Category Archives: Common Sense Media

App Review: Contre Jour

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Plenty of apps are fun, but few are truly beautiful. Contre Jour is one of those. From its lush, yet stark, black and white art style to its soothing musical soundtrack, it’s a game you will never get tired of looking at. Fortunately, it’s also an app whose gameplay will keep you hooked. Borrowing from many familiar titles, Contre Jour is another take on physics-based puzzles. But rather than being just another knock-off like so many others, it instead tips its hat to those iPhone legends and extends on their legacy.

Your blob/hero explores a perilous series of worlds, filled with spikes, carnivorous plants, and some endless falls. Some levels are easy, but some are nail-biters (any one can be skipped, though, if it proves too challenging). It’s a game best played on the iPad, if you have that option, given the occasional need to use multitouch, but that’s nitpicking. This is an app that could quickly become another must-have for all iDevice owners.

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App Review: Taco Master

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There are plenty of restaurant simulator games on the market — forcing you to quickly prepare orders with an ever-widening batch of ingredients. Taco Master, unfortunately, does nothing to move the genre forward. The game, in fact, is a treadmill of making orders (using ingredients that don’t look too appetizing and sound even less so when you slop them onto a tortilla), with short breaks between levels. The fun is supposed to be in the tension that comes with getting orders right and completed before customers leave, but it’s ultimately kind of boring. There are worse games in the App Store for a dollar, but there are much, much better ones, too.

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App Review: SpongeBob Frozen Face Off

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SpongeBob Frozen Face Off has a bit of dual personality disorder. It can’t decide if it’s a game or a book. It succeds more as the later. The story, taken from a new episode of the show, is certainly funny. And the voice acting is fantastic (due to the use of the same actor who voices Plankton on TV). It’s even nice to have an alternate ending, depending on how successful you are in finding jellybeans in the story. But ultimately, the app falls a bit short — leaving you with the feeling you’ve just watched an overly long introductory sequence and wondering exactly what you had paid for.

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App Review: Anomaly Warzone Earth HD

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Tower defense games are quite common in the app store, but this reversal of the game model in Anomaly Warzone Earth HD, which puts you in the role of the troops walking into the kill zone, is a wonderfully creative and entertaining twist. The game has tons of variety in troops you can deploy (as well as upgrades you can choose) and giving you plenty of options as you choose your route. The production values are high and there’s even a story that doesn’t feel tacked on. It’s an incredibly sleek, fluid game that might appear simple at first glance, but gets deeper and deeper the more you play it. And it’s an absolute must for strategy fans. It was also the winner of the Apple Design Award.

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App Review: Save Yammi

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There’s no denying that if it weren’t for Cut the Rope, Save Yammi would never have been created. The similarities in the games are glaringly obvious and sometimes distracting. Yammi’s lead character, color scheme, music, sounds, and more all seem to be taken directly from the hit app. But the gameplay is just different enough to warrant a look. Rather than cutting ropes, you string them out to help guide a cookie to the hungry cute amorphous creature. And the introduction of things like warp gates, racing wheels, shields, moving platforms, and destructible bricks breaks the game into new territory.

It’s fun, if a bit too familiar. And the physics (which are crucial in a game like this) work wonderfully — making Save Yammi well worth its affordable $1 price tag.

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App Review: Blobster

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A game inspired by the BP oil spill may not sound like a good time, but Blobster resists the urge to be preachy and focuses instead on fun. It’s not a perfect game, but it ticks off enough checkmarks to be worth your time. The graphics are cute and draw you in. The puzzles are challenging, but not too difficult, and it even gives clever nods to the kings of the genre — Angry Birds and Doodle Jump. The lack of a musical soundtrack is a bit curious, though. And the storyline feels forced, even though most players will skip right past it to start playing. There’s plenty of variety among the levels and there are 40 to enjoy.

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App Review: Baby Monkey (going backwards on a pig)

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You have to approach Baby Monkey (going backwards on a pig) with your tongue firmly in your cheek. Based on the YouTube hit video and featuring the catchy can’t-get-it-out-of-your-head-no-matter-how-hard-you-try song by Parry Gripp, it weaves in plenty of other Gripp’s YouTube creations (like Nom Nom Hamsters and Space Unicorns). It’s cheesy and fully embraces its ridiculousness.

The real joke is the game isn’t a bad one. It’s a standard platform jumper and suffers from a lack of variety (you constantly have either the pig, monkey, or both jumping to grab bananas). The controls are a little complicated, though, and the game isn’t very forgiving of mistakes, yanking away the multiplier that boosts scores when you miss a single banana. And all the while, you’ll be listening to the semi-annoying, but catchier than it has any right to be Baby Monkey song, which you’ll carry with you long after you stop playing the game.

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App Review: First Touch Soccer

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Soccer sims on iDevices have been so-so so far, but First Touch Soccer offers almost everything the true fan could ask for. The game is challenging and well-paced, with terrific AI, impressive graphics, and (amazingly) a play-by-play/color commentating system that doesn’t get annoying. It’s as close to a console experience as we’ve seen on an iOS system. Additionally, there’s a headline feed of soccer-themed stories (which, sometimes, can be a bit much for younger players). There are also several customization options and a ton of teams, game modes, and other gameplay options. The interface is a bit busy, but in the end, this is a game that truly feels like a team experience — which makes it stand above most of its competition.

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App Review: Zombie Gunship

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Zombie games are a bit played out in the App Store. Generally, if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all — shoot the shuffling (or sometimes speedy) undead as they try to devour your cranium. Zombie Gunship turns the genre on its ear, though, taking you off the ground and reinvigorating things in the process. Using a grainy infrared camera, you’ll shoot the zombies from an attack airplane, while trying to save civilians running for cover. The game’s pacing is also slower than most zombie games as well, which works to its benefit.

Using a word like “realism” with a zombie game seems wrong, but the game does feel more like a simulation than a gory fantasy game — ditching background music and colorful graphics for a stark feel that works wonderfully with the formula. The result? One of the smartest zombie games to come out on any platform.

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App Review: Cordy

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Cordy is one of the better platformers we’ve seen, which makes the game’s sneaky way of getting you to pay so maddening. Certainly, we have no problem with the price — $4.99 is fair for the quality the developers have put into the game — but it’s much too easy to download the game and not realize you’re merely getting a trial, as that’s not made glaringly clear in the app store. And the customization options (ranging from 99 cents to $2.99) are a greedy swipe at people’s wallet.

As for the game itself, it’s simply terrific: A good throwback to the glory days of Sonic with wonderful graphics, terrific pacing, and a difficulty level that’s top notch. (Beating a level is easy — but getting all the extras on each one isn’t.) It’s not revolutionary, but it’s a lot of fun.

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