such a simple idea but it works perfectly with the controls
A recommendation for Gunbrick - it's really a puzzle platform game in which you try and get the right side of your brick facing the right direction. Nitrome then squeezes everything they possibly can out of the idea, with new mechanics and ideas in every stage. The pixel art is lively and fabulously detailed. They've really established themselves as a developer to watch.
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Site | Trailer | App Store
Shadowmatic is an imagination-stirring puzzle where you rotate abstract objects in a spotlight to find recognizable silhouettes in projected shadows, relevant to the surrounding environment.
The game combines stunning visuals with relaxing and captivating gameplay.
On your journey to discover the right solution you will stumble upon many unexpected and infinitely varied silhouettes.
Shadowmatic is amazing on my GOTY list
You might remember Zen Bound from a few years back, a leisurely puzzle game about wrapping figures in rope. It was a calming experience, not too taxing and enjoyable in its design and artistic style. If you're looking for something similar, the recently released Shadowmatic might scratch that itch.
Like Zen Bound, it's a puzzle game to be enjoyed at your leisure, where the entertainment comes from the manipulating objects and slowly teasing out a solution at your own pace. But rather than wooden objects and rope, Shadowmatic is more abstract. Each level presents you with odd shapes, their shadows projected onto the environment. By rotating and moving these shapes, you alter their shadows into familiar objects, perhaps a frog or a wrench or a chess piece. Between the soothing music, detailed environments and objects, and satisfyingly tactile gameplay, Shadowmatic is an enjoyable puzzle game. While the core objectives are simple on their own, you can also try to find tricky shapes when you replay levels if you're looking for more of a challenge
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