I’d Buy That For a Dollar! (10/03/10)

Alongside the freshly minted Xbox Live Indie Games review series, GameZone is pleased to present “I’d Buy That For a Dollar!” (IBTFAD), a weekly review feature that focuses on three new or recently updated releases for the iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad, or Android.

Each game will be given a final judgement in the form of “BUY IT!”, “TRY IT!”, or “SKIP IT!” And no, I’m not yelling at you, I’m just really excited that my job now revolves around playing another Doodle Jump clone every day…

This week’s batch contains two painfully mediocre casual titles and one surprisingly good mobile port of a terrible console game.

Naughty Bear (iPhone/iPod Touch)
I won’t lie, I had semi-high hopes for Naughty Bear on the Xbox 360. Even 15 minutes in, when all signs pointed to the game being nothing more than a bargain bin flop, I still held out hope that it would somehow, magically, redeem itself. It never did, sadly. But the concept was strong, and so when it appeared on the iPhone, I thought that all the game’s faults would be swept away due to its miniature nature.

For the most part, I was right, but the devs have gone one step further and reduced the murderous, party-crashing gameplay to a twisted version of Pac-Man. As the titular character, you will beat, stab, and burn your way through 27 story levels. You do not control Naughty Bear other than to tell him which direction to run, when to sabotage an item, or when to hide in the bushes. Otherwise he automatically runs around the maze-like map, collecting cupcakes and picking up weapons which allow him to kill the other bears. Each enemy bear has unique attributes; some are more aggressive and will rush Naughty Bear on sight, some do not appear on the minimap, and some will run around and steal valuable weapons.

There are also 27 Challenge stages, which simply require you to rack up as many points in the time allotted, while Story missions rotate between cupcake collectathons, score attacks, and bear body counts. It’s all quite simple, but that’s how a mobile game should be. Naughty Bear scraps all the excess and just makes do with killing cuddly bears in style. I’m not sure you need much more than that. BUY IT!

PipeRush (iPhone/iPod Touch)
One of Clickgamer’s latest creations is PipeRush, an immensely casual endeavor where the player is tasked with creating a path for water to flow from house to house using an endless supply of puzzle pieces in the form of pipes. The game has a cheery presentation, simple yet colorful graphics, and the concept is decent, but about a third of the way through the game’s 15 stages, I couldn’t force myself to carry on. Each stage introduces a new twist to the gameplay such as magical pipes or valve pieces which can close off the flow of water, but the novelty rapidly wears off and I was left annoyed by the random nature in which I received (or rather, didn’t receive) the pipes that I needed.

If you’re a super casual game lover, this might be more up your alley than Naughty Bear, but it feels like it belongs in a mini-game collection rather than as a standalone title, if anything. SKIP IT!

Casual & Puzzle Gamebox (iPhone/iPod Touch)
Speaking of casual mini-game collections (did you see that smooth segue?), one such app exists. With only Solitaire, Mahjong, Bounce, Word Search, SameGame, Minesweeper, Bubbles, and Shishen-Sho, the library of included games is meager at best, but it’s more so the quality that worries me. Each of the eight currently available apps-within-an-app are anemic at best, with minimal graphics and no style whatsoever. It’s a far cry from the All-in-1 Gamebox it so obviously is attempting to mimic.

I don’t foresee Gamebox ever amounting to much based on what’s already here, but Pocket God started out with about 10 seconds worth of gameplay and look at it now. If this newborn app starts making progress down the road, I’ll certainly circle back to it and give it a second chance. But for now, SKIP IT!