I used to love strategy RPGs but as age has warped my enthusiasm so has it stolen my patience for all the genre's clutter, meandering UI constructs, same-y production values, punishingly difficult fights, and oftentimes tedious leveling systems. The Game Bakers' Squids [99�] is a great change of pace. It's a kinetic, clean, charming, and particularly streamlined entry in the aging genre that has a ton of character, fun, and unique constructs to share. If it wasn't for the weird payment model, it'd be just about perfect.

Squids' setup goes a little something like this: in a troublesome period of squid life, you'll be tasked with stopping an evil black ooze that threatens to destroy civilization with its ooziness. To accomplish this great deed, you'll need to assemble a team of eclectic and multiple-armed things, all with different abilities and varying degrees of awesome, and take the fight to the core of the conflict.

There are four classes in total � the scout, the healer, the brawler-dude, and the gun-guy who can hit enemies at massive range. It's a pretty uninspired setup saved by Squids' inventive, grid-less, and active combat mechanic. Instead of moving space by space, you'll be flinging your squids into enemies and areas of interest in the environment that contain goodies. When you connect with a foe, you'll do damage according to a bottom-line. A stamina bar keeps you from endlessly flinging around the map to and fro and allows for turns. Enemies do the same.

Combat manages to remain consistently interesting throughout the experience, as the maps have a ton of surface area and even the more modest flings cover a lot of ground. Positioning your characters takes as much style and touch as it does thought, and you've got an entire map to work with, as opposed to constricted and designated kill zones featured in other similar games. You'll also need to contend with the lack of level borders. Squids is fond of holes as much as it is of its pinball-like physics engine. When you make contact with an enemy, there are physical repercussions as the two (or more) of you spin off. Knocking foes off the ledge-less levels is a valid play strategy, but same goes for the enemies.

All blended together, Squid's combat ends up being delightfully action-heavy, while still remaining a strategy game at its core. Individual fights never dance with monotony because you're always moving around the breadth of a map, frantically avoiding edges and attempting to position yourself for rounds that'll hopefully swing in your favor. The level design in particular is huge for the combat: Squids boasts a ton of colorful and intricate environments with not-so-subtle zones you can "capture" and control, as well as traps you can exploit.

Keeping true with conventions, invisible dice-rolls and statistics provide the groundwork for the damage dealt and taken. The currency for leveling up is the pearl, which you'll receive for every downed opponent and find scattered around in the game's world.

This currency rubs me the wrong way: it's monetized and the balance of the game often reflects that. At some point, you'll be aching for parity in conflicts, and the only way to get it in a reasonable way is to spend real-world coin on the fake-world currency. You'll also be asked to buy the things you find in levels, including new party members, with Pearls as well, which ratchets up the need to always have more. It's hard to agree with this kind of approach considering that the game asks for money from the get-go and then doesn't give you some sort of exclusion from the profiteering systems in the process.

While Squids might suffer for its off-kilter payment model, it doesn't make any sacrifices on the visual front. It's a delicious, warmly crafted game that has an indescribable charm and whimsy that springs from its painterly look. It's gorgeous, and all of its constituent parts, including the animations, the cutesy writing, and the sound production, support its style and tone spectacularly well. It's an impressive feat.

The strategy RPG is, like, my arch-nemesis. I want them until I actually play them and start remembering why I dislike them while wading through their overbearing setups. Squids is remarkable in that it cooly throws out a lot of the garbage I associate with the genre and turns it on its head with a kinetic combat mechanic that keeps you in control without sacrificing any strategy. If it wasn't for a wonky layer of in-app currency, I'd be screaming about its greatness. Instead, I can only tell that it's definitely a good game with a fresh approach, but it's a little rough around the RPG edges. I think you'll like it, though, model be darned.

Remember WAAYYYYYY back, oh I don't know, like, 9 hours ago when we told you that the Unreal Engine powered first-person shooter Warm Gun was hitting the New Zealand App Store and slowly worming its way throughout the world? Well, those sentiments have just a bit more meaning now for those of us in the good ol' US of A as Warm Gun [$4.99] and its free spinoff Carnival of Bullets [Free] are now available in our little neck of the woods.

In fact, the release has hit a few bumps in the road, as a representative from the game's developer Emotional Robots has explained in our forums that an old version of Warm Gun was accidentally loaded up into iTunes Connect and for a good chunk of its international release customers had been unknowingly buying this incomplete early version. Emotional Robots took swift action and have replaced that pre-release build with the proper one, so things should be all good with downloading the correct game going forward. If you happen to be one of those who downloaded the improper version earlier, you might benefit from deleting the game entirely and re-downloading the new version which is up in the App Store right now.

In case you've missed it before, here's the trailer for Warm Gun followed by the trailer for the free Carnival of Bullets single player demo:

As we've said previously, we'll be hopping online in the next few days to dig into the multiplayer-centric gameplay of Warm Gun and will bring you a full review of our findings soon. The reaction to the game in our forums has been decidedly mixed. Some players are having a blast, with the game performing well technically and matches online being mostly lag free. A larger group of players are feeling the opposite of that. Many are complaining of performance issues on their devices, with laggy framerates plaguing both online and offline matches. These issues could be due to Emotional Robots having to make some pretty extensive last minute changes to the game right before release, and they have already committed to addressing all feedback and updating the game frequently to make sure it can be the best that it can be.

While the negative issues are troublesome, they also aren't completely unheard of when dealing with such a technically intensive game like Warm Gun. However, I feel confident in Emotional Robots' pledge to give the game plenty of tender lovin' in the coming weeks. If you find yourself intrigued by Warm Gun but aren't sure how your particular device will handle the load, your best bet is to check out the free Carnival of Bullets to gauge performance.

On this week's bonus episode of The TouchArcade Show, The Bearded One joins me in a delightful conversation with Simutronics' David Whatley and Nathan Lutz. At the top of the show, we dig into the past of the St. Louis-based studio and look forward as it embraces iOS and expands its inaugural App Store game, Tiny Heroes [$1.99]. We also have a hearty discussion about free-to-play models before we dig into a very special TouchArcade-themed unlock in Tiny Heroes.

This was a really, really fun interview and we think you guys will like it. If you'd like to listen, go ahead via direct download or in-browser streaming below. If you're feeling froggy, go ahead and subscribe to us on iTunes and the Zune Marketplace.

�

iTunes Link: The TouchArcade Show
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Direct Link: TouchArcadeShow-Bonus-020.mp3, 25MB

We'll be back in your earholes this Friday for another regular episode of the show. Also, be prepared for another bonus next week on top of yet another regular show. Content! Oh! And hey, send us your e-mails: podcast@toucharcade.com.

Sunside Games caught us dead bang this morning with the reveal of some rather impressive visual tech in its upcoming action-adventure game, Crow. In a nutshell, Crow is a guided flight combat game where you, as a crow, collect orbs, power-ups, and take out enemies and bosses in some pretty crazy good-looking environments. In an e-mail exchanged with a Sunside representative, it was lightly compared to Nights into Dreams, if you needed an analog.

Outside of that core experience, there's a second mode that'll let you mosey around an open world at your leisure, checking out all the sights Sunside has made in the game's impressive platform, Radiance.

Purely judging from the press release we got this morning, it seems like Sunside is pretty high on this new-fangled tech. Crow will deliver "unsurpassed visuals and immersions in a fully 3D world, which has never before been experienced in mobile gaming," the studio wrote. Big words!

We'll definitely be keeping our eyes on Crow as it hurdles towards release this winter. We expect to get some hands-on time in the coming weeks, and we'll definitely report back to you whenever we can. Additional screenshots of the game are available on its web site.

On the heels of an epic price-slashing maneuver that saw Pocket Academy and its latest game Grand Prix Story go for a paltry $1.99, the simulation gurus at Kairosoft have murdered the original asking price of Mega Mall Story [$1.99 / Lite] and Hot Springs Story [$1.99 / Lite]. Both titles are $1.99 for a "limited time." They usually sit at $3.99, so you'll save a couple of bones if you decide to take the plunge.

And plunge you should, as both of these titles are totally worth the reduced asking price. Earlier this summer, I called Mega Mall Story the most "complete simulation" from the studio yet. Hot Springs Story, though it�requires some effort to push beyond the cultural barrier,�is solid, too.

As a side-note, it appears as if we'll be missing out on a new game from Kairosoft this month. Last month, we speculated that it's SimCity-like title, Edo Town, would make it out of the door worldwide in early October. It's still a possibility, but we're thinking that these sales are an indication that a new game isn't coming.

Spilt Milk Studios' Hard Lines [Free], a fun line-racing puzzle game with a touch of�Snake thrown in for good measure, has received a big ol' new update. Starting now, the game boasts four additional power-ups on top of the pre-existing assortment, two new game modes, a brand-spankingly fresh in-game currency, and an in-game shop to boot. Oh! It's also free at the moment, though that'll probably change in the next few hours.

As is the norm nowadays with huge updates, a lot of the new additions speak to a pricing model change for Hard Lines as whole. The in-game currency, "Hard Cash," can be purchased straight-up with IAP or found in the game as pick-ups. With it, you can upgrade the new power-ups for use in whatever, including presumably the game's two new modes: Daily Challenge and Lionel's Hard Cash. The latter mode is an optional paid mode that offers a lot of Hard Cash in return for your investment. The full update notes, which mention several smaller improvements, can be seen here.

We loved Hard Lines and will continue to post this update. If you still haven't seen it, we'd suggest just grabbing it now while it's silly cheap. Our glowing review, however, is located here if you want some reading material before going in.

Here's a wild one: Zynga is apparently in talks to do a FarmVille [Free]�movie. Speaking with IGN the other day about an actual video game, Toy Story writers Alec Sokolow and Joel Cohen teased that they're in discussions with the mega-publisher to pen the possible flick.These chats seem insanely early, as the duo couldn't even name-drop FarmVille and Zynga, according to IGN, is refusing comment on the matter.

"So, yes, we will continue writing movies. We are also working on several new and very exciting opportunities. We're in conversations with Zynga to do something with one of their brands. Can't really say too much on that front yet, but 'Old MacDonald' didn't have a factory, if you get our drift," they said.

If this seems really stupid to you, we regretfully remind you that movies based on incredibly shallow games like, say, �Resident Evil and BloodRayne, have been made and actually shown in theaters. Of course, there's been plenty of video-game-to-movie adaptations that haven't panned out over the years, so it's not like a FarmVille movie is a lock. It's definitely not.

[Via IGN]

Well, by "TouchArcade" I mean "me," but still, I'm representing the rest of the crew the best I can on the mean streets of Austin, TX attending GDC Online. I'll be dropping into sessions, meeting up with developers, and making sure to eat my fair share of Texas-style barbecue.

If you're also attending, or are local to the Austin area and have anything new, cool, or exciting to show me, or if you just want to come say "Hi!" solve this captcha and shoot me an email. Make sure you put "GDC" in the subject somewhere for the sake of my email filters. Alternatively, you can hit me up via Google Talk at the same address, or send me an IM via AIM at ioburn. Both IM protocols forward to my phone, so I should respond fairly quickly.

I'm looking forward to meeting up with everyone this week!

The TouchArcade hive mind has been anxiously anticipating Emotional Robots' Warm Gun since early this year when it was first announced. Since then, we've seen a number of different videos and screenshots which have only served to get us all even more excited about the game. It's actually launching in two different versions, the online-centric Warm Gun [$4.99] which is currently live on the New Zealand App Store, and Warm Gun: Carnival of Bullets, which focuses on single player. We've yet to spot Carnival of Bullets for sale in international App Stores, but something tells me that as soon as someone does, a link will get dropped in the Warm Gun forum thread.

Just for fun, here's the trailer again:

We'll be working up a review for Warm Gun, but since it's an online game, for the full experience we're going to have to wait for the game's community to pick up some steam… So, keep an eye out for that in the next couple of days. In the meantime, if you're excited for Warm Gun, swing by our forums where people will likely be offering up their first impressions as the game slowly is released across international App Stores. Like most New Zealand releases, Warm Gun should be available in the US App Store at 11:00 PM Eastern.

Also, as soon as we spot a link for Warm Gun: Carnival of Bullets, we'll update this post with it.

Anthill: Tactical Trail Defense [$1.99] from Image & Form is a clever and innovative game which let's you control an ant colony, which is being attacked by various predatory insects. It's a real-time strategy game about insect warfare. You act like a general, overlooking a creepy-crawly battlefield and dictating the strategy for the colony's survival by gathering food, engaging in combat, and collecting artifacts.

You start by drawing a straight or curved line with your finger, which originates from your ant-hill.� This represents a pheromone trail for ants to follow. Once you've finished drawing a line, you specify if the new route will be used by workers, soldiers or spitter ants.

The lines are all color coded, with worker routes in blue, soldiers in yellow and spitters in pink.� Once you've drawn a line, any ants of that type will emerge from the anthill to patrol along it. There's no limit to how many separate lines you can draw of each color, but if you draw too many your ant forces will be spread pretty thin.

Each type of ant has a different specialist role. Soldier ants attack and kill predators, leaving their carcasses lying on the ground. Worker ants are responsible for collecting food and will work as a team to carry any large insect pieces (or artifacts) back to the ant-hill, because you eat what you kill. The more worker ants deployed, the faster the food is collected, but if there's enemies around, the workers run away.�Spitter ants love to inhabit burrows in the ground and spit at nearby enemies. They're particularly good at taking out any airborne predators. But if you're too slow, other insects may beat you to the burrows and use this vantage point to spit on you.

Lastly, the bomber ants don't require paths to be drawn, as they can fly to any part of the screen where you tap, which is handy for attacking any approaching big bugs. You need to tap in front of moving enemies, as it takes a while for the bomber ants to fly to the target zone. After each aerial attack, they return to the ant-hill before you can re-deploy them. To improve your chance of success, you can tap the screen several times, to dispatch a whole swarm of bomber ants and target multiple enemies. You can even upgrade the bomber ants so they carpet bomb an entire area.

The trails aren't permanent, as you can hold your finger on any trail briefly until a delete button appears. This adds to the strategic gameplay, as you can constantly redirect or concentrate your six-legged solders. It would be nice if you could extend or reshape existing trails on the fly, but that's not possible, forcing you to delete and redraw. My strategy was to have worker ants travel alongside the soldiers to gather the spoils, with spitters providing flanking cover. But the great thing about this game is that there's no right answer, the military strategy is up to you.

The next step is to choose how many ants of each type you want to spawn. There's a spawn button for each of the four different ant types, but you can only create new ants if you've gathered enough food. So, while you're attacking and defending the anthill, you also need to be collecting food and deciding how many of each ant-type to spawn.

Each type of ant has three extra strengths to unlock. Worker ants can gain speed, backbone, or courage; while soldiers can be upgraded with brutality, toughness and grenades. Each upgrade costs stars, which are gained based on your level scores, or optionally purchased via IAP (which is not necessary). If you missed any stars, you can return for them later, after you've upgraded to make it easier.

Anthill delivers three territories (worlds) to unlock and complete, with over twenty levels in total. Each level is allocated a different star value. To complete a level and collect those stars, you simply need to keep your anthill intact through each wave of insect attack. A progress bar is displayed for each attack wave, although the behavior of most enemies is random, so each of the levels will vary if repeated.

While this game is enjoyable, there's two areas for possible improvement. Firstly, the difficulty levels are not too hard, with users reporting they're often gaining all stars for a level within a couple of attempts. This suggests that different difficulty levels would benefit players wanting more of a challenge.

Secondly, while the graphics look good, some of the enemies are the same color as your own ants, making them hard to differentiate once the screen is buzzing with insects. The enemies have small red health bars, but these are not always immediately obvious. Sometimes you can hear that you're being attacked, but can't immediately tell where the attack is occurring. It would be better if the enemies were more obviously differentiated.

Anthill: Tactical Trail Defense is a creative, entertaining, and nice looking game which requires strategic decision making, but still has an arcade feel to it. It's almost like playing an insect-based tower defense game, where the tower is your anthill, so it's appropriate that the title includes the words "Trail Defense". If the game gets enough support, the developers plan to release an infinite (timeless) mode in the future. As it stands now, Anthill is still a unique strategy game with entertaining gameplay and a nice amount of content to play through.

Another physics-based puzzler with cute graphics and happy music in the App store, you say? NO WAY! Yes way, if you can wrap your mind around the uniqueness of that concept, then you just might get into Roll in the Hole [99�/UHD].

You will play the roll of PoPo, a happy-go-lucky fat panda who hoards ice cream. When some jerk gorilla comes along and decides to take his sweets stash, he gets mad (although he doesn't show it) and goes on an adventure to recollect all his lost desserts. For some reason, precision physics also play a role there, even though that makes zero sense in a story context. But I don't play iOS games for the mind-blowing realism, and I'm guessing you don't either.

Each level is fairly simple: Just a few obstacles and a hole at the end that leads to the next level. At first platforms will be the only thing to navigate, but as you progress you will also use balloons for bouncing and other things. There are ice cream bars in each level to collect too, and the more of them you snag, the higher your score will be. The challenge comes in getting them all and not falling off a ledge, which is a lot harder than it sounds.

Control is an issue with Roll in the Hole, although at first it seems as if it's working just fine. The actual interface couldn't be simpler � before play begins, you'll be shown a dotted line which splits the screen between left and right. The only way you'll control your rotund friend is to tap the left and right sides of the screen. Even though I knew this, I found myself turning the phone the first few levels, just like I used to do back in the days of NES where I believed jerking the controller to the right or left would make Mario jump that much further. Some things never change, I guess.

In all honestly, I think turning the phone would have felt more natural than the actual mechanic the game uses. In early levels, it works fine, but when you need precision, it feels soft, as if you need more responsiveness than the game has to give you. When you need to�maneuver�through tiny platforms and then bounce on a balloon to get height to get to the goal, you really need to be able to control your character perfectly. I'd say that getting frustrated by level 12 is a bad sign for the majority of the casual audience, as they tend to want to have fun rather than struggle to get a game to control in a way that it cannot.

The good news is, if you do get too annoyed with one level to continue, the game won't allow you to stay stuck. You can choose to skip a level in the menu and come back to it later, which really will be a blessing in disguise if you feel like throwing the phone on the floor and stomping on it (and there were times when that happened to me.)

Roll in the Hole boasts 72 levels total and also has connectivity to Crystal, Facebook and Twitter, making it pretty easy to share your score with others if you like. It has some strong points when it comes to overall presentation and the quick play (you can finish a level in under 10 seconds), but I really missed the ability to tilt my phone to help control PoPo. It just felt like a feature that was missing, and while the game is good without it, it could have been great with it.

I have such a love-hate relationship with High Flyer Death Defyer [$4.99 / HD]. On one hand, I love the visually striking graphics which I think complement the sky-diving gameplay beautifully. On the other hand, the poorly done tutorial and lackluster controls hold back High Flyer Death Defyer from being even an above average addition to the genre. Whether you actually decide to pick up this skydiver is going to depend on how much you love graphics over, well, everything else.

At its core, High Flyer Death Defyer is a sky/cave diver with a heavy dose of exploration and collection quests thrown into the mix. You play as Arreon, a member of the Death Defyers: a group of skydiving explorers charged with discovering new islands (and treasure) in a post-apocalyptic world in which the only human cities reside in the sky. �At the onset, High Flyer's story is a bit convoluted and confusing, but as you continue playing through the story, you'll get a better glimpse of what the heck is going on through the game's comic book style cutscenes.

The first thing you'll notice while playing High Flyer Death Defyer is its well-done cell-shaded visuals. The game's graphic engine does an excellent job conveying the sense of adventure and discovery that is prevalent throughout most of your play. Even more impressive is its relatively stable and high framerate, a requirement for games that need to convey that sense of free-falling speed. Granted, High Flyer requires either an iPhone 4 or an iPad in order to enjoy the game and all its visual glory. �Strangely, even though the iPhone version is classified as a universal app, a lot of elements will appear blurry unless you buy the separate 'HD' version that only works on the iPad.

Unfortunately, once you get past High Flyer Death Defyer's eye-candy, you're left with a game with a messy tutorial and dreary controls. The tutorial is way too long, doesn't do a good job of explaining all the gameplay elements, and some tutorial levels are even harder to pass than the post-tutorial levels. In fact, the only saving grace is that you can skip most of the tutorial and head straight to the story, but folks that don't figure this out (the game does not really show you how to quit the tutorial beforehand), are in for a frustrating initial experience.

You may be able to skip the tutorial, but you can't avoid High Flyer's control issues. The game comes bundled with two different control schemes: a tilt-based option that simply does not offer the amount of precision, accuracy and speed needed to do well in High Flyer, and a (default) virtual joystick that lacks the responsiveness and customization necessary in order to use it well. The joystick is a better control option than the tilt controls, but it still leaves much to be desired.

These issues are a shame too, because High Flyer Death Defyer's story mode is actually well-done. I particularly liked the fact that the game features seamless continuity between stages without any loading screens. Each level has you jumping from island to island, and once you land you get your score, the game saves, and then you get immediate control of your character right where you left off. It's certainly something that's not really seen in these types of games. There's also a lot of content to play through, and plenty of treasures and collectibles to seek out. It's just too bad that the controls will likely prevent you from ever obtaining the harder items.

High Flyer Death Defyer had the makings of an excellent game, particularly with its nice graphic style, story and core gameplay. Unfortunately, these features don't mean much when the controls are this frustrating. If Game Mechanic Studios were to address these issues in a future update (and I believe that they can certainly be fixed via an update), then High Flyer might be a game worth checking out. However, in its current state (and current price), I really can't recommend High Flyer Death Defyer.