Sale Alert! Azkend 2 HD is FREE this weekend!

 

From the guys at 10tonsltd, known for Miriel the Magical Merchant and Heroes of KalevalaAzkend 2 HD, the sequel to their popular match three adventure Azkend is FREE this weekend. The iphone version is free, too.
I haven’t played this game yet but I hope to review it soon. I do know that if it’s from 10tonsltd, it must be good!
Enjoy!
 
Download links:
For iPad – Azkend 2 HD
For iPhone – Azkend 2
 
 

 

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Now Playing: Appointment with F.E.A.R. on iPhone and iPad

 

If you are a comic book fan and a gamebook fan, then Appointment With F.E.A.R. is right up your alley. This classic gamebook written by Steve Jackson is Tin Man Games’ latest outing and adapts for the iOS the mechanics of a classic gamebook with an interesting new twist.

Appointment With F.E.A.R. parodies many familiar comic book heroes, villains and locales. As the main hero of Titan City, your job is to keep the city safe from an assorted lot of evildoers and thugs. Mainly, however, your mission is to prevent the meeting of F.E.A.R., a powerful organization of baddies, from taking place. Without much clues and only three days to do it, the challenge is to do the superhero stuff and be a detective at the same time. Oh, and as in typical super hero stories, your superhero identiy is a secret and you are a meek newspaper reporter by day (Clark Kent? Peter Parker?) with a mean boss.

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Now Playing: Valiant Hearts – The Great War for iPhone and iPad

It is 1914 and you are in the middle of World War I. You are an ordinary soldier, thrust into the power struggle between great European countries, to serve as fodder for protracted battles on the ground.

The App Store’s Editor’s Choice of the week Valiant Hearts: The Great War relives the confusion and nightmare of the war, told through the eyes of ordinary folks called upon to serve their country. Just as war, in its broadest sense, is just the game of the generals, it is ironic to see the game make out of a high stakes ‘game’ that cost lives.

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FREE for a limited time: Heroes of Kalevala and Unstoppable Gorg for iPad

Just wanted to give you guys a heads up that two excellent games are FREE this weekend. These are old favorites of mine and have stunning graphics and solid gameplay.

Heoes of Kalevala is not your typical match three game – it is in fact, one of the very best out there. It comes with a story culled from Finnish mythology featuring eight (8) distinct heroes and a village building mechanic, keeping you hooked on finishing levels to populate your village. It landed in appSIZED’s list of Top 10 Games and Apps for 2010 together with 10tonsltd’s other game Miriel’s Enchanted Mystery.
Link: Heroes of Kalevala HD (for iPad)
Developer: 10tonsltd
 
Unstoppable Gorg is a one of a kind tower defense game with loads of personality and a really tough learning curve. What’s nice about its is that you rotate your towers along a certain path to fend off incoming enemies from all sides. It’s pretty tough. In between you have B-movie black and white clips that perfectly capture the retro sci fi vibe of the 1950s. In 2012, it was selected by appSIZED as one of its Top 10 games for the year.
 
Developer: Futuremark Oy
 
Enjoy!

 

Now Playing: Sentinel 4 – Dark Star for iPhone and iPad

It’s been a while since indie developer Origin8 came out with a sequel to their award-winning tower defense (TD) series, Sentinel. However, Sentinel should be familiar to those who’ve been gaming on the iPhone and during the time when tower defense games were just starting to shine. With a long absence from the TD scene, does Sentinel 4 – Dark World measure up to the TD games that have come out since its hiatus?

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Review: Hanx Writer for iPad

 

 

Hanx Writer for iPad may seem like a quaint idea to most, but for those e who grew up with a manual typewriter long before Microsoft Word became a household name, Hanx Writer brings back memories and then some. The app, incidentally, was commissioned and endorsed by no less than award-winning actor Tom Hanks who is a typewriter fanatic.

 

Back then, typing was a challenging and frustrating experience. You needed to be extra careful when typing things – how soft or how hard you bang the keys means the difference between a smooth looking typewritten page and a page with out of place keys or smudged letters.

I can go on all day about the perils and terrors of typewriter ribbons gone threadbare and paper incorrectly inserted, but I’m not here to wax poetic about a bygone era, I’m here to talk about how Hanx Writer fares as a throwback app and as a notetaking/mini word processor.

The fun part about having a ‘pretend’ typewriter like Hanx Writer is that you get to enjoy the perks of typing manually without the corresponding headaches. The fun part of typing then was hearing the clickety clack of keys and watching words being hammered out on the page with a couple of quick strokes – the less than fun part was dealing with jammed keys, smudged letters and uneven typing. Nowadays, typing with a keyboard is a muted experience while a touchscreen computer is almost silent.

For a free app, you get to enjoy the experience of typing on a ‘pretend’ typewriter, complete with the clicking sound of the individual keys as you type and the ringing sound when you’ve reached the end of the line and have to move to the next. For the full-blown typing experience, you can even turn off the ‘modern’ way of correcting mistakes (read: backspace). However, it would also be nice to see keys a bit out of place just like what I was used to when I typed too hard. For select upgrades, you can try out new typewriter themes or styles or just get the entire pack for $5, which includes more ribbon colors, justify alignment, a title page with the option to put a picture, etc.

Hanx Writer makes typing on the touchscreen keyboard fun, but I’ve tried pairing the app with my trusty bluetooth keyboard and the experience has been seamless.

My only gripe with the app is that sharing options are limited. For now, you can only “share” or export your work in PDF, which you can of course open in other apps such as Goodreader and other PDF readers. It would be nice, however, to have other file saving options such as .txt or .rtf formats.

For a free app that you can straightaway enjoy without shelling out real money for in app purchases (IAP), Hanx Writer is a fun and engaging typing experience that is more than just a trip down memory lane. I can envision it to be my default writing app just to get those creative juices flowing. Check out the report below:

appSIZED rating: 5 out of 5

App: Hanx Writer for iPad

Link: Hanx Writer for iPad

Compatibility: iPad only

Price: FREE

Ver.: 1.0

Developer/Publisher: HitCents, Inc.

 

 

Now Playing: Guardians of the Galaxy – The Universal Weapon

Marvel Studios’ latest flick, the amazingly good Guardians of the Galaxy movie is now out in theaters and enjoying critical and popular acclaim. The iOS game, Guardians of the Galaxy: The Universal Weapon, on the other hand, was released a few weeks prior to the movie’s launch and is currently on sale for a limited time to celebrate the film’s opening weekend. Featuring a funny, ragtag group of space not so do-gooders straight out of a Marvel comic book, the real challenge of GOTG: The Universal Weapon is to be just as good as the movie. Check out the review after the break!

Now Playing: Royal Envoy – Campaign for the Crown HD for iPad

Ah, politics. Whether in the real world or in Royal Envoy’s fictional kingdom, it’s dirty. Playrix Games’ third and latest installment, Royal Envoy: Campaign for the Crown takes on politics as a mysterious person named Swindler (with a name like that, would you trust him?) seeks to capture the crown through election. Election … in a monarchy? Invoking some ancient law, Swindler has challenged the king to an election and is hell bent on sabotaging the King’s chances of winning.

This is where you step in, as his consultant/adviser/builder. Thanks to a highly effective misinformation campaign, most of the kingdom is in shambles due to charlatans tricking and deceiving people into destroying their home and introducing themselves as envoys of the King. Your mantra is rebuild and damage control in a wide variety of missions.

The Swindler starts out with an approval rating of 100% while you have to start from scratch to save your King.

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Now Playing: Dream Catchers – The Beginning HD for iPad

We have always had a fascination for the secret world of our dreams and how the real and surreal interact in our mind’s landscape while we are sleeping. Dreams sometimes help solve real world problems, others reveal anxieties and fears, while some of us find a fantasy world to escape in.
Dream Catchers: The Beginning HD by G5 Games hints at a new series of hidden object adventure games, with the intriguing storyline of ‘dream catchers’ (although not fully explained) who get caught up in a web of deception and betrayal.
The story, however, begins with the unexplained phenomena of students of a school, including one of its teachers (your sister), falling asleep seemingly without hope of waking up. As you try to piece together what happened, you are also drawn into the dream world with strange scenery, monsters and creatures to defeat in order to wake up.

the zodiac clock

Dream Catchers: The Beginning HD is standard Hidden Object and puzzle solving fare, requiring you to search for objects bit by bit that contribute to activating puzzles in order to obtain objects and tools (inventory items).
Looking for items is a pretty straightforward and simple affair. Some HOGs like to make things more interesting and interactive by requiring you to put together some items in order to find the object on your list, while others encourage you to open a drawer or part a curtain to reveal what’s inside. Disappointingly, Dream Catchers: The Beginning HD doesn’t employ these little gimmicks.
As I have observed with many hidden object games, there isn’t a clear or logical link between objects or tools you need to say, unlock a door or get an object from a tree. In addition, since these are objects scattered across different locations, you really don’t know what you need until you press the hint. Dream Catchers: The Beginning HD is no exception. Thus, in my case, I rely on hints a lot, and more so in this game. Some useful inventory objects show up in sparkly locations, in a seemingly random and arbitrary order.
The game’s art direction evokes some mixed feelings. The earlier parts and cutscenes are a bit hazy and muddled – much like a dream sequence, I know, but some consistency in relation to the regular scenes would be nice. The game would have been more visually appealing if the scenes were less static.
The puzzles are simpler and less varied than most HOGs. Of course, the usual rotate pieces to form a picture and rotate pipes to find your way out can be found in Dream Catchers: The Beginning HD, but I find the execution of some puzzles a bit cumbersome and frustrating.
As what appears to be the first among many in a series, Dream Catchers: The Beginning HD starts off intriguing and promising. However, compared to other HOGs and even G5’s own extensive offerings, this one doesn’t quite measure up. I do hope that future installments of this game will be a lot better in many ways and for its flaws, I will give Dream Catchers: The Beginning HD a pass.
Check out the report card below:

appSIZED rating: 3 out of 5

App: Dream Catchers: The Beginning HD
Compatibility: iPad only
Price: Free (with In-App Purchase of $6.99)
Deveoper/Publisher: G5

 

 

21 Battleheart Legacy Strategies, Tips and Tricks

Having played Battleheart Legacy ($4.99/Universal for iPhone and iPad) for nearly a month now, let me share some of the tips and tricks I learned.

For a more extensive walkthrough, there are plenty of excellent and in-depth resources out there, such as in the Touch Arcade forum, but I hope my own experience will help you out as a starting player. (Check out the review/guide to Battleheart Legacy on appSIZED here)

 

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