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Sine Requie: Snake Eyes combines alternate history mystery with horror RPG
It’s 1954 and Tuscany is in the grip of an undead apocalypse. As Inquisitor Rossano Mazzoni, your job in the upcoming RPG Sine Requie: Snake Eyes is to track down a dangerous cult, as you put together an investigation team and battle zombies. Set in an alternate 1950s, a decade after the dead began to rise during World War 2, Snake Eyes challenges you to explore the Italian countryside and towns through a 3D map, managing hunger, exhaustio, and sanity and talking with individuals in interactive fiction sections. Combat encounters and random events are drawn from a tarot deck of scenarios; while events might be handled through choices and more decisions, fighting is turn-ba…
iOSAsphalt 9: Legends soft-launches its gorgeous arcade racing on the Philippines app store
The Asphalt series has been bringing impressive arcade racing to mobile for over a decade and its latest, and ninth, game Legends looks like it might be the fastest and prettiest entry yet. While the worldwide release is still in the works, the game is currently available through a soft launch in the Philippines. Featuring over fifty cars to unlock, Legends once again unleashed you on twisting tracks in hectic Burnout-inspired races, complete with huge jumps and crashing rival racers. Tracks take you from the tornado-threatened roads of the Midwest to the narrow mountain passes of the Himalayas, with each successful finish letting you upgrade and customize your favorite vehicle…
Plan planet-wide conflicts in sci-fi real-time strategy game Element
Real time strategy games often revolve flat battlefields, managing bases and your army along frontlines. Element takes that idea and gives it a global twist, challenging you to wage war on land, sea, and space. Across low-poly planets, Element places you in the role of a commander in a futuristic conflict. The solar system is dying and each planet is another foothold to gather resources in your race for interstellar expansion. As you expand your network of mines and capture useful territory on planet surfaces, your options grow, letting you unleash supply drones and low-orbit artillery strikes that streak around the planet towards targets. Improve your tech enough and you can even harvest…
MU Origin’s latest update shakes up the way you’ll play the game
The times they are a-changin’ for MU Origin, but in the best way possible. Webzen’s popular MMO is getting a huge new update introducing a new character class, gameplay features, competitive events, and much, much more. We’re here to lay it all out for you. MU Origin’s latest update adds a new class. Magic users in particular will be quite pleased with the Summoner class, which allows you to summon the Valkyrie to do your bidding in battle. This powerful, magic-based character can be unlocked with a character over 3 Rebirth Level 1. If you don’t fit the criteria, you can always buy yourself a Scroll of Dark Souls in the shop to create your Summoner. Customize…
A Steel Media round-up for the week of February 19th
Here’s another weekly round-up of news, previews, and features from Pocket Gamer, 148Apps, and the rest of our sister sites. On our Youtube page, James Gilmour provides his impressions of Alto’s Odyssey, praising its mesmerizing sense of place and aesthetic, the addicting flow of its mechanics, and the engaging evolution of the first game’s design. For Pocket Gamer, Jon Mundy provides a list of worthy titles for the player looking for Metal Gear Solid-style gameplay on the go, if the recent Metal Gear Survive isn’t sating that niche. The long range assassinations of Hitman: Sniper, the camera-hacking sleuthing of Republique, and several others make…
Samurai tactically clash in turn-based strategy game Warbands: Bushido, now available on Android
After first releasing on iOS last year, the board game aesthetic and turn-based battles of Warbands: Bushido have now come to Android. If you’re looking for challenging strategy and a unique presentation, this is one strategy game to certainly check out. 16th century Japan is an era rife in conflict, and it’s within this war of samurai, ninja, mercenaries, and other factions that Warbands sets its gameplay. Each themed scenario utilized a blend of dice rolls, positioning on hex-based maps, and deck buildings to craft a wide array of tactics, letting you place detailed figurines to initiate battle among forest clearings, villages, and other locations. Swords clang, d…
Test your trap-dodging reflexes in hectic arcade runner Glitch Dash, out for iOS and Android
High scores and dangerous gauntlets await in Glitch Dash, the latest entry to The well-trodden genre of extra-challenging arcade games. From Temple Run to the frenetic Super Hexagon, it’s a genre quite at home on mobile and Glitch Dash brings a striking aesthetic and twisting stages to the table. Each stage in Glitch Dash forms before your sprinting perspective, revealing lanes of barriers, spikes, lasers, and other traps to evade. Quick reactions will see you deftly side-stepping, leaping over, or sliding under walls, while massive hammers rhythmically smash down upon your path and swinging blades force you to time your lane switching. To add to the hectic nature of your run, speci…
Hidden Gem of the Week: Dark Echo
Many horror games rely on jump scares and creepy atmosphere, but the stealth/horror/puzzle hybrid Dark Echo takes a different approach, instead conjuring horror from the unknown and unseen, through minimalist visuals and immersive audio. While other mobile games like Papa Sangre and The Nightjar have delivered gameplay through sound, Dark Echo melds visuals with sound; every level starts out with a black screen, your white footprints the only color amid the surrounding dark. Move forward and lines emanate in all directions, the sound of your footsteps visualized, bouncing off the walls and revealing the environment. Without sound, you are blind. Your goal is simply to find the exit. Howev…
Dissembler offers a colorful twist on the matching puzzler, available on iOS
Ian MacLarty’s past games like Boson X and Black Hole Joyrider have all taken uniquely different angles on the runner genre, whether it’s the former‘s rotating gauntlets or Joyrider’s limited-fuel races. His newest iOS title, Dissembler, shifts from hectic arcade action to colorful minimalist puzzles, but maintains the trend of taking a different approach with its genre. At its core, Dissembler is a matching puzzler, challenging you to shift tiles and match colors. But rather than new tiles appearing or the goal of a high score, Dissembler presens you with over a hundred single-screen collages and asks you to break down the design tile-by-tile, until none remain. T…
Cute platformer Reed makes the jump from Android to iOS on March 8th
After releasing last year on Android, Reed is bringing its cat-like character and challenging platforming to the App Store next month. As an agile creation of a powerful supercomputer, your running, jumping, and trap dodging in Reed is your attempt to save your creator and the world by collecting its scattered cubes. Giving you only a double jump, Reed pits you against fifty gauntlets of spikes, saws, enemies, and other hazards, as well as secret levels to discover and tricky achievements to collect. Published by Crescent Moon Games, Reed will be $1.99 when it releases on iPad and iPhone and currently can be preordered on the App Store. In the meantime, you can also find the game on Goog…
A Steel Media round-up for the week of February 12th
Here’s another weekly round-up of news, previews, and features from Pocket Gamer, 148Apps, and the rest of our sister sites. On our Youtube page, James Gilmour plays a round of the Chinese release for Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds Mobile; the graphics may not be as detailed as its PC and consoles cousins, but it looks like the tension and action of its gameplay has made the transition. For Pocket Gamer, the App Army provides a wide range of impressions for the recent release Purrfect Date, a visual novel with a feline twist. Amusement, confusion, disappointment, and other reactions make for quite a divisive response. Tre Lawrence on Android Rundown offers a ve…
Technolites hopes to bring cross-platformer shoot-em-up action to mobile
The bullet hell spectacle of the shoot-em-up has graced mobile many many times, from Cave‘s games to popular indie titles like Phoenix, and the customizable ship shooter Technolites looks like it might offer another action-heavy entry to that genre. You may be facing an overwhelming alien threat, but Technolites lets you even the odds by building a unique ship, choosing from hundreds of weapons and parts. Not only can you make a ship of your own design bristling with gatling guns or lightning guns or flame throwers, you can merge weapons together to create powerful hybrid weapons. Progressing through Technolites’ animated story campaign unlocks new parts to use, as well as upg…
Returner 77 concludes its sci-fi puzzle adventure with the release of the Den chapter
More than a few games have followed in the footsteps of The Room, exploring tactile hands-on puzzle solving through different themes. Games like House of Da Vinci have gone for a familiar Victorian style, but Returner 77 designed its rooms and puzzles with science fiction flair. Now the game’s final chapter, titled The Den, is available on iOS, added in a recent update. Returner 77 tasks you with exploring an attacking alien force’s crystal ship, in the hopes of finding a way to save Earth. Within its odd corridors and otherworldly rooms rest machinery and extraterrestrial contrapations to interact with, letting you progress deeper into the vessel and through the game’s…
Death Squared doubles the tricky challenges in this color-based iOS puzzler
The block-pushing Sokoban-style puzzler has seen myriad variations and permutations on mobile, but while others may be more complex or minimalist, few can claim to as clever and mischevously designed as the newly-ported-to-iOS Death Squared. At its core, you think you might know how Death Squared works: manuever blocks around tight levels filled with gaps and barriers and corners, pushing those blocks into the right spots. And you would be right; Death Squared does want you to solve its 80 main levels like that, enhanced with color-based twist where red and blue objects and traps interact with the like-colored blocks. Death Squared works like that, until you realize moving a block makes…
Hidden Gem of the Week: Five Card Quest
Developer Rocketcat is best known for their popular RPG and action roguelike releases Mage Gauntlet, Wayward Souls, and Death Road To Canada, but amid their larger titles lies a smaller and intriguing outlier of a game, the turn-based minimalist roguelike Five Card Quest. Selecting a trio of warriors from powerful Priest, the dagger-wielding Rogue, and more, you battle room-by-room through grid-based dungeons. The focus here are those battles, an interesting blend of card game and lane-based strategy; tour party is one side of the screen, enemies on the other, spread out across three lanes. From each warrior’s deck, you choose abilities and attacks, all revolving around the ta…
