Truffle Saga puts you in control of a dog named Truffle who must destroy mushrooms by throwing acorns at them. You throw acorns the same way you slingshot fowl in Angry Birds, except you don’t control how hard you throw them. You even get a white dotted line showing the path of your most recent throw. Unlike Angry Birds, which gives you multiple airborne critters to shoot your enemies into green bacon, Truffle Saga only gives you one acorn per level.

With all the weird stuff in this game, it shouldn’t be surprising that acorns are an effective anti-fungal agent.

At first the only obstacles are sticks and leaves, so all you need to make your shot count is good aim. After a few easy levels bouncing nuts off leaves, you’ll have to learn more tricks. There are flowers that eat your acorn and spit it out, bees that act as trampolines, and monsters that swallow your acorn, ending the level. Those of you who want games to make sense are not going to have a good time. These challenges add depth to the game, but unfortunately they also cause it to fall apart. Some of these extra elements require you to use awkward touch controls, especially the bouncy bees. To make matters worse, Truffle Saga suffers from a common AAA game trap and forgets what kind of game it is. There are a few levels that are solved by moving a bouncy bee around the bottom of the screen like in Breakout. Fortunately, you can skip levels by tapping an onion icon in the corner of the screen.

My other major problem with Truffle Saga is that its ads are really annoying. Paid versions on other platforms may not have them, but I played the Android version on my Droid Razr HD. There were many times when a new level had just loaded and I tapped the screen to throw my acorn, only to be thwarted by an ad that popped up just before I touched the screen. I eventually got sick of this and turned off my WiFi, but then the game kindly informed me that it had also fallen into the AAA trap of requiring a constant Internet connection.

Like most mobile games, Truffle Saga has a three-star ranking system to increase its replay value but with an interesting twist. Each level has three gems to collect in addition to the mushrooms, but after finishing the game you’ll be challenged to play each level four times, collecting a different number of gems each time for a crown. It’s a great design choice because avoiding gems is often trickier than collecting them.

Truffle Saga has some interesting puzzles and a clever way to add replay value, but I can’t recommend it because of its awkward controls, intrusive ads, and genre amnesia. If you can live with those things, you can get it on Steam, Google Play or the App Store.

Overall Rating: ★★☆☆☆ 

© 2014, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

My first problem with Zelik Adventures is how hard it is to start a new game or continue an existing one. Its menu was pretty unresponsive on my Droid Razr HD running KitKat, and it wasn’t readily apparent whether it hadn’t registered my taps or was just taking its time responding. In Zelik Adventures, you play as an alien named Zelik who would have a hard time outrunning my girlfriend’s turtles. After you manage to start a new game, you’re dropped off on planet Earth by a small rocket to begin your mission of meeting five wise men and convincing them to share their wisdom with you. Your first task is to close all the tutorial hints as they tell you how to do things like “run,” jump, and open chests, usually a few seconds after you find out for yourself. Provided you have the patience and will to resist the urge to simply close the app and do something fun, the hardest challenge is jumping using the atrocious controls.  As the ever-so-helpful tutorial hints will tell you without being the least bit intrusive, touching either side of the screen makes Zelik sprint towards that side with all the speed of a seahorse. Swiping upwards on the screen makes him jump as long as you swipe straight up. The slightest slant to your swipe will make it register as a tap on that side of the screen, often walking the alien into spikes or off a ledge.

Throughout whatever part of Earth Zelik Adventures takes place on, there are chests you can open by tapping them. Upon being opened, these chests will vomit up gold coins and a mixture of fruit and junk food the game calls treats. The game keeps track of how many treats you’ve collected, but they aren’t good for anything besides annoying your friends by telling them how many you have. Coins are used to buy disguises like cowboy hats and sunglasses.  The human population of Earth is scared of Zelik, but humans are unobservant enough that they won’t know it’s him if he’s wearing one of these disguises.

Once you have a disguise, you must find a wise man, usually by doing some clumsy platforming. If your disguise is good enough, he’ll talk to you. I would have had a lot more fun with Zelik Adventures if the wise men didn’t all say the exact same thing. The only question on this personality test is “What attracts you?” and each time you are asked it, you are given three answers to choose from. From your answers, the game will assign you a trait like agreeableness or open-mindedness, which you can share with your friends on Facebook until they un-friend you for annoying them. On the game’s stats page, the game will tell you your trait as if it’s your only one.

What is your name? What is your quest? What is your favourite colour?

This could be seen as a good thing in a game with such lousy controls, but Zelik Adventures has no failure state. There are spikes and enemies, but all they do is take away your disguises. This isn’t a big deal because chests can be looted as many times as you want. If you lose your disguise, you can just re-loot a chest and buy another one.

I kept playing, taking frequent occasional breaks to engage in more entertaining activities such as watching my girlfriend’s turtles race, until I found all five wise men and told them what attracts me. At this point, I expected the game to congratulate me for finding all five wise men and show me an endgame cutscene as a reward for putting up with it for so long. Instead, it told me to go find more wise men to learn more about my personality. What immediately followed was the most enjoyable part of my experience with Zelik Adventures: uninstalling the app.

Zelik Adventures is definitely one of the worst games I’ve ever played. The story is boring, the controls are horrible, and it doesn’t even have the decency to be over when you finish it. If you don’t believe me, download it and see for yourself. If you want a mobile platformer that’s actually good, check out Splashy Slime.

Overall Rating: ★☆☆☆☆ 

What does this score mean?

© 2014, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

In Splashy Slime, you must navigate thirty 2D levels using just one button as a ball of green slime named Splashy, who is probably a ninja-in-training. My favourite thing about Splashy Slime is its control scheme. Despite its apparent simplicity, German developer paranoiax did a lot with it. If you can call it running, Splashy runs from left to right automatically until he/she/it bumps into a wall and turns around. To jump, you tap the screen. The longer the tap, the higher the jump. If you’re touching the screen when you run into a wall, you do a wall jump that I would never have guessed Splashy is in good enough shape to pull off, which is one of the reasons why I think he/she/it is training to be a ninja.

The game loads in a little over six seconds on my Droid Razr HD running KitKat, and the loading screen explains the controls. In case you’re one of those people who doesn’t read the tips on loading screens, the first four of the thirty levels serve as a tutorial that explains the controls again. The problem is that both of these sources are a bit misleading. They say “Tap to jump” and “Hold to jump higher,” which implies that there are only two jump heights: one for tap, one for hold. It would have been more accurate to say “Tap to jump” and “The longer the tap, the higher the jump.” After that, the tutorial teaches you how to wall jump, how to use springboards, and the most important lesson of all, “Remember: if it’s spiky it kills you.”

Remember: if it’s spiky it kills you.

The object of Splashy Slime is to reach the exit sign in each of the levels without getting killed by the multitude of bottomless pits and spikes that are out to ruin your day. The game never explains what’s at the end of these exit signs that mean so much to Splashy that he/she/it is willing to risk his/her/its life, but jumping over saw blades and avoiding spikes both sound like skills that would be taught at a school for video game ninjas. This is the other reason I think Splashy Slime takes place at a ninja school, and I never saw Splashy in a history lesson to disprove this hypothesis.

I never expected a mobile game to do platforming as well as Splashy Slime, but I do have some gripes with it. As is the case with many platformers, there are coins you can collect. However, there’s no reason to collect them, so they end up being annoying rather than adding to the game. In a hardcore platformer, I would expect the coins to add another layer of difficulty for those brave enough to try collecting them, but paranoiax misses that opportunity.

There are three different environments, but the only one I liked was the dungeon between the forest levels and the winter holiday-themed ones. The dungeon appeals to my affinity for dark themes in video games and literature, and it’s the only level where all the spikes and saw blades don’t seem out of place. The dungeon levels also feature hanging platforms that aren’t in the rest of the game, making the game play slightly different. The other two environments don’t do this. The woodlands and the holiday environment would be indistinguishable given a paint job, and the spikes look out of place in both of them. All three environments also share the same music, which is a shame because having three background songs would have made the game’s biggest problem a little more bearable.

Just like I never expected anyone to make a good platformer for mobile devices, I never expected anyone to make a game with music so bad that the game is better on mute. I usually like chip-tune soundtracks, but Splashy Slime‘s is easily the worst part of the game. The music in the trailer is actually pretty good, so I’m not sure why it’s horrible in the final product. Splashy Slime touts itself as “an impossible hardcore platformer”, but I stopped playing more times because I was sick of the music than because I was frustrated by the difficulty. I ended up playing the second half of the game on mute, and it only took that long because the mute button also silences the sound effects.

Despite some design flaws that keep it from being as good as it should be, Splashy Slime is a great game that exceeds my previous expectations of mobile platformers. It’s a free download on Google Play, and I recommend it to anyone who doesn’t mind playing it on mute.

Overall Rating: ★★★★☆ 

What does this score mean?

© 2014, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

The Flashlight: Chupacabra’s Greatest Foe

After a loading screen that politely reminds you that the game is made by MEGO, Chupacabra prompts you to press start. Since most smartphones lack a start button, this is emulated by tapping anywhere on your phone’s screen. Your reward for discovering the solution to this first puzzle is that you’re given control of a goat-murdering vampire and mercilessly unleashed upon the unsuspecting goat population of a 2D version of Mexico. The game doesn’t explain the controls, but I can overlook that because they’re so simple: to run, you do nothing. To stop, you “press start” the same way you did to get past the title screen.

The objective, which shouldn’t surprise you, is to kill as many goats as you can without being spotted by any flashlight-wielding cowboys, who are probably just jealous that you get to be a vampire and they don’t. To kill goats, you simply avoid tapping the emulated start button and allow yourself to sprint through them. Every time you do this, your score increases by one. As an added bonus, you get to see each goat you kill explode into red, tasty pixels of  goat blood. Chupacabra is a messy eater.

You must be careful though. Throughout 2D Mexico, vigilant cowboys sit on horseback, waving flashlights back and forth, hoping to spot the monster that slaughters their goats in the night. If you are caught in the beam of a flashlight, the cowboy holding that flashlight will immediately shoot you. When Chupacabra comes into contact with a bullet, the result is similar to the slime in a video game adaptation of the 90s Nickelodeon show All That: green, pixelated, messy, and completely innocuous to goats. And being innocuous to goats means the game is over.

To complicate matters, the screen constantly gets darker, returning to full brightness every time you kill a goat. If you allow the screen to go completely black, you starve to death and the game is over. This creates a nice balancing act that requires you to slow down enough to avoid the flashlight beams but not enough to starve to death before reaching the next goat.

All of this would make for a great game except for two problems I have with it. The first is that doing well seems to rely, at least to some degree, on luck. If you’re lucky, there will be lots of goats to eat with only the occasional cowboy to  evade. If you’re unlucky, you’ll run into too many cowboys too close together and starve to death trying to sneak past them.

The second is that, if you run for a few seconds without stopping, you switch speeds from moderately fast to extremely fast. When running extremely fast, it’s much harder to stop in time when you see a cowboy. To get around this, I tapped my screen every few seconds to keep my speed at moderately fast. This probably won’t be an issue for everyone, but it kept the game from being fun for me. I hate having to constantly interrupt the game to keep it from giving me something that would usually be, and should be, considered a power up.

Despite its good points, Chupacabra isn’t a good game. To be fair, it’s not that bad either, and I can understand how other people would like it. The bottom line is that I didn’t enjoy it, but it’s a free download, so it may still be worth checking out.

Overall Rating: ★★☆☆☆ 

What does this score mean?

© 2014, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

I’m not sure what kind of animals those are.

Hilomi is the opposite of a 2D platformer. In a platformer, you are given a character and an environment. You control the character to navigate the environment, collecting items and completing objectives. In Hilomi, you are given a character named Hilomi and an environment, but now you control the environment to help Hilomi collect pictures of animals and reach the gate to the next level.

The mechanics of Hilomi are pretty simple. The environment is made out of Minecraft-like blocks that Yamago repainted with better textures. There are different materials like earth, stone, sand, water, totem, wood, ice, and fire. All of them are good for something except stone. You can create and destroy blocks of earth, and you can turn materials into other materials. Making and destroying earth takes one mana per move, and converting materials takes two. My first problem with Hilomi is the contrived nature of this Minecraft alchemy. It makes sense that you can turn wood into totems because totems are often made of wood. It makes sense that these wooden totems can be turned into fire because, as any pyromaniac who’s received something from a Hawaiian gift shop knows, wooden totems burn quite well. If anyone understands the logic between being able to turn fire into sand, please, I implore you: leave me a comment and explain it to me.

Hilomi has a variety of environments, so you won’t get bored of the scenery.

The other contrived bit is the way you get more alchemy powers. In the beginning of the game, all you can do is make and destroy earth. Your alchemy powers are introduced one by one as you need them, with no explanation as to why you just learned a new trick. In fact, I don’t know who is helping Hilomi navigate these areas to take pictures of the wildlife. Hilomi is introduced in the opening cut-scene as a young, probably French girl who likes to take pictures of animals. I really like her as a character, but I have no clue who I am playing as. Am I some kind of benevolent god? Am I Hilomi’s subconscious, controlling a dream she is having? Am I a vampire who is working to gain her trust so I can eat her later?

That last one would make me feel better about the art style and music choice. In my preview of Forward to the Sky, I made a distinction between the kind of cheery that makes me feel like I’m going on an epic adventure and the kind of cheery that makes me sick. The art style of Hilomi is the latter.

My other problem with Hilomi is its loading times. My phone is a Droid Razr HD running Jelly Bean, and it took an average of 27 seconds of loading time to be ready to play. After that, there is a 5 second load time between worlds. This won’t be a big deal to some people, but when you’re waiting for your grandfather to get his hair cut, 27 seconds feels like a couple of minutes. The development team is currently looking at the issue.

Other than that, the game is really good. It’s easily the best mobile game I’ve ever played. While the cute art style annoys me, I like that the animals smile when Hilomi gets close to them. It has a rating system similar to the three-star system in games like Angry Birds, Cut the Rope, and Ten Second Ninja. Each level has three or four animals, and you must take pictures of all of them in order to get the highest rating. It’s incredibly satisfying to come back to a level that’s been troublesome and finally get all of the pictures. It also amuses me that Hilomi takes no fall damage but dies instantly in water like Cole McGrath from inFamous. Once you get past how contrived the game is, it’s incredibly fun. It has minor flaws that keep it from being perfect, but if you have an iOS or Android device, I strongly suggest you at least download the free version.

Overall Rating: ★★★★☆ 

What does this score mean?

This game was reviewed on an Android-based device using a copy provided by the developer for that purpose.

© 2014, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

While Hopeless: Space Shooting shares the same great gameplay, it doesn’t feel like enough new content has been added to consider this entry much more than an entertaining re-skin. Bonus points for an amazing game trailer that will probably give you a photosensitive seizure.

What’s New:

Multi-Touch shooting allows you to blast space monsters as fast as your little yellow marshmallows can squeeze the trigger.

The game comes with two modes: The traditional Arcade Mode which challenges you to rack up as many points as possible, and the fast paced Survival Mode, which challenges you to hold out as long as you can against increasingly difficult waves of space monsters.

A new, mask wearing monster variant has also been added, requiring two shots to kill, and giving you even less time to save your squishy comrades.

Super sweet space lasers!

What’s The Same:

The adorably terrified blobs are back for more punishment, and to prove that in space, no one can hear you get eaten by ravenous monsters.

What Doesn’t Work:

The eerie “oh crap, what was that” atmospheric sounds have been replaced by an upbeat soundtrack that takes away from the “hopeless” vibe that worked so well in the original game.

Hopeless: Space Shooting is available on iOS and Android now.

For those of you who loved the original entry, Hopeless: The Dark Cave, you’ll enjoy more trigger happy blasting with Hopeless: Space Shooting, but don’t expect much in the way of groundbreaking gameplay changes.

For those of you who missed out on the original: A- it’s FREE in the App Store/on Google Play, so stop sitting there and download it. B- This new entry is an entertaining entry in its own right, and one that you can easily jump into without having played the original.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

© 2014, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

In Turf Raiders, you play as the leader of a horde of blue kitty commandos (they look more like squirrel…bear…things to me, but hey! Still cute!) on a mission to collect energy cubes known as gluons which power your defenses against the diabolical red dog hoards. In order to do this, you and your enemy take turns playing cards that have a variety of abilities, such as summoning units to the grid-like field, moving your own or your opponent’s units, or even getting rid of your opponent’s units! Each part of the grid yields certain items, such as gluons or cash which is essential to being able to play cards at all. In essence, Turf Raiders is a tactical area control game in a vein similar to the classic board game Risk.

Despite its strategic leanings, Turf Raiders is simple and easy to learn. After a few tutorial levels, the player is thrown right into over forty different missions which all feature different field layouts and enemies that get increasingly aggressive. While it’s a free game, there is an in-app currency that allows you to buy ‘Perks’: one-use items such as extra cash or cards to give you an edge over your opponent. I found that I usually had enough of the currency available that I didn’t really need to opt for actually buying more.

Turf Raiders feels like a game that appears simple but actually hides complex and engaging strategy beneath the surface. If only this were true. The game is awkward, teetering on the edge between something casual and light and something deeper, something that I need to sit down and consider. There are elements which are annoyingly slow, such as having to touch the screen every time both my opponent and I draw a new hand.  The cash as the beginning of my turn takes way too long to auto-gather to me. I end up just touching on the little sprites myself to have them available faster. These are, admittedly, minor grievances, but the constant touching for aspects that should be automatic wore down on me. It was tough to continue in this war of attrition, having to convince myself to play the next mission and deal with the weird slowness of it all.

I like cute games with adorable characters, but maybe Turf Raiders was also a little too cute for me. The bouncy music became repetitive, speeding up to a stressful crescendo at odd intervals, leading me to eventually turning it off. Overall, I was saddened that Turf Raiders became an unpleasant, tedious experience for me. Perhaps some tightening up of certain mechanics and a little more variation in music and animations would improve the experience, but for now this is a game I’d rather skip.

Turf Raiders Card Battle is free and available in the Google Play Store. You can find more information on the developer’s website.

Overall Rating: ★★☆☆☆ 

What does this score mean?

© 2014, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

The simple, one-touch controls dictate where your blobs shoot, but it’s up to you to determine friend from foe. The stripped down mechanics help set Hopeless apart from other games as the barrier-free user experience drops you into a new game with a single tap, and the method for survival is immediately apparent.

The dark, atmospheric sounds drive home the eerie, “Oh crap, what was that?” feeling within the game’s static, desperate setting. With every cricket chirp, gust of wind, and squeaky metal door, I found my fingers twitching to shoot a monster that hadn’t yet appeared.

As the pace and number of the monsters increased, I found myself with less time to identify friend from foe and opting to shoot first and not tell anyone that I shot Bob later. Every time I blew one of my jiggly little friend’s heads off, I let out a dejected and audible, “Awww!”

The game runs smoothly on iOS, but I did encounter a few frame rate issues as more characters crowded the screen, which resulted in some of my blobs getting picked off as soon as a monster appeared on my screen, or my shots not registering. These instances were few and far between, but I actually felt like they added to the game’s desperate atmosphere and my feeling of being overwhelmed.

Hopeless: The Dark Cave is a fun, quirky, and very well executed game. The dark, yet approachable setting, and pick-up-and-play mentality make this a great addition to any mobile game library. Plus, it’s FREE on iOS and Android right now, so you really don’t have a good excuse not to play it.

© 2014, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

Toast Time is a physics-based tower defense game for iOS and Android in which you play as a “Toast-ejecting recoil & reload system” or TERRY as he is more affectionately known. It’s your job to save Monday morning from an invasion of inter-dimensional blobs hell-bent on ruining breakfast, using the breaded arsenal you might expect a toaster to have at his disposal.

Controlling Terry is done by shooting your toasted ammunition, and by the magic of Newton’s third law of motion you will in-turn be catapulted in the opposite direction. This maneuverability will come in handy as the goal of each level is to stop an encroaching wave of blob monsters from reaching a clock placed somewhere within each level. Firing off slices of toast at the monsters will take them out, and the aim is to last long enough for the timer on the clock to run down to zero. At its very core, Toast Time is best described as bringing popular physics based precision puzzles to a tower defense setting.

As you progress through the levels, things become a little bit harder with the introduction of jump pads that boost the blobs over great distances or walls that obscure your aim, forcing you to be constantly aware of your positioning so you can still get a good shot off on the marching blobs. When you reach later levels, different enemy types are also introduced to shake things up a bit, ranging from a tougher ‘fat’ blob that takes multiple shots to finish off, to parachuting blobs that attack from the skies.

As you play through the levels, pickups will be introduced via crate drops which have to be shot down to be collected. These crates offer interesting – but limited – ammunition to help turn the tide of battle, with some granting explosive shatter shots or rapid fire toast slices when you need a little extra firepower. If you do especially well and score a x20 multiplier against the blobs there’s a chance for you to slip into ‘COFFEE TIME’, a berserk state that causes the screen to become stylized and ammunition to bounce off of walls for a limited time. My only gripe is that this isn’t as obvious as perhaps it should be as I had completed the game long before I knew what this bonus effect was actually doing.

With 46 levels to play through, there’s plenty to keep you occupied for a few days of casual playing (or perhaps half a day if you’re in to blitzing through content). Once you’re done with the main levels there’s a secondary mode called ‘Survival’ which has you trying to complete as many levels as possible with only one life. Much like the main portion of the game, Survival has you fighting waves until the clock runs down, but things become a lot tenser when you know that one mistake is going to cause you to lose everything.

Toast Time is a charming entry to the mobile market, slathered in the quintessential ‘Britishness’ of its creators.  It’s endearing to see the minor touches like cosmetic customization of Terry, or the witty one-liners that appear on each game-over screen. There’s a decent amount of content for casual players to sink their teeth into, and an enjoyable few hours’ worth for those who like to burn through games as fast as possible. But above all else, the game is just good, clean fun that’s easy to pick up and play when you’ve got a few minutes to kill or a lust to shoot bread at things.

Overall Rating: ★★★★★ 

What does this score mean?

This game was reviewed using a copy provided by the developer for that purpose. It was tested on an iPhone 5 running iOS 7.0.4.

Toast Time is out now on IOS and Android for £1.99/$2.99

© 2014, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

Multiple armies will be available for players to command in either 1v1 or 2v2 matches. Each army will feature units that fit within the classic roles of Infantry, Ranged, Cavalry, and Support. Substantial Games is trying to make every unit in the game as unique as possible, like the Berserker who constantly regenerates health, or the “Puglings” who spawn a new Pug every time they kill an enemy unit, to help ensure that no two battles play out the same.

Matches are won by eliminating the opposing army, or by controlling Points of Capture (POCs). While complete annihilation is the most likely way you’ll win or lose a match, be on the lookout for crafty players who seek to control all of the POCs on a map, which will result in an immediate victory.

The Ember Conflict has a lot of potential to offer an engaging and innovative mobile gaming experience, and I’m looking forward to getting my hands on a playable demo in the future.  A release date hasn’t been announced yet, but the developers are aiming for Fall 2014. Until then, you can check out some screen shots, enjoy the amazing concept art, and sign up for updates on the game’s website, www.emberconflict.com

© 2014, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.