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I was relatively skeptical upon my first glance of Hero of Sparta. It seemed as if Gameloft was simply trying to jump on the bandwagon that is Sony’s God of War series and the blockbuster film “300″. However, instead of schlopping together aspects of the two franchises and relasing a sub-par clone Gameloft released a great action adventure game that pushes the envelope for iPhone gaming.

The game opens with a cinematic of your protagonist King Argos awakening on a desolate beach to find his ship in tatters and his crew missing.  But, make no mistake while there is a mystery to be solved instead of sleuthing Argos takes up his sword and shield in order to solve things the way any true spartan warrior would, by killing any Greek mythological creatures he sees until the problem is resolved.  There is no shortage of monsters to cut down, either. The Oracle’s Island, and the several stages the follow it, are crawling with Minotaur, centaurs, and gorgons just to name several of the enemies you will encounter.

When you kill monsters, you collect colored orbs that serve various purposes. Green orbs restore health while red orbs are accumulated until you can level up your weapons, just like you might find in the God of War series. It’s a nice touch, since it keeps you from just running past enemies. Sure, you may want to avoid a few battles when your health is lacking, but skipping too many means you cannot purchase the best upgrades and attacks and that will make some of the bigger battles much tougher.

In addition to collecting orbs, you also earn special equipment such a larger shield that unlocks a slam attack, a bigger sword, an axe, and more armor. The game is smart about doling out these improvements as it keeps you playing to see what you can earn next, keeping the game fresh throughout its entirety.

The control system is rather generic for this genre but still effective. You hold your device horizontally. There is a virtual analog stick in the lower left corner of the screen with the attack and defend buttons appearing in the lower right corner. I had very few problems controlling Argos, and those that I did encounter, were in the beginning of the game while I was still familiarizing myself with the inputs. The attack and defend buttons are always responsive and using them to unleash special moves and combos is easy. For example, when you get your shield upgrade, you can use it to push enemies back through a special move by pressing the defend button and then dragging your thumb up. Right away, Argos will release a shock wave that pulverizes nearby attackers. Gameloft’s virtual controls deserve to not only be looked at but imitated by other developers considering their own action games.

The 3D graphics in Hero of Sparta are top-notch. The world around Argos is richly detailed and painted with an impressive number of colors. The texture work on Argos, the monsters, and the environments is stellar. Hero of Sparta is illuminated by excellent light effects, too. Slowdown is rare. The soundtrack is as loud and bombastic, as you might expect for a “300″-style game.

At a budget price of $.99 its hard not to recommend Hero of Sparta to any action fans. This is a thrilling action game loaded with cinematic flair. The controls work exceptionally well and it’ll last you a good 6-7 hours of play time to finish up the adventure but you may go back just to find everything.

There are several different weapons (such as this bow) for you to dismiss foes with.

The cinamatics and top-notch

Gotta hate gorgons.

I doubt I’ll be the first to say it, but,  what a disappointment. As a fan of the Xbox 360 franchise I was expecting at least a slight tie in with the epic space action/RPG game Mass Effect that came out a while back. However, I was severly dissappointed with what I had after downloading this game. What makes Mass Effect Galaxy such a tragedy is that it did not have to be a bad game. The iPhone is more than capable of hosting a Mass Effect experience that fans would appreciate.Would Mass Effect on iPhone be a huge epic like the Xbox 360 game? No, but it could get a hell of a lot closer to it than this disinterested shooter. This isn’t even a compromise; it’s a cop-out.

The game is a pointless tilt-and-tap shooter where you just clear out room after room of space thugs pretty similar to the arcade game “Smash TV”. You simply tap an enemy to target it and then Jacob does the rest of the work, auto-firing bullets until you either select another enemy or the current target is dead. You access special moves like biotic attacks (temporarily freeze the enemy) or shield removal by touching icons along the side of the screen. The most effective secondary attack is the heavy shell, which acts like a grenade. Each special move has a refill timer, so you cannot simply hammer on the heavy shells. Once you kill every enemy, the exit opens and you move into the next room only to repeat the exact same procedure with the obstacles and walls moved to different locations.

Tilting the phone to guide Jacob is clumsy. Supposedly, you can calibrate the accelerometer by pausing the game so you can play the game at any angle, such as sitting or in bed. This never did quite work right for me, the only time I could get Jacob to move with any degree of precision was when I held the iPhone parallel to the floor and hovered over it. The dialog scenes between combat missions are also slimmed down from the console game. Since the narrative was such an integral part of the Mass Effect console game, it was important for Bioware to include them here. You do not have the branching conversations but you can select responses from multiple options and sort of guide a conversation along. You can immediately challenge a foe and jump into combat, or talk it out a little and get more pieces of the story. How much consequence dialog scenes have is questionable. Your responses do not shape Jacob’s character like they did Shepherd’s in Mass Effect. That’s terribly disappointing since personal evolution is so critical to the Mass Effect experience.

As for graphics, the stylized, comic book-like direction doesn’t bother me at all. The drawings are smart and clean. What is unfortunate, though, is the weak animation. There are little half-assed animations throughout the game where Jacob will stay perfectly still, but his body just moves ahead. No leg movement. No arm movement. It looks weird. Worse, it looks cheap.

Unrelated gameplay mechanics with a popular console game license strapped on top of it do not fool anybody. The simple shooting scenes could have belonged to any game. That the Mass Effect universe is bolted on to them is puzzling and, as mentioned, very disappointing to a real Mass Effect fan like me. The technical issues like slowdown and clumsy controls are just further twists of the knife. Avoid this uninspired, un-fun game.

Sounds like... I really don't care anymore

Oooooh... another room full of bad guys what could await me after I finish up here....?

Oh yeah, thats right. Some more of the exact same thing...

Now, before you write Chillingo’s Knights Onrush off as yet another tower defense game you should know that it would be a grave mistake. Knights Onrush tweaks the tower defense credo by tasking you not with setting up a gauntlet to slaughter incoming enemies, but with arranging a series of defenses on the castle. With the gold you earn by killing enemy units, you can buy cannonballs, door strength upgrades, boulders, fireballs, bottomless pits, gigantic columns, dragon lures, and more. All of these defensive measures will help you keep the encroaching enemies from battering down your door during their multi-day onslaughts.

The controls in the game are pretty standard fare. When a fireball is active, just tap and hold to pick it up and the swing it toward a group of meddling knights to reduce them to charcoal. Tap a loaded cannon to blast the knights away from your gates. Touch a switch to grab a column and then drop it on enemies. You can also pick up knights individually by touching and holding them. While holding them, you can hang them on the dragon lure hook and wait for a passing dragon to swoop down and gobble them up or hold one over the fire pit and drop them to their doom when the lid opens up. Some knight come running in with explosive barrels which you can tap to make them blow up in their faces. Amidst all these weapons you still have the old standard of picking up a knight and then just swiping down to slam him into the ground.

With eleven different enemies, Knights Onrush will keep you from getting all too comfortable with basic strategies. You must prioritize enemies, like the little magicians or assassins, and ranged enemies. There are 12 different castles to defend, too, and many of the stages have specific scenarios and last different numbers of days.

The art style in this game is absolutely gorgeous.  From the almost too cute to slaughter knights with huge heads and tiny bodies, to the bright red dragons, and vivid backgrounds. Everything in this game is bright colorful and vibrant enough to make you think your in some crazy, brutal, cartoon.But do not let its cartoon looks deceive you: there is a real-deal strategy game in here. This innovative take on the tower defense concept is one of the genre’s best.

Time to let loose some of that hatred for magicians.

Golden armor won't be saving you here knight.

Hey, Dragons can get hungry too ya know...

Like most of us I grew up playing a lot of board games such as Sorry!, Clue, Monopoly, and The Game of Life just to name a few. So it would be sufficient to say that I was excited upon hearing the news that Electronic Arts would be giving this classic a new age makeover.

While all your old favorite characters are here (Scarlett, White, Green,Peacock, etc…) I must attest that this is a much different game than what I had expected (a port of the classic board game much in the viens of the monopoly port released earlier this year).  Clue for the iPhone is more of a puzzle/adventure game. It’s complicated, and involves more thought than you’d expect, but it’s also easy to pick up and play in short bits while you’re on the go.  In this varieant of Clue, you play a reporter tasked with investigate different scenarios all including the untimely murder of Mr.Black (talk about bad luck, decades later and this guy still manages to get killed on a nightly basis).  You go from room to room talking to the suspects, examining objects, and taking notes.  You’ll get clues like, “I was reading a book,” or, “the cause of murder can only come from an autopsy,” or, “Mr. Green was in the north wing.”  The game presents you with a clock that ticks down after you perform these actions until it eventually hits zero signaling the end of the game at which point you must give an accusation as to who commited the crime, with what weapon, and in which room.  The Crime Map, Notes, and Suspicions tabs all help you build your case.

Clue’s presentation in this new frontier for the game is both stylish and functional. Allowing you to seamlessly navigate the house, interview your suspects and narrow down your investigation. Plus the inclusion of all the comic book style graphics and the fact that the case is different each time you play makes this game quite a value.

Although it’s much different than the Clue I grew up playing this version is still entertaining and certainly challenging.  You have to use deductive reasoning to solve each mystery and multiple endings enhance the shelf life of this one

Pros:

• Cool detective film noir/ comic book style graphics
• Case outcomes different on each play
• Challenging

Cons:

• I wish there were more scenerios
• I was kind of hoping for the board game version of this
• No multiplayer

The crime map is used to map out all of your clues

Can you really trust a smirk like that?

Mr. Black should really consider getting some new friends.

Digital Chocolate has been extremely active in the iPhone/iPod Touch app scene from the beggining almost to the point that it would seem they have released a new title monthly. But that’s not neccisarily a bad thing considering that many of their games are easyily accessible quirky and most importantly, fun.  California Gold Rush is a worthy successsor to Digital Chocolate’s fame seemingly recieving its inspiration from classics such as “Dig-Dug” and “Boulder Dash”.

California Gold Rush’s protagonist, Mandy, is a newcomer to the mining profession with an eye for gold. She can sense when gold is nearby, marked with little exclamation points as you dig through the earth. By just tapping a square in the mine, Mandy bores right through it. It takes her several swings to clear away rocky patches of earth and each swing of her pickax drains a little bit of stamina, which acts as a sort of timer for this game. When her stamina runs out, the stage ends and you need to have pocketed enough gold by that time to reach at least the first star in a meter strung along the top of the screen. Moving through the mines also uses stamina, but at a much slower rate. Mandy cannot carry all of the gold she finds in a single load, so you must climb to the surface every once in a while to sell off your haul at the general store, conveniently located at the top of every mine. Here, you can buy sticks of dynamite that drill through the mines in both horizontal and vertical lines.Using dynamite is a great way to save stamina and break some of the more resilient rocks and patches of iron which are completely immune to your pickax.

California Gold Rush is a mix of the puzzle and stratagy genres. The puzzle element is figuring out where the hidden gold is in the mines by burrowing around or looking for clues, often handed over by locating trapped miners in the earth, or by buying maps and clues from the general store. The strategy is maintaining your stamina so you do not run out of it prior to fulfilling the levels objectives. Prospecting into the unknown can sometimes reveal massive gold veins, or it can lead you right into an impenetrable rock wall or a pool of lava and often the deeper you dig the larger the danger of cave-ins (indicated by dust trickling off of a wall) that will sap you of stamina.

The graphics are bright and colorful with rather impressive explosion effects. and the soundtrack seems to have been ripped straight out of the old west with plenty of whistling and flair. However, I will say that I wasn’t thoroughly impressed with Mandy’s path finding skills.  The clicking and/or dragging to move Mandy to nearby locations seemed to work very well it was when I sent her directly from the mines up to the generl store (Clicking the backpack icon) that I became slightly unhappy with Mandy’s choices. Her paths would lead to unexpected mining that cost stamina I did not intend to expend or she would run straight into a bat (the primary enemy in the game) which cost stamina and a 1,000 gold when there was clearly another way around not inhabited by a bat.

California Gold Rush is a great game that will easily please both puzzle and strategy fans and while luck does play a part in your quest for gold, thinking things through before breaking into the ground will make things quite a bit easier. Think before digging, look at your surroundings, buy maps and dynamite and always watch your stamina. I also appreciate how the game smartly rolls out new challenges so you are never overwhelmed, but never bored of playing the same kinds of stages over and over again. Couple all of this with great production values, and California Gold Rush becomes a game that I wholeheartedly recommend.

Pros:

• Catchy tunes
• Colorful graphics
• Impressive game play with a fresh coat of paint over the classics it draws from

Cons:

• Would have liked to see more landscapes
• Needs improvement on the path finding A.I.

Who doesn't enjoy old school dynamite explosions?

Can someone tell me where all these underground ice sheets came from?

Uh oh... lava in a mine is never a good thing.