With a fond farewell to the month of May, we welcome you to June and its summery goodness. If you happen to have some time indoors to kill, then you’re going to love this week’s set of fresh App Store games. Come see what’s on offer…
Air Mail
Among the most impressively developed titles to hit Chillingo’s catalogue recently is Air Mail, an incredibly stylish flight simulator with all the right ingredients for a winning genre piece.
In the main Mission mode, you’ll play as a mail-delivering pilot who will fly through detailed, gorgeous and amazingly rendered Retina-ready worlds to accomplish tasks. Spread over seven chapters, the game is lengthy and satisfying, with a healthy variety of environments and experiences waiting for you. Of course, you can also opt to play one of the other two modes — a speed/score run mode called Express Delivery, and the relaxing Explore mode.
It becomes immediately evident as you play Air Mail that it could easily become one of the showcase titles for the platform, with a wealth of content and visuals that are simply oozing with polish and style.
Price: $4.99
Developer: N-Fusion Interactive
Download: App Store
Mega Run – Redford’s Adventure
His name is odd, but his tale is amazing — meet Redford, starring in his new game, Mega Run – Redford’s Adventure. From the makers of the original Mega Run, released to great critical acclaim, this new platformer is absolutely bursting with content.
After his brother and sister are kidnapped, Redford must travel through four worlds to rescue them, encountering a great cast of monsters and utilizing 28 unique power-ups to help best them. There are actually seven playable characters, and a huge number of hidden gems and secrets for you to uncover as you progress through the levels.
Everything is brought to life through colourful level design and smooth animations, and while it isn’t pushing many boundaries with its gameplay, the whole package is so refined and lovingly filled with things to do that it’s difficult not to fall in love.
Price: Free
Developer: Get Set Games
Download: App Store
Extreme Skater
Skating games used to be more popular, especially in the Tony Hawk days, but now they’re few and far between. Attempting to bring them back is Extreme Skater, from Miniclip.com. This platform-based game has a wonderful arcade-y feel to it, and its quick pacing is reminiscent of Sonic, which is a very good thing indeed.
Seeking meteor fragments, you must skate through 78 distinct levels and avoid the various environmental hazards as you go along. There are numerous shortcuts and secrets to uncover, and you can unlock and perform tricks, buy new boards, and even find new characters. The tilt controls are precise, but they’ll take some getting used to if you’re more familiar with touchscreen controls. They work very well though, and keeping your hands off the screen means that you never get in your own way as the pace picks up.
Extreme Skater is quick, nice to look at, and extremely fun to play. If you’ve missed a chance to do some virtual boarding, then this is one you’ll want to grab.
Price: $0.99
Developer: Miniclip.com
Download: App Store
Defender Chronicles II: Heroes of Athelia
In the realm of sequels, we find Defender Chronicles II: Heroes of Athelia. As far as tower defense games go, this one is among the absolute finest, largely because its vertical layout shakes up the usual formula a bit.
Somewhere between an adventure RPG and a traditional tower defense game, Heroes of Athelia puts you in charge of defending a gate in a number of different worlds. This time around, there are four playable heroes and more unit types — 24, in fact — and since everything is upgradeable, you’ll have to be very wise about your strategies because the game can quickly become unforgivingly difficult. The challenge works in its favour though, encouraging you to play more and polish your skills so you can defend your turf successfully.
Perhaps the best part is the fact that some of the upgrades encourage you to think in terms of collaborative effort between units — halfling poison being shared with neighbouring units, for instance. This kind of depth is what secures Defender Chronicles II: Heroes of Athelia a hearty recommendation from us.
Price: $2.99
Developer: Gimka Entertainment, Inc.
Download: App Store
Plague Inc.
Last up today is an extremely compelling simulation game, designed to help you build and infect the world with the perfect disease, that seems to finally get the formula right.
The amount of content in this game is amazing, and it makes for an extremely deep simulation that offers legitimate challenge beyond the other “let loose a disease and watch it spread” titles that have come before it. Plague Inc. requires that you truly master the characteristics of the ten different disease types at your disposal, making use of the detailed DNA manipulation system to hand-craft the perfect variant and ensure that it is optimally able to survive, spread and reproduce.
Most interesting of all is the fact that the world has its own AI that will try, realistically, to contain the infection, counter-act your efforts and prevent global pandemic. This constant balance between the biology of your disease and its spread through a modern world is what makes Plague Inc. so utterly fascinating, if a bit macabre. It may be dark, but it’s incredibly engrossing. Maybe it’s worth washing your hands after you play though, just in case.
Price: $0.99
Developer: Ndemic Creations
Download: App Store
What Have You Been Playing?
Enjoyed this week’s games? Been playing something else? We want to know — give us a shout in the comments!