Swedish game developer Pyramid Beam Studios has released their first game onto the App Store. So Gravity! is a retro artillery game with a vintage 1950′s science fiction flair. The turn based strategy offers multiplayer through Apple’s Game Center by pairing gamers up with their friends or via an automated match maker. Not satisfied? So Gravity! also boasts a local multiplayer mode using just one iOS device.

“The multiplayer portion of the game was essential for us, and we designed it as a multiplayer game from the ground up. If you look at the market you’ll notice there are a lot of highly ranked games that include or are based around multiplayer.” Explains Marcus Nykvist, CEO and Sound Designer at Pyramid Beam.

“So with that in mind we made So Gravity! a multiplayer only game. We wanted to make a game we would play ourselves and multiplayer was an important part in that regard. Playing with, or in this case, against other players is just more fun.” Nykvist also expressed interest in a possible single player mode of So Gravity! if there is enough player demand for one.

So Gravity! pits gamers against each other in randomly generated space battlefields with unique solar systems. Taking advantage of the gravitational fields of the surrounding planets, players can curve their attacks while also making themselves trickier to target. At your command are a set of primary and secondary weapons and of course the ships thrusters.

“Artillery games have a lot of history and were an early way of playing multiplayer with friends. There is a reason we feel it to be relevant to this day, it simply is a lot of fun blowing up your friends! We reimagined it for the smartphone market and took advantage of the option to play against your friends at any time, what’s not to like about that?” Marcus said.

So Gravity! is on sale now at the App Store for 99 cents

You can visit Pyramid Beam Studios on their official Blog to learn more about So Gravity! 

We received the news roughly a month ago that Hemisphere Games was bringing the multiplayer features of Osmos over to the iOS. Should you have heard of the news previously, you might have spent your time absorbing Nemocytes and Ferax, honing your skills against human minds. Your practice is probably over now, since the real arena has finally reached your iDevices.

The new multiplayer portion of Osmos features six arenas: Ambient, Warped Chaos, Impasse, Solar, Epicycles, and Antimatter Impasse. While the objective of the game largely remains the same throughout (which is absorbing the other player), each arena plays out in a different environment, employing different gameplay tactics as well as atmosphere. Standing out among the arenas is Antimatter Impasse (uniquely for multiplayer), in which two players employ different motes to grow, as one would see the other as anti-matter. The Time Wrap feature (which allows you to control the flow of time) is also removed for consistency between the two players. The rest of the game utilizes the same mechanic and techniques, and any skills you have acquired in single player mode will definitely serve you well. Following signature traits of Osmos, all arenas — regardless of type — are procedurally generated, providing a completely different experience for each play.

So far, I have been having quite a lot of fun with Osmos. Finding an opponent isn’t an issue at the moment, because there are plenty of newcomers. And connection problems are luckily few and far between. While most players seemed to have been frustrated easily after constantly being absorbed and quit the match, looking for another didn’t take that much time. As Osmos should be, plenty of unpredictable things occur in a match. Often, someone crashes into a larger mote, and the other player simply wins for treading more carefully. Other times, a huge green mote (the new appearance denoting the other player) flies out of nowhere and ends your short life. Matches are short and fast, and frustration never lasts long no matter how much you lose. In any case, it also should be noted that a handicap system is present to help out less capable players.

Fifteen additional multiplayer-specific achievements were also added, but most of them are simply win-counters without any interesting twist. As a fan of the single player Sentient mode, and despite understanding well the challenges of implementing such games, I was quite sad to not see the chaos of an eight player free-for-all dogfight for survival.

Much more joy and value has been added into Osmos with this new update. If Osmos is already on your device, you have a good reason to visit the App Store and go back to the game now. If you haven’t bought it, Osmos has just become much more worthy of mere three bucks. If you’re on Android, unfortunately, you would need some more patience, though considering how great things are right now on iOS, it probably won’t be that long.

For more information, visit the Hemisphere Games website. Osmos is available on iOS App Store for $2.99 (iPhone)/$4.99 (iPad). Multiplayer is not yet available on the Android version.

After an agonizingly long development cycle, especially for an iOS title, the game billed as “the first RPG designed for a mobile platform” is finally here! That’s right, Ayopa Games’ Pocket Heroes is due for release on July 12th — today!

Fans of the genre may now enjoy an RPG crafted especially for iPhone, but only if they have friends with which to do so. Pocket Heroes is a multiplayer only game where players may start co-op games with friends in order to embark on quests and explore dungeons for all of the loot you could shake a stick at. Complete with four classes, twenty different types of monsters, retro graphics and — once more — plenty of loot, you and up to three friends should have no problem enjoying the package Apoya has carefully crafted. The game even incorporates asynchronous multiplayer, so if the real world calls, you can let your friends know that you’ll be able to continue your journey with them just as soon as you’re able.

For now, however, those of you with friends can pick up the complete RPG package that is Pocket Heroes on the App Store for just $0.99.

For more information on the game, check out Apoya Games’ official website.

Do you remember Spell Tower? The game was released a couple of months ago and combined the old Tetris vibe with some timeless word hunting flavour. Well, the game’s developer, Zach Gage, has been working on an update to the game so that fans and newbies alike can pit their vocabularies and hand eye coordination against one another.

Perhaps spurred by the recent resurgence in popularity of games like Words With Friends, Gage has decided to add asynchronous multiplayer to the game, which means iDevice owners will have one more game queue to check after rolling out of bed. The second big update being made to the series is the addition of an Android version to the product line, so now those of you who’ve been waiting to get in on the wordplay fun will soon have your chance to show off your skills.

Spell Tower is currently available on the App Store and owners can expect the mutiplayer to be added with the next update, possibly requiring an in-app purchase. No release date has been announced for an Android version quite yet but with a hardworking one-man wrecking crew like Zach Gage on the project, it shouldn’t be too long.

For more information on this and other projects, head over to Zach’s official website.

Every once in awhile, a pleasant gem finds its way onto the App Store, and you have probably come upon one in the past. After combing through endless lists of newly released titles, you find one whose icon catches your eye, and decide to give it a second look. The app’s description and design seem understated, simple, and that low profile design is what coaxes you into tapping the install button and giving the game a chance to make a home for itself on your iPad’s solid-state drive. Simply put: This developer knows that “less is more”. I’ve had such an experience recently, and at the end of that long, almost dreary process, I stumbled upon Secret-Library’s Centrifeud, and as its developer’s name might suggest, it’s a gem hidden away in the folds of the App store.

Centrifeud is a beautifully designed, easy to pick up, addicting game currently available on the iPad. Having been optimized for the third generation iPad, Secret-Library’s minimalist design direction practically jumps off of the screen, no matter what generation of iPad you own. Dark background colours are contrasted by a vibrant foreground palette that pleases the eye, as the “puck” sweeps from corner to corner.  The simple design also helps players to keep their eyes on the action during the course of each game, which can be difficult as the number of players increases. Even though the game is, at its core, a pick up and play multiplayer experience, it even has a smirk-worthy plot summed up by Secret-Labs.

“In the year 3212 the Circumlords have established their complete control over the known circle-verse. It is here in the sinister Hexadome that they exert their cruelty over a helpless populace and feed their insatiable lust for the circle-on-circle combat known as CENTRIFEUD.

In the last star-cycle your mentor perished in the final round of CENTRIFEUD, and now you must step up to represent your homeworld.”

Up to four players may go head-to-head on the screen of iPad in a race to thirteen points. Each player picks a corner of the screen, and by touching their finger to the button in said corner, set a disc of the same colour into motion within the playing zone. When all four zones are in play, the playing zone can appear incredibly crowded, which makes for more intense competition. While each coloured disc zips to and fro, players will have to keep a key eye on the center of their disc, because lifting a finger from your playing node and placing it back down will cause the disc to change direction towards whatever path the spinning needle at its center is pointing.

If that’s not enough to keep your eye on while trying to hunt down the discrete pink dots which appear at random points on screen to score points, the subtle background will constantly change the dynamic of the game with rings which light up in sequence starting from the outside. On the surface, it may now sound like such a big deal, but the pattern these sparsely spaced and pulsing rings create something of an optical illusion which can warp one’s perception while tracking their rapidly moving disc, as it ricochets off of the limits of the screen as well as other player-controlled discs. The final layer of player lies in the very center of the game board, where icons appear periodically to represent power-ups. In order to gain these power-ups, players must quickly lift their fingers from the playing node and tap the center of the screen – a scramble which left myself and friends all but wrestling on the living room table – winning a temporary advantage for themselves before charging right back into the action, assuming everyone else isn’t frozen solid.

On the surface of things, Centrifeud may seem simple to the point where you’d be bored, but it really isn’t! While the game’s core concept is simple, the subtle tasks it requires players to accomplish in order to be competitive elevate enjoyment to another level. To me, the game strikes up memories of sitting around a table with family and playing Hungry Hungry Hippos on Christmas Eve, and that’s a rare feeling type of feeling to conjure from any game. Beyond those personal feelings, it’s fair to say that the game is meant for short term sessions. Even with four, highly competitive individuals playing the game, playing for more than twenty minutes at a time diminished the entertainment value of the experience, but that is still a long session for any mobile experience.

Centrifued is currently on the App Store for $1.99 and is more than worth the money. If you’re someone who has friends over often and find yourselves sitting around on a hot afternoon with nothing to do, there’s nothing better to for a few laughs and good fun. For more information, check out Secret-Library’s official website.

Who misses local multiplayer? You? And board games, are those to your liking?

Whether or not you fit into the board game luvvie category is, to a certain degree, irrelevant when it comes to the mobile gaming space, mainly because setting up a Monopoly board on a train isn’t exactly the most user-friendly of exercises. Simply put, then, sitting around a table, pitting one’s wits against one’s peers and exchanging memories past just doesn’t tend to work when you’re on the go. And ain’t that just a crying shame?

Enter Moo Yu’s Ring Fling.

Fast paced, frantic and pretty darn addictive-looking, Ring Fling serves up the almost unique premise of four-player, same-screen multiplayer on a portable iOS device. Each player must use the touch-screen interface to thrust coloured circles into their opponent’s scoring zones, all whilst keeping an eye on their own scoring areas in an attempt to avoid meeting a similar fate. And if nothing else, the game looks as though it’s set to be a bastion of repetitive strain injury and shattered relationships, but that’s not exactly our problem. Well, not until the lawyers come calling now that we’ve officially endorsed it, anyway.

For more information on this multiplayer mash-up and all its unlockable bits and pieces, check out its official site.

Even though Michael Bay’s efforts to reinvent the Transformers saga ultimately boiled down to overzealous attempts to instigate seizures and hightail away with naive purists’ money, long-standing mech battle franchises within the gaming world, most notably Armored Core, have demonstrated that there’s still plenty of life in the noble art of robot warfare.

Hoping to breathe fresh life into the mechanical mayhem are Small Impact Games, a development studio located in the pleasant suburbian outreaches of Leamington Spa, England. They’re stepping up their development campaign for M3CH, a truly spectacular-looking title in the pipeline for an iOS release.

Defined by the development team as a sci-fi third-person shooter, M3CH is set to feature both a sizeable single-player component alongside what appears to be its proverbial bread and butter – arena-based competitive multiplayer. We’re also told to expect a healthy dose of wave-based action against streams of belligerent AI opponents in the game’s Scavenger Mode, in which players can effectively ‘gamble’ away the mech parts accrued in the other game modes as they attempt to retrieve even more items and utilities for their troubles.

The game is currently being developed on the foundations laid out by the Unreal 3 Engine, accounting for the hugely impressive visuals seen in the video footage above. And while it’s already looking to be a graphically behemothic concept at this stage of proceedings, Small Impact have become the latest studio to take to Indiegogo in an attempt to secure additional public funding to support the game’s ongoing production. They’re looking to raise $25,000 in order to support the development of a a high-quality iOS Beta version of the game, with a fundraiser deadline of May 19th set in place. The studio is also weighing up the prospect of a PC release if enough funding is secured, although the game’s primary development platform is likely to remain rooted in Apple’s mobile service.

More information and updates can be found on M3CH‘s Facebook page.

Featuring a new four player game, built for iPad, is Centrifeud. A simple goal: collect all the orbs to win. Is there a plot? Yes, there is, but don’t expect anything too fancy:

“In the year 3212 the Circumlords have established their complete control over the known circle-verse. It is here in the sinister Hexadome that they exert their cruelty over a helpless populace and feed their insatiable lust for the circle-on-circle combat known as CENTRIFEUD. 

In the last star-cycle your mentor perished in the final round of CENTRIFEUD, and now you must step up to represent your homeworld.”

Centrifeud is a materialistic pick-up-and-play multiplayer game, something you don’t see every day. With six unique power ups, the game never stays the same. There is HD retina graphics made for iPad 3 (A.K.A. The new iPad).  Also included free of charge: extraordinary laser-bass background music by Octophonix. You can download the soundtrack, completely free, from Band Camp.

More information on Centrifued is available on their official website. The iOS version can be downloaded from the App Store for iPad for $1.99.

I’ve seen Ninja Warz become increasingly popular on Facebook, attracting millions of players (2.3 million and counting!). It’s a simple game, raising a casual ninja clan, to battle other, real life, ninja clans. Broken Bulb is interested in bringing the game to mobile devices – iOS and Android (sorry Blackberry!) – something I’ve seen many times. Of course, they’re looking for some support, a bit of cash to get them started. Perhaps their goal of $285,000 is a bit excessive, but personally, I think it can be done. Something different about it though, they mentioned bringing a RTS (real-time strategy). They’ve currently made $1,477, with 24 backers, and 26 days to go. Check out their claims and rewards on KickStarter.