Early last month we took a look at Bug Heroes [$1.99], a dual stick shooter of sorts that borrows gameplay elements from many different genres. In the game, you play as one of three bugs, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. You must switch between them to protect your pile of food, and dish out punishment to the invaders looking to steal it. We went in to detail in our review:

The bulk of Bug Heroes takes place in the Adventure mode. Here you battle in 4 different environments using a combination of three different characters as you defend a stockpile of food from an onslaught of hungry insect enemies. Money is collected as you defeat enemies which can then be used on various types of upgrades. You can add several different types of turrets to your food pile to protect it while you are away, or you can buy better weaponry to increase the offense of each character. Gameplay involves exploring each environment to collect additional food to add to your stockpile while simultaneously fending off enemies. The game ends when all three characters die or your entire food reserve is depleted. …Read More

The 1.1 update landed mere moments ago which adds new abilities, makes a whole bunch of balance changes, a ton of bug fixes, and… adds universal compatibility as well as Game Center.

Bug Heroes was an absolutely fantastic game in its original 1.0 release, and now that it's received this hefty update, you're really running out of excuses to not give this game a try. The way it blends dual stick shooter, castle defense, and RPG elements is really clever, and I still stand by what we said in our review: Bug Heroes makes it very difficult to go back to playing a standard dual stick shooter.

It's really not an every day occurrence that a puzzle game piques my interest, and while I've yet to get my hands on RoboSockets, I really can't wait to try it. According to the preview material, instead of being a simple match three, RoboSockets also mixes in gameplay from both Tetris and pipe games. Instead of typical tiles, you're working with robots, and each robots needs to connect to a chain of five or more to be cleared. Doing so gives you energy, which plays in to the story of the game where you're attempting to revive the robot civilzation.

Check out the trailer:

RoboSockets is due for release on February 22nd for 99�. For more details on the game, take a look at the game's thread in our forums.

This has been a crazy week at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. I saw a ton of different kinds of mobile phones, tablets, and other devices running all sorts of non-iOS apps and operating systems. Overall, it was really interesting checking out what the competition has to offer. Unfortunately, it was rather difficult to truly gauge the relative gaming performance of these new phones and tablets, as curiously enough, most were just loaded with a smattering of ports of last year's Gameloft games (or older, in the case of Shrek Kart) and Angry Birds. When asked, despite superior hardware, most developers still seemed reluctant to invest too much time or energy in to building games for these new devices, really making me wonder how much longer this "wait and see" approach will persist.

Anyway, the reason I was even in attendance at Mobile World Congress in the first place was to participate as a judge in the International Mobile Gaming Awards. The whole process was incredibly elaborate, with everyone involved taking the whole thing very seriously. It was great deliberating games with an international pool of judges, and seeing what people from particular regions tended to prefer. I hope to play a bigger role in the event next year as well, and hopefully can get some more developers to submit their games for judging than we saw this year.

Oddly enough, even though all mobile platforms were allowed entry, iOS games swept the awards:

Best Casual Game: Plants vs. Zombies, $2.99 � [Review / Forum Thread]
Best Real World Game: AR Invaders, 99� � [Forum Thread]
Best Sports Game: Snowboard Hero, Free � [Forum Thread]
Excellence in Design: Infinity Blade, $5.99 � [Review / Forum Thread]
Excellence in Game Play: Beyond Ynth, $1.99 � [Review / Forum Thread]
Most innovative Game: Papa Sangre, $6.99 � [Review / Forum Thread]
People's Choice Award: Perfect Cell, $4.99 � [Review / Forum Thread]
Operator's Choice Award: Snowboard Hero, Free � [Forum Thread]
Grand Prix / Game of the Year: Beyond Ynth, $1.99 � [Review / Forum Thread]

I'll try to raise more awareness to the IMGA when entries for 2012 are starting to be accepted as after I posted about the nominees being announced, I got confused instant messages from quite a few developers who weren't even aware they could enter. Regardless, some great games won, and hopefully we can get some even better games submitted next year.

If you weren't paying attention to iOS gaming last Summer, then you may have missed a total gem called Pix'n Love Rush [99�]. The best way to describe Pix'n Love Rush is to say that it's the platforming genre's answer to WarioWare. The goal is to run, jump, and shoot your way through various bite-sized platforming sections that appear quickly one after the other. As you scored well and built up your multiplier, the "skin" of the game would change to one of 7 different retro-gaming themes.

The action was frantic and fun in Pix'n Love Rush, and we really enjoyed the game in our review from last June. We also recommended it as a game to get in our 2010 Buyer's Guide, I chose it as one of my personal favorites of 2010, and Apple even recognized it as one of "The Best Games You've Never Played".

So while pretty much everyone had been enjoying the heck out of Pix'n Love Rush, it never really got any of the updates that had been talked about by the developers in our forums. It was updated last September with Game Center achievements and leaderboards, and a native iPad version called Pix'n Love Rush DX [$1.99] was released in December that included a few additional features, but none of the promised additional modes were ever added to the timed 5 minute and endless modes in the game.

Now, more than 8 months after the initial release, the iPhone version of Pix'n Love Rush is finally getting some update love. The big new addition in this latest update is an endless runner type of game called Cursed Rush. Here you automatically move to the right as you jump from platform to platform as they disappear from under your feet. There are five difficulty levels in this new mode, each with their own set layout of platforms. Scoring is based on the percentage of the level that you complete, so in this way it doesn't really seem "endless" though I'm not totally sure what happens when you reach 100%.

Besides the Cursed Rush mode which is proving to be a ton of fun, there are a number of other welcome additions in this update. The menus have been redesigned and are more streamlined, and the long-awaited ability to flip the screen has finally been added. Also the controls feel much tighter, and you can now pause the game and move the virtual buttons around to better suit you, which is fantastic as I've always felt the jump and shoot buttons were too far apart. Finally, and best of all, there are two blank options on the mode selection screen that hint at additional modes to come soon (and one "not so soon"), so I'm really excited to see what's in store next for Pix'n Love Rush.

If you already own the game then hurry to your iTunes and grab this latest update. If you've never heard of Pix'n Love Rush, it comes highly recommended if you like platforming games, high scoring challenges, or awesome retro graphics.

Last month at Macworld 2011 I spent some time playing with XMG Studio's latest game Cows vs Aliens [99�], and yesterday it became available for download in the App Store. Cows vs Aliens is a super casual high scoring game that uses a gameplay mechanic that struck me as especially unique. I enjoyed my ten minutes or so of playing Cows vs Aliens at Macworld, but now that I have the full game in my hands I'm liking it even more and finding it especially hard to put down.

In Cows vs Aliens, waves of cows will appear from the bottom of the screen and it's your job to herd them into the barn opening located at the top of the screen. Touching the screen creates a circular barrier of sorts, and you'll use these to push the cows along in the right direction. Making this task more difficult are aliens that begin to appear in saucers along with the cows at the bottom of the screen. You'll need to weed these aliens out from the pack of cows and push them off the sides of the screen into oblivion, and if even one makes it into your barn then it's game over.

Those are the basics, but there are additional aspects in Cows vs Aliens that add depth and strategy to the gameplay. Each wave requires you to herd a certain amount of cows into the barn all whilst a clock is ticking away. The clock resets each time you complete a wave, but the number of cows required increases with each wave and the timer can easily tick away if you're not paying attention. There are also harder types of aliens that will begin to appear as you progress. The initial aliens are pretty slow and easy to shove off the side, but later aliens are quicker and more aggressive, and aren't so willing to be pushed around.

The real hook in Cows vs Aliens is the scoring system. Cows come in several varieties, and are worth between 10 and 50 points each when wrangled into the barn. Herding a group of cows into the barn at the same time adds a multiplier to the scoring that increases with each successive cow captured. Being patient and letting a huge group of cows amass before herding them inside can earn you some insane scores, but it also gets decidedly more difficult to weed out the aliens when they're in the middle of a big bunch of cows. Pushing cows off the sides while trying to dispatch aliens won't count against you, but it does deplete the amount of cows you can use to score with.

The controls in the game just feel good, and there's something very fun about pushing around a herd of cows. The natural inclination is to use two thumbs to push cows from the outer edges towards the middle of the screen, but Cows vs Aliens utilizes multitouch which can prove very beneficial if used wisely. You can create up to 5 points of contact on the iPhone, and up to 11 on the iPad. While I generally stick to the two thumbs approach it can be really helpful to stick an extra finger or two onto the screen when a pesky alien is trying to sneak into my barn. This can result in what resembles a game of finger Twister as things get increasingly more hectic. It's definitely a lot of fun.

If I had to come up with one negative about Cows vs Aliens, it would be that it's really just a one-trick pony. There's only the one mode with wave after wave of cows where the goal is to get a high score. Still, it doesn't make it any less fun and I've been hooked on trying to rise up the ranks on the Game Center leaderboards. Some of the best high scoring games around, like Doodle Jump [99�] or Canabalt [$2.99], rely on a single type of gameplay and I think that Cows vs Aliens has found a similar winning formula.�The game is also really cute, with colorful Retina Display graphics and a catchy tune. Coupled with the interesting control mechanic and compelling scoring system, Cows vs Aliens has totally reeled me in.

You can head over to our forums for a discussion about the game and further impressions, and if you've got an extra dollar floating around and enjoy high score-based survival games then I'd suggest hoofing it on over to the App Store and checking out Cows vs Aliens.

Back in early December, Gameloft revealed the latest entry in their series of highly inspired takes on established franchises called Starfront: Collision, a real-time strategy game that takes more than a few cues from Blizzard's insanely popular Starcraft series. After hitting a slight delay from its intended release date last week, Starfront: Collision [Free] is now live in the App Store. Like Gameloft's previous release Sacred Odyssey [Free/HD], Starfront can initially be downloaded for free and provides a short taste of the game, with a $6.99 IAP to unlock the full version.

Typical of many RTS games, Starfront features 3 playable races who are all in a battle over the rare resource Xenodium that is found on the planet of Sinistral. There is the human race known as the Consortium, a hostile alien race called Myriad, and a sentient robot race called the Wardens. The full version of Starfront features a 20 level campaign that is split into 3 sections which has you playing as a different race during each one.

Additionally there is a skirmish mode with 7 maps to play on and a multiplayer mode that features both local and online play for up to 4 people. Unfortunately, since the game has only been out for a few hours I haven't been able to find an online match to test it out. Hopefully in the coming days the servers will fill up as more people buy the game. While a decent sized campaign and a skirmish mode are nice features on the single player front, strong multiplayer is what will really give Starfront longevity.

One of the biggest issues with RTS games on the iPhone is being able to have controls and UI that work on such a small screen. I've only spent limited time with Starfront, but it seems that they've nailed it pretty well on this front. Navigating the terrain and setting up any of the 8 different structures is a snap. There are 10 different unit types for each race, and for the most part they are easy to control. It can be a bit difficult to select certain units because they appear so tiny on the screen, but there are some nice advanced features like assigning units to groups for quick selection or creating a selection box by pinching the screen with two fingers. With a bit of practice and some forethought, navigating and commanding your army isn't a problem.

A game like Starfront is really hard to judge off of brief impressions, since it will take many hours of play to determine how balanced each race is and stress test the online multiplayer servers. That said, my first impressions of Starfront are really good. We'll definitely put the game through its paces in the coming days, but seeing as it's free to download initially I can definitely recommend checking it out. Just be aware that it's a 680mb download and requires a 3rd generation device or above.

The free version of Starfront gives you access to 4 tutorial levels that do a wonderful job at explaining how to play, and the first mission of the campaign. A $6.99 in-app purchase will then unlock the remaining 19 campaign levels, skirmish mode, and multiplayer.�There are a ton more impressions rolling into our forums which have been largely positive, and there is a dedicated thread to finding online opponents and discussing strategies. I like what I've seen of Starfront so far, and it's worth trying out the free version if you're a fan of real-time strategy games.