And surely enough, Escape doesn’t disappoint on the visual front. From the freakish character designs of the eponymous monster horde to the wonderfully exaggerated in-game animations which imbue the title with an irresistible Saturday morning cartoon-esque vibe, there is plenty of scrummy eye-candy on offer here. Sadly though, it all acts as window dressing for a somewhat pedestrian endless running romp.

Escape plonks players into the boots of a gangly, dweeby chap named Gizzard who finds himself involuntarily thrust into a hero’s role when some slimy monsters start laying siege to a city and a pair of magical gauntlets wind up in his possession. With a trio of younger kids in tow and a pack of slobbering beasties snapping at his heels, Gizzard makes a last-ditch rescue-cum-escape attempt by hotfooting it through a series of crumbling skyscrapers, obliterating obstacles and dispatching enemies with his groovy new red and blue gloves as he goes.

This is where you come in. Every barrier and foe Gizzard and co. come up against as they flee is color coded, so you’ve got to swing a punch with the appropriate gauntlet in order to clear the way; tapping the left side of the touchscreen takes out blue obstacles while anything red is destroyed with a tap to the right. If you mistime a punch and, as a result, a monster manages to snatch one of the kids, you lose a precious life (which is pretty gosh darn dark, if you ask me!). On a brighter note, stringing together three perfect punches unleashes ‘Turbo Mode’, in which points are more plentiful and Escape’s already rockin’ score reaches a crescendo of ear-splitting awesomeness.

Thanks to its manic energy and a steady stream of visual gags, Escape is a tough game not to enjoy, at least initially. A sense of humor and stylish visuals can only carry a game so far though, and despite putting a rather nifty color matching spin on the genre, this endless runner loses its luster after a few playthroughs.The desire to hammering the ‘retry’ button is also stymied by the fact it takes an agonisingly long time to earn enough in-game coins to unlock bonus items (unless you don’t mind shelling out for IAPs to speed up the process, of course).

iFanzine Verdict: Escape from the Age of Monsters is an unabashed exercise in style over substance and gameplay-wise it retreads ground already covered by other iOS endless running games, yet its Saturday morning cartoon-esque aesthetic and madcap energy go a long way toward glossing over such shortcomings. Fun, but not for long.

Populating the first three rows in the gallery below are before-and-after environment concepts, followed by fully colored background mockups. As an added bonus our gallery contracted various germs, or rather early design work for some Jellyflug microbes. Finally, here’s a nice montage of all the environment art that’s so massive we couldn’t even fit it into the gallery! Be sure to check out the game’s website and Facebook page for more art and screenshots, and here’s the Troll inc Twitter account for good measure.

With an overhead view of each floor, the player tilts to give the sheep just the right momentum to bound over chasms, squash monsters, and avoid traps while solving simple logistical puzzles. Exit platforms that take you to the next floor regularly have to be unlocked or revealed with keys and switches, so every square inch of these levels gets used. Multiple floors compose a single level, with at least one checkpoint assigned to the most harrowing ascents.

It may look unassuming, but what really impresses me about Sheep is that it’s not afraid to pull you out of your comfort zone at every turn — i.e., this is a freaking tough game. A few levels in and tiles regularly give way after a few bounces, though they mercifully regenerate if you lose a life and start the current floor over. If you bounce around aimlessly for just a few seconds you’ll be left with few footholds — maybe just the dispersed musical tiles you’re supposed to hit in a specific order, the exit tile, and a bottomless pit looming in between. Throw in a moving platform with an enemy guarding it, and now you’re in for a real interesting time! Progress requires that you master the art of accelerating and braking the sheep’s momentum as needed for death defying leaps, tracking tiles in motion and staying over one square until an opportunity arises. Switching among those states on the spur of the moment takes real finesse, and fortunately Sheep has all the tilt calibration options needed to make this formula work.

Sheep is advertised as having 20 levels; while that might sound weak in terms of content, Sheep gets more than enough longevity out of its challenge to justify the price tag. It’s too bad the game doesn’t explicitly state how the normal mode differs from its expert mode aside from eliminating tutorial messages, and it passes up a chance to tie its score system to player rewards in a meaningful way. The game uses an internal achievement tracking system instead of Game Center.

I daresay Sheep has the best-rendered cardboard on iOS and there’s a healthy assortment of backdrops so you’re never staring at a single diorama too long. Now if there were just more music tracks to go with them! Sheep’s floor transitions are seamless, but it’s worth noting that if you’re running an iPod Touch, you’ll be paying up front for the visual zest with noticeable load times.

iFanzine Verdict: A tough-as-nails overhead platformer that should satisfy any genre fan who can get past the idea of a bouncing hero covered in fleece.

When I first saw the preview trailer I thought Green might be in a race with its foes for each level’s yellow star. Turns out things are deliciously more sinister than that, cute appearances aside: enemy blobs are cool and efficient hunter-killers, out for the player character’s jelly hide far more than they are the pointy gold trinkets. Not to mention, each enemy gets two moves for every player hop on Teeny’s puzzle board — make that three if the enemies collide and combine into one super jelly!

Obviously it’s going to take some serious wits to overcome the disadvantage, and thankfully Teeny serves up tools aplenty. Walls, springboards, conveyor belts, teleporters, electrocution devices, and more must be used to trap, destroy or delay the enemy jellies before the player has a clear shot at the level goal. It’s a solid logic puzzle formula and the player’s competition with ruthless enemy AI adds something fresh to the genre. We could definitely use more like this one on iOS!

Teeny lets the player freely skip through any level sets that are unlocked, but on the other hand, new sets are accessed only after meeting star collection goals. With the game’s solutions requiring some serious out-of-the-box thinking and experimentation, Teeny’s difficulty would have been just right had things been left there. For better or worse Teeny goes further: not only do you have to figure out how to use all the gizmos to block your enemies, you have to solve a level in a certain number of turns if you want your solution to count toward your star collection goal. The solutions are so tight as it is, the extra challenge is something of a straw that breaks the camel’s back as far as accessibility is concerned. If you’re going to have much luck whittling the solutions down to acceptable move numbers you’d better have training in algorithms or at least a long-running fascination with the genre. It would help if the player knew what the goal is at the start of each level rather than finding out at the end, and it would help even more if there were some counter to remind you how many moves remain.

Teeny’s cutesy aesthetic and one-screen environments are par for the course when it comes to the genre and price range. With dozens upon dozens of levels heaped into the game, it’s too bad there’s only a single in-game music track. You might want to bring an iTunes playlist to this one; so much the better if the tracks are high octane, because Teeny has its fair share of harrowing close calls.

iFanzine Verdict: A diehard logic puzzle fan’s dream, Teeny Green adds something to the genre with its palpable and unyielding suspense. Casual gamers be warned, however — the game’s winning conditions are so demanding that some serious mental algorithm crunching or note-taking aid will be needed if you want to make it much further than the first level set.

KOTOMON’s game mechanics sound rock solid and pretty darn refreshing on paper. Like a mix of Pokémon, a bowling sim and a third person shooter, it has you scouring its landscapes for monsters to hatch and then rolling them to knock down scores of distant enemies. The beauty of using little critters as ammo is that you have to care for them — as long as they’re healthy they’ll dutifully return to your roving conga line for another throw, but if they get knocked out while they’re walking around you’ll have to brave enemy fire to prop them back up. As you add more monsters to Kotomon’s following you’ll find that they have a range of effects when held or lobbed, so once the game gets up to full speed you’ll be switching them in and out to find the perfect five-monster team. The fact that our quirky hero moves to the sound of maracas and all other beings in this world are constantly doing a little jig adds some hilarious spice to the whole package.

Just the sound of it has me salivating again, so there’s no doubt in my mind the formula was worth a try. Something went tragically awry in implementation, however. One of the bedrock elements in a free roaming, third-person shooter – or any action game with a 360⁰playing field – is a camera that follows over the player character’s shoulder. Instead of doing that, KOTOMON fixes your view to just a sliver of its wide battlefields, meaning you can see maybe a third of everything you might need to.

The repercussions run deep. KOTOMON tries for a simple one-tap aiming system, where Kotomon tosses whatever monster he’s holding directly ahead of him – but there’s no point in this when Kotomon’s line of sight doesn’t match the player’s. If you’ve passed up an alcove packed with enemies and find yourself completely flanked, you can’t effectively target them because you can’t see them even if you’ve skillfully turned Kotomon to confront the sudden threat; you have to laboriously reposition to get those enemies in view. And when Kotomon and the player are facing the same direction, it seems that targeting wherever the player taps would be so much more efficient. It’s thanks to an heroic homing function once monsters are launched that the game is basically playable at release.

There’s also how difficult it is to keep track of your pet monsters. The lot of them love to spread out and eat little energy pellets strewn over the land and that means they’re quickly out of sight. A little “Help!” message appears along the screen edge to guide you when they get knocked down, but it’s the landscape that’s most threatening. Levels pockmarked with lava pits are the biggest offenders — here you’ll get sudden Game Overs as the poor critters slip into the drink well out of view. At a very minimum, the game screams for a call button that summons the monsters back to Kotomon in updates. Not only would this make it far easier to do an effective head count and keep the little chicks in line, but it could serve a useful gameplay purpose: they are Kotomon’s only shielding in a firefight.

Finally, we come to the drifting virtual joystick. KOTOMON reminds me why I have such a strong bias against these: I found my thumb inevitably migrating somewhere that blocked the action, try as I might to plop the joystick as far down on the touchscreen as possible. Add a stationary virtual joystick option to my wish list for updates!

Suffice it to say KOTOMON needs an overhaul, but it’s an overhaul I’m enthusiastically awaiting. Even in its present state the game enjoys moments of brilliance. When you’re making a long approach toward a throng of hardened enemies and have time to reflect on what a huge battle is in store, KOTOMON feels like the delicious hellpsawn of Teletubbies and DOOM — and that’s something I can totally get behind. The game’s soundtrack is an interesting exercise in minimalism, the music essentially procedurally generated by the onscreen action as sound effects take over.

iFanzine Verdict: KOTOMON should have been a refreshing monster collection/shooter mashup but suffers critical failures in its camera and aiming systems. We’re looking forward to updates that give this one the playability the game mechanics deserve.

As you might expect from Pixel Elephant’s previous work, Monstaaa! is a tricky logic puzzler. However, it contrasts quite a bit with Puzzled Rabbit in its tilt driven gameplay; in Rabbit you carefully plotted each move, while Monstaaa! demands tight reflexes as you think on the fly. The idea is to feed the eponymous beast, which sits still while you guide one or more bugs into its gullet.

What starts out as a piece-of-cake maze navigation exercise quickly gets more challenging with the introduction of spikes and crawling flames you have to very gingerly guide the bugs around. When there are multiple bugs onscreen it seems the best strategy is to get them together so you can move them consistently. Add in bugs that grow so big over time that they can’t squeeze through narrow gaps and you’ve got a very nice time attack challenge thrown in; here the difference between victory and the poor monster starving is giving the bugs a smooth flight path, keeping momentum-sapping wall collisions to a minimum. It appears four worlds will be on tap at release, with later levels tossing in a variety of bug traps and even bugs that devour one another when brought too close.

What we see on release day, May 29, could be just the tip of the iceberg: the Pixel Elephant crew tell us their brains are swimming in ideas for content updates. Monstaaa! will retail at a normal price of $1.99 but will launch half off at $0.99. The game will be Universal and iCloud support is in the bag. Keep an eye on the game’s website and Facebook page, as well as Pixel Elephant’s Twitter feed, for the latest news. Let’s roll some preview footage:

We may never know what a “jellyflug” is exactly, but we’re excited to learn more about Troll inc’s upcoming action-adventure debut. Here to talk about it is studio lead Jim Murray.

Let’s start out by learning a little about Troll inc. How many people are on the team, how do you divide all the responsibilities of game design among yourselves, and is Jellyflug everyone’s first videogame industry experience?

Troll inc was set up by Jim Murray (me), Mark Quinn, Gavin McLaughlin and Delia Millan. It’s our first commercial game for the whole team.

In terms of roles, I take care of the game design, project management, level design and business development. Mark is our Art Director and he takes care of the art styles, character designs and animations. Delia is our Environment Director and she develops all the level environments as well as the user interfaces. Gavin is our programmer and takes care of all the framework and feature programming. A more recent member, Darragh Lydon, worked on the Level Programming, UI Programming and Sound Programming and is currently working on our next big project. Finally, we had really great work from Chris Norby, who did the music, and Alan Monaghan, who did the sound effects.

Delia was completely new to the area, as she was more traditional media-based. I, Mark and Gavin have all been in Dare to be Digital, which is a contest based in Scotland where you develop game prototypes to showcase to thousands of people. That helped us get experience and our courses at the University of Ulster helped in that regard too, but other than that, yeah, we’ve been learning as we go.

When you founded the studio, did you know for sure you’d be creating Jellyflug as your first project, or were you kicking around a number of ideas at the time? If so, do you think you’ll revisit any of those down the road after Jellyflug releases?

Yeah, when we founded we were weighing up a few different ideas. Some of those were a bit unreasonable for the small size of our studio, but Jellyflug was the idea everyone was drawn to. Mark, our Art Director, had already done concept work on it for his Master’s Degree and it was by far the most fleshed-out and unique idea we had. We’ll definitely be looking at some of those concepts at a later stage, and if not the games themselves, then we’ll certainly borrow ideas from those unused games for our new ones.

The thing that really strikes me in the preview footage is that Jellyflug’s interface is visually very simple but you’ve got a lot going on in the game. What are some of the player character’s abilities, and how does the player make them all work?

The user interface went through several iterations until we eventually settled on the simplest control system we could make. You can use the onscreen buttons to move your character, Grash, and anywhere you touch the screen he will fire his little baby bacteria.

In terms of abilities Grash has all the usual controls of a platformer as far as running, jumping, etc. But where it becomes really unique is that he can fire his little army of baby bacteria at enemies to defeat them, or simply to destroy obstacles.

Grash starts out with four babies each level but for every “Foozle” (health pickup) he collects he gets one more baby bacterium. So if you have full health you have an army of eight little critters you can fire. Of course, if you get hurt you’ll have one less.

Grash also has a helper character called Vani; this microbe helps you by warning you about enemy bacteria and marking checkpoints in the level. There are also loads of other features like bubble jumping, fungi hopping, bouncing platforms, rolling rocks and boss battles.

Another thing that caught my attention is the game’s very thorough microbe dictionary. Is it your intention to mix real-world factoids with information that’s pertinent to the game world? And how much research did you end up doing to get ideas for the game’s creatures and environments?

One of the things we actually wanted to do with Jellyflug was to showcase the bacterial world in a fun and unique way. So we did a lot of research into bacteria, protozoa and other microbes. We felt people would find this information interesting, especially since we based many of the character features on them. So we made a feature where you can unlock information on these little microbes as you find them throughout the level. This means players can find out about microbes in a way that gives them positive feedback for finding them. Of course, it’s the kind of thing that might not interest some people so it is simply an optional component of the game that gives the experience more depth.

In terms of research, it involved days on Wikis - which were interesting - and some very scientific sites that we pretended we understood.

It looks like Grash will meet some helpful microbes along the way in addition to enemies. What can you tell us about these and their gameplay functions?

You can also find bacteria Grash will have a mutual relationship with; this is based on the fact that many bacteria do in fact work together for mutual gain. We keep the controls the same throughout so the player doesn’t need to relearn them.

We have around 10 mutual microbes, all with different functions. When Grash finds a Spirillum he will gain the ability to jump over massive ravines; when he finds Streptococcus (the bacteria that cause plaque in your teeth) he can use them to eat barriers in your way, and there are loads more bacteria you can work with in a similar way.

Update 2 comes packing 10 all-new levels, including the prologue scene to 6th Planet II: Mission Earth(!), a faster ship for free (which was previously only available via an in-app purchase), Facebook and ‘Gift this app’ integration, a new screen rotation option, plus loadsa level tweaks and miscellaneous bug fixes.

If you’re a fan of Monkube and 6th Planet, you’ll probably also enjoy our full review of the game and in-depth developer interview.

Dragon Evolution casts you as a big shadow-puppet dragon out to rescue its eggs from little shadow-puppet warriors. It’s hardly an easy task seeing as the little peeps have constructed giant forts and siege engines, and love to toss darts at your dragon en masse. There’s no visible user interface here; the auto-scrolling takes care of movement while right-hand taps and left-hand taps make your dragon attack. A right-handed tap generally triggers a bite or an elemental breath weapon suited for taking out infantry while a left-handed tap makes your dragon pull off an edifice-destroying head butt. If it looks like your dragon is biting off more than it can chew with the current obstacle, simply hold both sides of the touchscreen to make it gain temporary flight. Avoidance does place a cost on your dragon’s energy meter though!

The game has a fascinating way of combining the auto-scroller’s automatically evolving environments with the level-based runner. Your journey is divided into nine time-limited years, and at the end of the current year you’re taken to an upgrade screen whether you’ve made it to the end of a level or not. Between years you’re tasked with selecting the dragon’s upgrade path; it’s important to balance different elements so you have a way of tackling infantry who are invulnerable to fire, ice or acid breath.

We’re looking forward to seeing the final build. In the meantime, check out Nob Studio’s website, Facebook page and Twitter feed for the latest news.

First of all, this game – with its environments that are at times hand drawn, and other times made in rendering software – consistently looks great. This is a good thing for a game like this, as you will often spend intense lengths of time focusing with great purpose on tiny minutia in a cluttered scene. Thankfully – given the rather tiny size of an iPod screen – you can pinch enlarge these images at any time, which only further reveals just how much detail there is contained within each and every scene you will encounter.

In fact, you will spend large portions of the game zoomed in 100% as that is the only way to sanely spot many of the completely random objects you will be tasked with finding during the hidden object portions of this game. For the most part these scenes provide a nice slow moment of zen, but occasionally you will be asked to find something – such as manganese – that will leave you tapping furiously at random with no clue whatsoever as to what your intended target looks like. Once all of the items in your checklist are finally accounted for, either with or without frustration, you will take some of them and then return to the mission of solving the mystery of the woman dressed in white.

The bizarre part comes when you finally finish the hidden object sequence and discover which items your hero actually kept from the long list of things you found. The game’s hero – Walter Hartright – must have some special case of Clairvoyant Kleptomania, as he will often snatch from a scene of clutter – filled with a variety of otherwise extremely useful objects – a handful of bizarre trinkets that generally seem to be the most useless items in the mess pile. However, these items will always seem to be precisely what he needs later on to solve the puzzles that he – pretty much 9 times out of 10 – has not yet encountered.

Curiously, a large portion of the puzzles in the game seem to involve vandalizing property at some point or other. In the early portions of the game, when the plot hasn’t reached the mystery proper yet, this leads to your hero – who has been fetched to the Limmeridge Manor to serve as an art tutor – generally conducting various acts of destruction upon the house in the name of completing the errands demanded of him. Furthermore, he will clairvoyantly predict the need of such destruction – saying things like “There might be something inside this, I better find a way of breaking it open” – long before he is ever given a task that actually required him to use the item inside said target of his destructive urges. Thankfully, later in the game’s plot – when you’re actively investigating the person you believe to be guilty – the random destructive acts seem less weird than they do early on.

However, far worse during the puzzle sequences than the hero’s disturbing logic are the controls for the usage of your inventory. The problem here is that all items must first be drug out of the inventory box before they can be used, rather than just clicking on them and then where you want to use them like you would in most graphic adventure games. The problem with this is the fact that you will be doing most of your tasks with the graphics zoomed in, which will lead to you often scrolling your objective off the top of your screen – thanks to the scroll command not being disabled when you hold a tool – by the very act of acquiring the tool. To add insult to this particular injury, the very next place you put your finger – after getting a tool out – must be where you intend to use the object or it will immediately be sent back to the inventory box where you will have to retrieve it yet again.

The other problem with the inventory management system is that the game will often confuse attempts to hit the buttons that scroll through pages of your possessions as requests to close the inventory box entirely. This can be greatly frustrating when you are carrying a lot of items and are trying to quickly reach the page of the one you currently desire. I eventually found that using my pinky finger to hit the inventory navigation buttons provided the best results, and even then I still had issues with it.

The final problem that comes up during puzzle sequences is that the places they want you to use the item itself are not always the obvious one you’re going to intuitively want to be clicking. At one point I needed to attach a series of weights to a clock to fix it, and the most obvious place in my mind to use the weight was on the weightless strings dangling inside the clock. However, after much frustration, it eventually turned out that the actual correct place to use the weights was in the empty space below the strings they attached to rather than the strings themselves.

Persevering through these puzzles will reward you with discoveries, cutscenes, and interactive conversations that further you towards the answers to the plot’s mysteries. A nice upside to the game is that it actually features quality voice acting throughout, which is something of a rarity in most iPod games. However, a weird quirk of all this is that your own character is only voice acted during the cutscene portions of the game but never in the interactive conversation parts where everyone else is still voiced.

Under normal circumstances I would completely over look such a thing, but it does lead to another of the game’s unfortunately annoying quirks. All but the shortest of responses available to you will only be presented in a truncated form in your dialogue selection box, with the full version only being visible after you select it. The problem with this comes from the fact that the second your full dialogue box opens the other person’s audio clip begins playing, meaning you hear the other person’s response before you even know all of what you yourself said. If your character had been voiced throughout then this wouldn’t have ever been a problem as your dialogue clip would have played before the other person’s audio clip began, at least the other person’s dialogue is also presented in text so you can read that after you finish reading your own.

iFanzine Verdict: The game actually is fun, particularly in the latter half when the plot picks up and the random acts of vandalism seem more justified when done in the name of investigating the presumed guilty party. However, the clunky puzzle controls will be a source of constant vexation throughout. Still, when viewed in the light of the low price tag it’s being offered at, you could easily do far worse than this.