Although the following is a sponsored review, as always I strive to provide an honest opinion of the product reviewed.
I love my iPhone games. With my busy lifestyle, I rarely have time to get a game loaded up on my WII or XBox and just a few minutes of game play is all I’m looking for at a time. So many games on the iPhone meet my basic gaming criteria and Infinity Control is no exception.
Game Play
The game’s creator offers this introduction to Infinity Control:
Welcome Recruit! You have just joined the Federation of International Space Marines! You start on earth where you learn the basics managing incoming craft while avoiding passing by satellites, then you will help the researchers maneuver craft around the dense asteroids of Saturn. Keep ahead of satellites orbiting around earth while docking ships! Watch out! The random appearance of black holes is possible!
Playing the game is as simple as drawing lines with your finger… but the lines are flight paths… for space ships. The screen shot below should give you a pretty good idea of what it takes to become a flight controller in space.
Over all, the game play is pretty straight forward and very easy to get the hang of.
Strategy and Features
The strategy of the game is just as simple as the controls. You have a red space station and a blue one on the screen. Entering the screen from all sides will be red and blue space ships. Your goal is to get each ship to dock safely to its matching colored space port. To do this, you swipe your finger along the screen to draw a flight path. As with any flight control, you need to make sure that you don’t direct your space ships into each other or other objects. The video below demonstrates this.
The game starts out incredibly easy and gradually increases in complexity as you play. Having to think about the colliding paths and plan ahead is critical to getting a good score, often involving re-thinking your ship’s path a couple times to avert disasters.
Conclusion
This was a fun game, but very simple. With limited goals and no enemies or weapons, it’s more of a test of coordination than it is a battle or puzzle game. At $0.99, it’s as cheap as it gets (other than free) and it does offer the ability to just play forever, unlike games with levels that get beaten. For a buck, it’s a good game that will remain unbeatable for as long as you play it, which is always good. Get your own copy and let me know how long it takes to beat my high score of 77.
Although the following is a sponsored review, as always I strive to provide an honest opinion of the product reviewed.
With a $1.99 price tag in the App Store, Sand Slides, a physics-wielding original game runs the risk of being overlooked in a sea of flashy games with thousands of downloads, but when you dig deeper, sometimes you find gems.
First Impressions
I have to come right out and admit that I judge a book by its cover, occasionally, and that’s true with software more than anything. When I first saw Sand Slides, I thought it had some potential, but the graphics didn’t draw me in. They weren’t bad, but I’ve been spoiled with some of the more popular games, I guess. At first glance, this looks like a simple game without a lot of depth, but looks can be deceiving. To be fair, I’m not sure how much you can dress up sand.
How To Play
This is where simple comes in. The basic premise of the game is to get the sand to flow in to the correct bins by color. Blue sand goes in the blue bin, yellow in the yellow, etc. Sometimes you get lucky and it can fall straight in, but usually, it’s up to you to create a slide by drawing a line. The slides help guide the sand to its proper destination.
At the start of the game, you get a kind of bank of 30,000 grains of sand and every grain that goes into the wrong colored bin deducts from your bank and every grain that you get into the proper bins adds to your score. Below is a video showing how the game play works.
It looks easier than it is to keep all your grains, though. In the harder modes, you can easily lose with one simple mistake.
Hard To Put Down
This game was surprisingly addictive. You could spend hours just trying to beat your own personal best score, and when you do, there are several other difficulty levels to try. This is also one of those games that generally only lasts a few minutes, opening the door to that “just one more game before bed” mentality. Losing track of time with Sand Slides was not hard to do.
Conclusions
At $1.99, Sand Slides doesn’t stand out as a deal that you can’t pass up. There are plenty of well-polished games in the App Store that I could easily spend money on, instead. That said, beauty is not just skin deep. The addictive nature and smooth play of this game are features even some of the best dressed apps forget about. If I’m playing this game months from now, it’s $1.99 well spent.
This is a Sponsored post written by me on behalf of OgilvyInteractive for SocialSpark. All opinions are 100% mine.
When the App store came out for the iPhone, developers started releasing ebook readers and apps to help you read news sites. When the iPad came out, the number and quality of apps increased and the door really began to open up to reading all your news on a device. In our fast-paced society, many people only get to spend a few minutes a day catching up on news and world events. Today, I got my hands on The Collection, a self-described monthly “appazine” for review.
What Makes The Collection Different
I really don’t know where to begin. Most news apps offer very flat content. They have more of it, but it’s often the same stuff you find on their website or elsewhere around the web. The Collection has opted for an alternate approach, nailing down a single subject and bringing the reader every detail they can think of in a very rich and organized presentation. In it’s premier issue about Prince William, The Collection provided audio and video interviews, 360 degree panoramic photographs, tons of information about Prince William, details about the Royal Wedding, and even a virtual Royal Wedding, walking you through the whole process, complete with 3D palace designs. Before downloading The Collection, I read a description claiming it to be a “uniquely compelling and entertaining user experience like you have not seen before”, and I simply can not find better words to describe it. The presentation is so rich, in fact, that it is only available for the iPad. Beyond all the useful information, there were interactive pieces like turning Prince William bald and unique tidbits like the section that focuses on his athleticism in near creepy detail. If The Collection were food, it would be like eating a meal for 100 people, but sadly only once a month, and the meal would include those fancy garnishes… everywhere. The attention to detail and sheer amount of content is what makes each issue worth the $4.99 price tag. The fact that they make it available in three languages is just over the top.
What’s Missing
It’s hard to say that anything is missing when it has so much, but I always want something more. In the case of The Collection, we have a magazine that covers only one topic per issue. With print magazines, you get a variety of topics centered around a theme like Computers or Science. Here, if you don’t care about Prince William and the Royal Wedding buzz, you just have to not buy this issue and wait until next month. The only other thing I found lacking was the app’s stability and attention to programming. When it worked, it was incredibly smooth to use, but it did crash a couple times and that was not something that I would expect from an app of this caliber. Also in the programming corner was the issue of the Facebook sharing option. When I opted to share it on Facebook, all it filled in was The Collection and the link to the app in the App Store. I felt like it should have filled in “Reading about Prince William in The Collection rich media iPad magazine” or something.
Conclusions
Despite a couple small crashes, I give The Collection five stars. It has truly brought digital publishing to a whole new level and other apps will now have to struggle to keep up. The $5 cost per issue is reasonable, and if they ever branch out into computing, I wouldn’t miss an issue. The writing style, photography, detail, balance and delivery all work together smoothly to bring an amazing new “appazine” into the spotlight. I can’t wait to see what’s next. Download the app and check out the issue preview and let me know what you think in the comments below.
