"If there is an app for that"

Free Apps to Download TODAY ONLY 07/15/2024

July 15, 2024 by RSS Feed

Lamafox - Hide and Seek! , DotList , DayCircle - Day counter and more

iPhone:

DotList ( $0.99 → Free ) Danz L.L.C. DotList will help you keep up with your busy life. Use the app to organize everything from grocery lists to work tasks. DotList lets you customize your view by renaming, reordering, and adding/deleting lists. All lists are shareable via messages or email and important tasks can be prioritized by pinning them.

DayCircle - Day counter ( $1.99 → Free ) Genau Factory DayCircle is a minimalistic calendar app with a bold design. Choose to count down or up to important events. Swipe back and forth to enjoy cute animations with 14 different themes to pick from.

BWP - Bear Walking Pal ʕ·.· ʔ ( $0.99 → Free ) EUIHYUNG JUNG Achieve 10,000 steps per day with the help of an adorable bear named Tom. BWP tracks your every movement and keeps a running history of your accomplishments. You’re also able to monitor your daily steps via a handy home screen widget. BWP will even let you know how many steps you have left in order to have traveled around the world by foot.

Lamafox - Hide and Seek! ( $6.99 → Free ) Paul Kolvenbach Play hide and seek with Fredfred, a rare mix of a lama and fox. Fredfred is a master at hiding so you’ll really have to think outside the box to find him. You will meet all sorts of cute friends along the way who can help you search the many colorful worlds for Fredfred.

PXL - mosaic art ( $3.99 → Free ) Norikazu Muramoto PXL can take the photos from your camera roll and turn them into intricate collages in seconds. Choose any photo from your camera roll to act as the main image. With just a tap, PXL will utilize all of the other images from the camera roll to create the collage. The process may take a few seconds, but in no time you’ll be presented with a high resolution piece of art that can be saved or shared.

Enhanced - Guided Meditation ( $11.99 → Free ) Pakotec Enhanced - Guided Meditation is an anti-stress app that will help you focus better and fall asleep faster. It will train your body and mind to slow down and keep calm. You’ll feel more in tune with your emotions and have more confidence to take control of your life.

Conversion Calculator - Metric ( $4.99 → Free ) Collins Cheruiyot Conversion Calculator - Metric is a must-have app for anyone who switches between imperial and metric units. Get precise measurements in seconds. It offers unit categories such as length, weight, volume, temperature, and more. Whether you’re in the kitchen whipping up a meal or working on a construction project this app has you covered.

Chuckie Egg 2017 ( $0.99 → Free ) Downsideup Games Collect hundreds of golden eggs across over 30 hand-drawn levels. Use your fingers to guide and tap Harry, the chickadee. Nibble on birdseed as you collect all the eggs while also dodging enemies. The game have two different difficulty modes.

Source link: http://appadvice.com/apps-gone-free

Loop Hero review

May 02, 2024 by RSS Feed

I have some complicated feelings about Loop Hero. I remember is as one of the big games culture phenoms under the height of COVID (along with Among Us), and it is an enjoyable upgrade treadmill that is fun as long as its systems are playing nicely together. Sometimes they aren't, as there are a ton of disparate things at play in the game, but the fact that any of it works is rather impressive, and even moreso seeing it tied so well together by its surprisingly cool art and worldbuilding. On iOS, you'd think it's kind of the perfect game to dink around with, and it is fully capable of sucking you in, but I'm not sure it has aged all that well since its initial release.

Loot loop

In the event that you haven't played Loop Hero, some explanation for how it works is required. This game borrows from a lot of other places, but as far as I know there aren't really games like it. You play as a hero who is trying to build up some semblance of civilization at the end of the world, and you do this by going on adventures where your character automatically moves around a track to fight monsters, secure supplies, level up, and find gear that will help you fight even more powerful monsters.

Your role as the player controlling this revolves somewhat around switching up gear to make your hero as strong as possible, but the main focus is actually on building up the land features on and around the track (via cards) to try and make things as hard as possible while still being able to survive so you can score the most chances at getting powerful loot to take down and end boss for big resource rewards and some story payoff.

Repeating randomness

As you advance in Loop Hero, you build up a village in between runs and the structures you build grant bonuses, add new cards to play with, and even unlock additional classes with their own gear and special combat abilities. The core of what you do in each subsequent run remains largely the same, though: kill, loot, die/retreat, repeat.

There are times where this formula is totally engrossing. It can be incredibly satisfying to happen upon a build that lets your hero go the distance to fell a boss or find special items like trophies to tip your battlefield builds in certain directions. There are plenty of other times, though, where things like this simply do not come together, and either you die or you retreat just to venture out again and see if things shake out better next time. As a game that you could basically let idle in the background of your PC while you do other things, this is mostly fine, but in other formats, not so much.

Meager on mobile

Speaking of format, this mobile version of Loop Hero is serviceable, though some of its ideas to make it more mobile-friendly are a bit odd. Perhaps the nicest thing about this port is that Loop Hero has flawless iCloud sync, allowing you to continue progress between devices, or even tie up a device to allow for some idle play if you so choose.

Beyond that, Loop Hero has added some options to try and make its smallish visuals a bit more readable, but it's all via an awkward magifying feature that didn't quite feel right in all of the configurations offered. Luckily, I found it easy enough to see and read everything on screen when playing on my iPad, though on my phone it was a little more difficult, to the point that I considered turning on high-resolution fonts on the game. I didn't, though, because it kind of ruins the aesthetic of Loop Hero, which I may have only mentioned in the intro but it's cool as hell and goes a long way to make its idle/looping gameplay more appealing.

The bottom line

Loop Hero hasn't suddenly turned into a different game in the years since its release, but you can also see why there haven't been any splashy games like it since. At times, the game feels like lightning in a bottle. At others, it gives the feel of countless other games that are just random systems slurries. When you could play it somewhat idly (and when folks had a lot more idle time), I imagine it felt more magical than it does now playing on a device where you have to face its imperfections head on.

Source link:https://www.148apps.com/reviews/loop-hero-review/

Wildfrost review

April 24, 2024 by RSS Feed

Wildfrost is an easy game to fall in love with. What I mean by that every little aspect of the game has its own little charming flourish to it. You might not be able to appreciate all of those nitty gritty details on a phone screen, but on larger displays Wildfrost is one of the most polished deckbuilders you can find on the App Store.

Cold cards

The core concept of Wildfrost is hardly new. In it, you customize a deck full of units, abilities, and more to battle through increasingly difficult stages in an effort to reach and defeat a final boss. As you try and fail a bunch (and occasionally succeed), you'll unlock new cards or factions to add more variety to each playthrough.

There are definitely some significant ways in which Wildfrost reworks this idea into something unique, though. Combat takes place across two lanes and involves unit cards that have their own timers that tick down every turn before attacking and using their abilities, for example.

Friendly frosts

The main thing that jumps out about Wildfrost is just how nice it looks, feels, and sounds. Everything is bright, colorful, and full of expression, and there's a ton of little animation or design touches that bring its flat cards to life. I also want to shoutout the game's superb soundtrack, which is something I don't think I've ever said about a deckbuilding roguelite before.

All of this attention to detail extends to more technical aspects of Wildfrost as well. The game runs at an extremely smooth frame rate all the way up to 120 frames per second and its cloud saving system is among the best I've experienced, with progress syncing between devices nearly instantly.

Icy edges

As charming as I do find the vast majority of playing Wildfrost, there are a few things that I found slightly troubling in my time with it. The first (and most significant) is that it is awfully difficult to see and read cards on certain devices like my iPhone SE. If you have a larger phone, I could see this being a non-issue, but I found myself only really feeling sort of comfortable playing on my phone after simply memorizing what most cards do, and only then only playing the first few opening stages before things get too complicated.

And this brings me to my second point: deep runs in Wildfrost can be very infuriating due to a certain degree of randomness, some ambiguous card text, and the high degree of complexity that doesn't always play well with an occasionally finicky control scheme. There are multiple times during my time with Wildfrost where I lost entire runs because a card didn't operate the way I thought it would, or an attempt to read a card resulted in playing it. If there were some way to confirm card plays or have an undo button, most of this would be a non-issue. It's also something that becomes less of a problem the more you play, though that's mostly because you end up learning how to avoid these things the hard way.

The bottom line

There is an extremely high bar set for roguelites on mobile--particularly deckbuilding ones--and Wildfrost manages to clear it despite some pain points in its design. This is thanks mostly due to the game's impeccable style that makes spending more time with it a complete delight.

Source link:https://www.148apps.com/reviews/wildfrost-review/

Ghost Trick review

April 18, 2024 by RSS Feed

Ghost Trick is a cult classic game for a few very good reasons. It's a one-off release by the creator of the Ace Attorney series that only released on Nintendo DS back in 2010, which was pretty late into that device's life cycle. Beloved as it may be, it's not a huge surprise to reveal that it didn't perform well sales-wise back then, but at least Capcom knows that the game captured enough hearts that it was worth remastering. This new release of Ghost Trick looks and plays great, and--although it has some of the same pain points of the original release--is well worth playing for its unique sense of style and charm.

Ghost game

Ghost Trick is a bit of a critical darling, so I won't spend too much time in this review belaboring how it works or what it's about. What's important to know for this remaster is that it takes advantage of being on upgraded hardware by looking extremely sharp and running at a smooth and stable frame rate.

As for the gameplay, using a finger in place of the stylus works exactly like you'd expect, and there's nothing so demanding design-wise that having higher fidelity touch is necessary. The only mild annoyance I came across while playing this version is that taps to advance dialog occasionally would register as a swipe input and pull up the game's dialog history instead.

Sample specter

The iOS version of Ghost Trick is a free-to-start title, which gives you a surprisingly lengthy chunk of game to play to decide if it is for you or not. You play through multiple puzzle sequences in their entirety and get enough story to get a sense of what the overall plot will end up being. Very few things past this paid point end up being all that surprising, but it is nice that Capcom has decided to really let players get a feel for the game before deciding whether to fork over a whopping $29.99 for the full experience.

Aside from the main story, Ghost Trick has a few special features like illustrations, notes, and music from the game you can browse/listen to, as well as a "Ghost Puzzle" minigame that is simply an animated jigsaw puzzle of several scenes from the game. These aren't terribly exciting add-ons in my opinion, but the core game is more than worth the asking price alone.

Old soul

The last thing to talk about now is probably just how Ghost Trick feels to play in 2024. The short version is: pretty good! It's definitely easy to peg it as an older title, but its look and gameplay are still so incredibly distinct and charismatic. In almost 15 years since its release, I don't think anything has measured up or even made the attempt to do things that Ghost Trick does.

My only caveat with the experience is that some of the game's puzzles are not all that fun to figure out. Deep into Ghost Trick as the challenges get more complex, there are times when the way to avert someone's fate with your ghost powers is--let's say--less than clear. This can lead to quite a bit of trial and error, with errors kicking you back to the beginning of a sequence. Luckily, there's a menu option in-game that lets you fast-forward through dialog to make these sections feel less tedious, but it can still grow tiresome to just experiment until you happen upon some obtuse solution to move the story forward.

The bottom line

Ghost Trick is a charming and unique puzzle adventure experience, and I'm not sure there's anything else out there quite like it. It's certainly not the smoothest play (especially these days), but this remaster definitely adds enough shine to make it worth picking up on iOS.

Source link:https://www.148apps.com/reviews/ghost-trick-review/

Slice & Dice review

March 28, 2024 by RSS Feed

There is no shortage of roguelikes on mobile, and great ones at that. I feel like I'm writing about some new hotness in this space every other month. It's a pace that feels unsustainable, and yet, the hits keep coming. Slice & Dice is yet another incredible run-based dungeon-crawler that is more than capable of standing out in front of its excellent competition.

Rolling deep

In Slice & Dice, you "control" a party of adventurers as they battle their way through a set of increasingly challenging combat encounters. You do this by rolling dice for your team and choosing to lock in specific abilities before using them to deal damage, buff your team, etc. Each of your party members has unique sides on their individual die that is determined by their particular class and the items you have equipped on them.

After each battle, your party gets stronger through gaining a choice of item or a somewhat random offer to evolve one of your heroes' classes. Through these layers of chance, you are supposed to try and create some degree of order that allows you continue to survive fights and forge on. But, if you don't, there's always next time, and chances are good your next run will have some new unlockable to play with.

Variable variety

It may seem like Slice & Dice is a total crapshoot given how chance-based every facet of its gameplay is, but if that was the case I probably would have stopped playing it well before writing this review. There's some design magic at work here that I can't quite put my finger on, but you never feel totally out of control or unable to right the ship on any given run of Slice & Dice. At the same time, you always feel like you're on a razor's edge, as one bad turn or roll can also spell disaster and stop even the most promising runs short.

If at any point you do feel like you're starting to master (and grow weary of) the game, Slice & Dice offers a ton of different ways to prevent that. Between different hero classes, new modes, harder difficulties, and several other modifiers you can mix and match together, there is a whole lot of game to explore that will feel fresh for a really long time. Oh, and if the prospect of playing Slice & Dice to unlock all of these things also sounds draining, there's a little check box in the settings menu that can just unlock everything for you.

Dice pocket

Slice & Dice is available on PC as well, but I can't imagine a better home for it than on mobile. The pacing of the combat and overall run structure fits incredibly well for on-the-go play, and layout of the action looks great in both portrait and landscape mode. The game doesn't have cloud saving for retaining progress between devices, but that doesn't feel all that important for a run-based game where unlocks can all be bypassed.

Something else nice about Slice & Dice is you don't have to take my word for all of this. You can try it out yourself for free and see what up to 12 fights of a run feel like, which should give you a really good sense of whether this game is for you and if you like it on mobile. If you decide you are all-in on it, a single $8.99 purchase unlocks the full game.

The bottom line

There's so much possibility space in Slice & Dice and the game is designed expertly to let you explore all of it on your own terms, all while delivering a super satisfying and strategic roguelike experience. There's not much else I could ask for from a game like this, except more ones like it, I guess.

Source link:https://www.148apps.com/reviews/slice-and-dice-review/