You may remember nearly a year ago when perpetually busy developer Crescent Moon Games announced a new title by the name of Ultra Kid: Mystery of the Mutants. It was a platforming game with a combination of 2.5D and fully 3D gameplay, set in a colorful and cartoonish 3D world with the cute space boy Ultra Kid as its main character. A couple of months later, late last June, we got a peek at the first teaser video for Ultra Kid, and it looked really promising.

About this same time, Crescent Moon had taken on the massive cosmetic overhaul of Aralon: Sword and Shadow [$9.99], and due to that project taking up most of their focus Ultra Kid: Mystery of the Mutants got put on the back burner. Unfortunately, we haven't heard much about him since then, despite the upcoming thread in our forums still receiving a fair bit of interest.

Then yesterday, Ultra Kid was resurrected, but not quite in the way you might think. Crescent Moon announced a brand new game, Ultra Kid Sprint, which is an endless running style game using the same graphics and set in the same universe as Ultra Kid: Mystery of the Mutants.

With the glut of endless running games already on the App Store, Ultra Kid Sprint hopes to differentiate itself a bit from the pack. First of all, it is comprised of fully 3D graphics and looks fantastic. It also utilizes a dynamic camera that will zoom in and out during play, and is offset slightly behind the character giving a pretty unique perspective to the game. Also, levels will feature multiple elevations and different paths to take, and are chock full of enemies to dispatch and power ups to collect. At one point, Ultra Kid will even be able to transform into a moon buggy to take out enemies.

You can get a quick taste of the gameplay in Ultra Kid Sprint in the following teaser trailer:

Ultra Kid Sprint should have approximately 6 endless levels to play, and Crescent Moon is hoping to have the game out sometime next month. As for Mystery of the Mutants, it's still in development and should see the light of day at some point, though no firm time frame for release has been committed to. In the meantime, Ultra Kid Sprint is looking pretty cool, and may just be an interesting new take on the endless runner formula. There's currently a discussion in our forums for Ultra Kid Sprint, and we'll have more from this title in the coming weeks.

Back in January at a Capcom preview event, I was able to get some hands-on time with Resident Evil Mercenaries VS [$2.99], a new multiplayer focused entry in the Resident Evil mobile series. During that preview, I could see that there was some potential fun that could be had battling it out with other players Resident Evil style, but was left with many reservations. The game's performance was pretty atrocious, and it was slated to only ship with 2 playable characters and 1 multiplayer map. Even with the potential of the actual gameplay, these shortcomings left me doubting how the game would turn out.

Yesterday, Resident Evil Mercenaries VS was released in the App Store, a little more than a month after originally planned. The good news is that the extra development time went to fixing some of the problems I saw in the preview version, tightening up the performance a great deal and adding a 3rd playable character and 2 additional multiplayer maps to the game. The bad news is that even those additions can't really overcome the poor presentation and mundane gameplay of the title.

Let's get one thing out of the way first: Resident Evil Mercenaries VS is not a pretty title. The character models look halfway decent, but the entire game has a grainy, low resolution look to it that is full of jagged edges and a muddy color palette. These graphics may have been impressive a few years ago, but they don't come close to cutting it in this day and age of iOS visuals.

Looking past the graphics, the game controls very well, utilizing the same scheme as the other Resident Evil iOS titles currently in the App Store. A control stick for movement and a set of context sensitive buttons for performing every action, along with a handy quick inventory for using items and switching weapons. The problem is that the Resident Evil style of gameplay just doesn't suit what should be a fast paced multiplayer battle. Having to stop moving in order to enter an aiming mode, and then line up your shot on an enemy is an exercise in frustration as the other players and AI-controlled enemies that inhabit each level lay waste to you.

On the good side of things, the game does run relatively lag free while online. There's even a single player component that lets you play the 4 player free-for-all or team battle modes with AI bots. The mode I had the most fun with was ironically not a versus mode at all, but rather the coin hunt game where you seek out and shoot 15 hidden coins in any of the 3 levels within a certain time limit, with your final score uploaded to a Game Center leaderboard. Even still, I don't think this is enough to warrant recommending the game when what should be the star feature � the online multiplayer � is so sub-par.

With enough practice, some people may warm up to the style of multiplayer battling in Resident Evil Mercenaries VS, but with so many far superior online multiplayer experiences on iOS already it doesn't seem worth the effort.