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This Week In Mobile – Defend, Deceive, Retrieve
Mobile gamers never have a lack of games to play. Finding a good game to play, however, requires some thinning of the herd. This week’s mobile highlights feature games across several different genres, so we’ve picked out something for just about everyone.
Anomaly Defenders
Developer: 11 Bit Studios
Platforms: iOS, Android
Price: $4.99 (iOS), $3.99 (Android)
Anomaly Defenders is the final installment in 11 Bit Studios’ critically acclaimed Anomaly tower defense series. In the Anomaly series you aid the humans in their battle against alien attackers, but Defenders turns that around, instead letting you control the aliens as they protect their home world from the human forces. The game features 24 levels and a wide variety of towers with different upgrade paths, as well as a skill tree you can customize to fit your play style. Former Game Informer PC Editor Adam Biessener enjoyed the series' previous titles Anomaly: Warzone Earth and Anomaly: Korea, giving them both scores of 8/10.
Smarter Than You
Developer: EightyEight Games
Platform: iOS
Price: Free
Pretty much rock, paper, scissors with a risk/reward system, Smarter Than You Think isn’t so much about intelligence as it is about deception and weighing probabilities; before each turn, you have the option to either mislead your opponent by entering a string of red herring text or confuse them by telling the truth and following through. However you play it, your word choice interacts dynamically with your move choice to increase or decrease its effectiveness. The team behind 10000000 has crafted what they call a “social dueling game”: asynchronous, turn-based online play and the option to “tip” your opponent after a match (your dollar becomes their XP). This puts Smarter Than You at the more passive, but no less unique, end of the mobile gaming spectrum.
Interstellar
Developer: Paramount Digital Entertainment
Platforms: iOS, Android
Price: Free
If gazing into the infinite abyss of space makes you feel all warm and gushy inside, then Interstellar might be the app for you. A tie-in to the upcoming Christopher Nolan film of the same name, Interstellar touts deep space exploration in player-created solar systems. Players can customize celestial bodies like asteroids, moons, and planets, and then share their solar systems with friends. You can also take your ship, The Endurance, out for a ride, zooming past planets and dodging black holes on research-collection missions.
Cosmophony
Developer: Bento
Platform: iOS, Android, Windows, Amazon
Price: $2.99 (iOS, Android, Windows), $3.00 (Amazon)
This one’s for the Child of Eden fans out there. Cosmophony is a psychedelic music shooter that boasts heavy beats and demanding, fast-paced gameplay. Details on the game’s story are scant, but strange. Players seize control of the heart of a fallen goddess and attempt to fulfill her destiny. Scored by DJ Salaryman, the soundtrack is composed entirely of drums and bass, and sets the backdrop for the app’s colorful stages, which run at 60 FPS.
Cursed Treasure 2: Hey! Heroes! Leave Us Gems Alone!
Developer: IriySoft
Platforms: iOS
Cost: $2.99
Cursed Treasure 2: Hey! Heroes! Leave Us Gems Alone! is a tower defense game in the same vein as another popular Armor Games’ title, Kingdom Rush, but that doesn’t stop it from being great in its own right. In Cursed Treasure you are tasked with defending hoards of gems from pesky heroes who are attempting to loot them. You have three types of towers that upgrade in different ways and get stronger depending on which skill trees you invest in as you progress through the game.
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