This week’s App Store reviews are all about games. We it had to be, considering that it is the most popular category in the App Store. For this roundup we have puzzle based games, namely Crossbones and Deep Green Chess.
Crossbones
A newly set up software development company, New Insect Overlords get their first game out in the App Store. One of the developers, Steve Sprang, previously worked solo on the App Store developing the drawing app “Brushes” [iTunes link] all by himself. Well actually, for a person like Steve, Brushes should be a piece of cake. After all, he did work at Apple for 7 years developing the iWork office suite. An original member of the Keynote team, he left Apple to start off his iPhone development dreams (I guess he stayed in the family).
Enough about Steve and more about Crossbones.
Crossbones is a challenging and addictive pirate-themed puzzle game for the iPhone and iPod touch. Match cards as fast as you can to collect pirate loot. Play solo or against computer opponents in single player mode. Challenge your friends over the internet using either Edge or Wifi or play on a local network.
Like that made any sense. I fired up the game and briefly looked through the tutorial. For the first five minutes I didn’t know what I was doing. But once you get to know the concept, the game is really interesting, and challenging. I would say Crossbones is a very intelligent form of tetris. You need to be quick at looking colours, objects and well, a few other things to be able to put them together to form groups. I won’t try and explain the concept, as the only way to understand the game is to play it.
I wouldn’t say it’s the best puzzle game out there (my vote still goes for Frenzic), but it is one of the better ones. If you got bored of playing Aurora Feint, or need to kill time, Crossbones fits the bill. I didn’t try the Multiplayer option as I didn’t have anyone else to play with over local wifi, and the online servers didn’t have active players, but I assume it would be much more fun playing it against others (upto 4 players per game).
Crossbones [iTunes link] costs $2.99 at the App Store and will go up to $5.99 after the holidays are up. If you like puzzle games, Crossbones won’t disappoint.
Deep Green
If there ever was a perfect digital chess game, this is it. Deep Green features a well designed wooden chess board, with warm colours and a deep green backdrop. The pieces are carved beautifully, with soft shadows, and the entire UI is well thought of. Tap any of the pieces and they start to jiggle.
The player vs computer mode is very engaging. You can set the intelligence level of the computer, which in my case needed to be set to the lowest setting (and it still managed to beat me). Note that I haven’t played chess in a while, hence the poor performance from my end.
The game is almost perfect in every way. The only thing missing is a wi-fi or online extension to play a game using two iPhones.
Deep Green Chess [iTunes link] costs $4.99 right now, and will go up to $7.99 after December. If chess is your thing, Deep Green is definitely the best there is.
