Lumi HD: bringing light to a dark world.
Lumi – $1.99 iPhone, $2.99 iPad
Now on to electromagnetism and light! Well, sort of. Lumi (not to be confused with Lumi HD, which is also a puzzle game based on shooting beams of colored light into the correct targets) is a platformer in which you control Lumi, a little yellow fluffball, out to save the universe. The story is that some monstrous darkness has taken over Lumi’s world, turning all the other cute little fluffballs into hideous creatures and casting everything into shadow.
Lumi can move around and jump a little bit, but his real power is when he encounters these swirling sparkly things: he can magnetize himself, sticking to these spots, and then slingshot himself through the air (hopefully to another one). There are also light trails that shoot Lumi along, and some sort of light cannon thing. Along the way, Lumi collects fireflies, which can then be released into various trees around each level to brighten things up. Lumi casts a little glow around himself, which is a neat effect, and when a tree is fully lit, it casts a wider circle, showing what the world should look like when it’s not shrouded in darkness.
It can be a pretty tricky platformer: you do have to aim well when you slingshot Lumi from spot to spot. He does have a little bit of magnetism, but as with real magnets, the pull is weaker when you’re falling away (or going too fast), and it’s easy to over- or undershoot. You get three health points per life, which you can lose by running into enemies or falling into pits, but one cool thing is that your progress in a level is saved, so you don’t have to re-collect fireflies you’ve already gotten. You can replay an incomplete level at any time and it’ll start you off with whatever trees you’ve already lit and fireflies collected (unless you choose to reset the level).
The ending was a little … anticlimactic for me, but it was a fun journey getting there. It’s certainly a game that put more into the level designs and look than really exploring the story itself, so when you beat the game it’s just sort of over. But if you like platformers this might be worth checking out. Lumi is $1.99 for iPhone or $2.99 for the iPad.
Save Yammi: get the cookie to Yammi using ropes and gravity.
Save Yammi – $.99 iPhone or iPad
Yammi is a little orange octopus who needs saving. And by “saving” I mean “cookies,” because the object of the game is to get the cookie to his mouth (while collecting stars along the way). Save Yammi is a little puzzle game in the same vein as Cut the Rope, where you have a single-screen puzzle and need to maneuver the treat past various obstacles to get it into the little critter’s mouth. However, rather than cutting rope, in Save Yammi you actually lay down some rope to make temporary paths. You have a limited amount of rope for each level, and the goal is to collect all three yellow stars with the cookie (the two red stars are bonuses) and then get the cookie to Yammi, without losing the cookie off the bottom of the screen or to various cookie-destroying obstacles.
The ropes bounce and sway as the cookie rolls on them, and they fade out and vanish after a few seconds, so you have to be quick. Also, you do have some tilt controls to make the cookie roll left or right, to some extent. As you progress, you’ll go through various levels that introduce various types of features… which are kind of bizarre, considering that the game appears to be taking place on a shower wall. Ok, yeah, I didn’t promise you all of the games were very deep.
Save Yammi isn’t tremendous, but it’s cute and pretty cheap, or you can try out the Lite version for free. Here are your choices: $.99 iPhone, free iPhone Lite version, $.99 iPad, and free iPad Lite version.
Squids screenshots: an underwater wonderland filled with enemies.
Squids – $1.99 (iPhone or iPad)
And while we’re on the subject of mollusks, here’s another one: Squids is a turn-based battle game that has you flinging squids at various enemies in an underwater adventure. It might be stretching it a bit to call this one a physics-based game, but stretching is exactly how you control the squids. When you start off you just have a scout, but as you go you’ll recruit others to your team, and each squid has its own powers and abilities, as well as different helmets (some of them quite amusing) that up their stats.
The levels are gorgeous, particularly on an iPad, with a top-down view of the action and tons of lovely details in the backgrounds. You take turns against the enemies, smashing into them or using your special powers. Take care not to overshoot and fall into the ocean depths (I don’t know why that’s a problem for squids, but it is), and collect pearls so you can buy more gear. There’s a storyline, about some grey ooze that seems to be coating these creatures and turning them into bad guys, but it’s mostly just a lot of fun to slingshot squids around.
The levels are pretty well-designed, with tricky obstacles, dangerous enemies, and water currents that whisk you off whether you like it or not. The four types of squid abilities are nice, too, with the option of customizing your team as you see fit. The game does seem to take a while to load levels sometimes, but it’s worth the wait. There’s also a good deal of humor in the game, so it doesn’t take itself too seriously.
Squids is $1.99 for the universal app.
Old-school Breakout with a few tweaks.
Breakout: Boost – free, with additional levels available in-app
Remember Breakout? It was one of the first games we got for our Atari 2600, and one of the only ones that used the paddle accessory. My parents really loved it, and I remember having a little trouble at first getting used to how quickly the on-screen paddle moved when I turned the knob. But once you got the hang of it, bouncing the ball back and forth to clear the bricks was pretty addicting. It was like single-player Pong. Oh, and there were multiple levels: ones where you had two paddles instead of one, or where the bricks dropped lower on the screen every so often. I remember hitting the “reset” lever to get the particular sound effects that I preferred.
Well, Atari has a reboot for iOS: Breakout: Boost. I’ll warn you right from the start: Breakout: Boost, just like the original, plays it a little loose with physics. I mean, it’s about a bouncing ball, but I know in the original after so many bounces it would automatically change trajectories, sometimes with a sharper angle and sometimes coming in nearly vertically. In the new version, at least, you have a little more control: hit it with the center of the paddle and it’ll go up; hit it with the edge and it’ll go more sideways. (Perhaps it would be more accurate if the paddle was depicted as a curve instead of flat.)
The biggest difference in controls presented here is the boost gauge on the left side of the screen. As you play, you can slide the gauge up and down, making the ball faster or slower. It can go from blazingly quick to a crawl, and your score multiplier increases or decreases along with the ball’s speed. The free version just comes with 5 levels (plus a few more if you like them on Facebook) but you can buy three additional level packs at a buck each, for 222 more. These additional levels are where you’ll get more interesting stuff, like the dynamite squares that blow up when you hit them, the Fire ball that breaks through metal and stone, the Acid ball that eats straight through bricks, and even a 12x brick that splits the ball into 12 when you hit it.
Throughout the game are also various bonuses that drop down when you hit certain bricks. It reminds me of Arkanoid, a popular Breakout clone from the 1980s. In fact, though, I think the main thing that bugged me about Breakout: Boost was that, well, it kind of felt like a Breakout clone itself. It was neither a replica of the original nor significantly different (like, say, the <a title="Asteroids Gunner Updates the Atari Classic for iOS” href=”http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2011/11/asteroids-gunner/”>Asteroids Gunner app), and although I played through all the levels to try them out, I just wasn’t quite as excited about playing them.
If you’re a fan of Breakout (or similar games), you should at least try out the free levels to see what it’s like. But with the ability to slow down the ball, it’s ultimately more about racking up the highest score possible than simply surviving past all the levels, the way the original was. I think maybe it would have been more fun to see them pick up the old Super Breakout story and do something with that: it’s a strange rainbow-colored barrier, and the astronaut is breaking through it with some weird light projectiles that he bounces off the hull of his ship.
Disclosure: I received review codes for the games reviewed here.
