It’s no secret that iOS is thriving right now possibly more than both Xbox Live and PlayStation Network. Here’s another previous hit trying the waters with iPhone and iPad gamers.

Pandemic 2.5 (Universal: $0.99) 

“Be the villain! Eradicate mankind by designing and releasing your own disease on the world in this expanded and refined update to the popular game Pandemic 2.”

Presentation

The game is pretty simple. Your goal is to infect the world, so the a map of the world completely takes over the screen while you’re playing. As a country is infected, it will turn red, and you can tap it to get details (how many infected, dead, state of borders, etc.). You can also pinch in or pinch out to see just how far your disease has gone from it’s humble beginnings.

Controls

There’s not much to mention in the controls section. As mentioned above, you can zoom in / out on the map to view the soon to be infected world, and tap on countries for information. Adding genes to your virus is as simple as simply tapping on that symptom or trait and tapping on “activate gene”. That really is about it.

Gameplay

The premise of Pandemic is fantastic, you’re creating a virus that is aimed to wipeout all of mankind. Fun, huh? To do this you choose between three types of diseases, bacterial, viral, and parasitic. Here’s where things start to fall apart for the game though, it just starts you right off, no tutorial, no tips.

Now having played the flash version before, I had a general idea of what I was doing already, but I can see how the game can be confusing for people. In order to create your deadly virus, you expand your symptoms. You do so with the in-game currency of EvoPoints. The more people die or become infected, the more EvoPoints you earn.

You’ll want to balance your disease though, because as your virus gets out of hand, the humans will try to create a vaccine that will render your virus useless, and will end your game. When you’re picking genes to add to your disease, you’ll see how contagious, lethal, and visible that gene makes your virus. Infecting countries becomes a challenge as they become aware of your virus, as they can shut down their airports and harbors and essentially lock down the country (I’m looking at you, Madagascar).

Another problem I had with the game is that it takes a long time to play, so you’ll end up using the fast forward function. When you do that, the news ticker is also fast forwarded, which is bad because you want to keep an eye out on news about your virus. They’ll let you know how the humans are reacting to your virus, vaccine initiation / progress, etc.

Suggestions

Pandemic 2.5 isn’t necessarily a bad port, but it does need some help. The most notable thing would be the ability to save your game. Let’s face it, a game of Pandemic will take a while, even on the fastest setting. You’ll want to just leave and come back later, especially if what you’re going for is a quick game.

After that probably the biggest issue with the game is the lack of a tutorial or instructions. Having played the flash game before, I was able to dive right in, but for newcomers it can be quite a challenge. Pandemic 2.5 could really use a tutorial mode to get new players started.

Conclusion

Pandemic 2.5 is a mixed bag. It can be fun, and its definitely an interesting concept. Having played the flash game before I was looking forward to having it on the go. The result? It’s not as glamorous as I had expected, but it certainly is Pandemic on your iOS device. I’d say approach this one with caution, it’s not a perfect port, and if you’re new to the game you’ll have to find instructions / tips online.

Whoa it looks like it’s not only iPhone 5 releasing later this year. iMore sheds some more light on the long rumored 7-inch iPad. According to their source, the device would be around 7 inches (no specific measurement given), being priced in the $200-$250 range.

The report claims it wille be identical to the current iPad (besides screen size, obviously), even including a retina display.

According to our sources, the reason for such aggressive pricing is to do to the tablet market what Apple did to the MP3 market in 2004 with the expansion of the iPod product line — leave absolutely no space for competitors.

We haven’t gotten a firm read on the exact screen dimensions, so we’re using 7-inches generically here. Our sources have indicated, however, that the 7-inch iPad will be identical to the current 9.7-inch iPad, just scaled down. That seems to include a 2048×1536 resolution display, just like the new iPad. If accurate, that would put the pixel density at around 326 ppi, the same as the iPhone 4S (and higher than the 264 ppi new iPad) retina display.

It would be interesting to see how Apple is able to keep it at the $200-$250 price point, considering the iPod touch starts at $199 and the iPad will obviously have higher component costs. The 7-inch iPad would reportedly come with only 8GB of storage. Rumors of a 7-inch iPad have been around for a while, but they’ve noticeably increased in the past months. Would you buy a 7-inch iPad?

[via MacRumors]

Happy Hump Day everyone! I know most of you are almost done with school or are studying for finals, why not take a break either way and download some awesome FREE games!

MotoHeroz 

“MotoHeroz takes the fun, fast gameplay of a Trials style game, adds it to a frantic rally race, and delivers a fresh new kind of side-scrolling, platform racing game. Players race, chase, and rally their way through a brightly colored world, competing against their friends for the fastest times, entering daily races, and hunting for secrets and coins.”

Angry Bikes XD 

“Angry Bikes XD takes the original (4.5 / 5 Star Rated) game Angry Bikes to the next level, with 6 all new stages including a mystery level sponsored by Supercross.com, 16 available bike upgrades, and brand new power up’s like emergency gas to help fuel your attack on the track.”

Download both games today!

Halfbrick step onto the iOS scene with Fruit Ninja. Since then, they’ve released numerous games including for the iPad: Fruit Ninja HD  and Fruit Ninja: Puss In Boots HD  . Speaking of which, both games are on sale for $0.99 for the first time ever!

“Fruit Ninja is a juicy action game with squishy, splatty and satisfying fruit carnage! Become the ultimate bringer of sweet, tasty destruction with every slash. Swipe up to EIGHT fingers across the screen to deliciously slash fruit like a true ninja warrior, taking in all of the crisp detailed effects which have been radically improved from the iPhone version.”

“En garde! Fruit meets fairytales in the juiciest iPhone game this year – Fruit Ninja: Puss in Boots! The suave fruit-slashing swashbuckler, Puss in Boots, faces a challenge that would make Sensei proud. His search for the Magic Beans brings him to developer Halfbrick’s legendary hit game Fruit Ninja.”

Download these games ASAP before the sale ends!

One of the hardest genres to execute well is the top-down racer. The developer has to figure out a way to make the game work where the controls can be reversed. This provides an interesting challenge, and when it is done correctly, it makes for a fun racing game that breaks away from the standard genre conventions.

Mini Motor Racing ($1.99)  is a top down racing game on the iPhone. So that begs the question: does it get the controls right, or is it a frustrating excursion into bad controls and extreme lack of fun?

Gameplay

As you can probably deduce by the fact that Mini Motor Racing has “racing” in the title, it is a game where the objective is to make your car drive faster than your opponent’s. As I mentioned from the outset, this is a top down racing game, which makes the gameplay feel very arcadey and fun.

The bulk of the game is spent hanging out in the career mode. It has over 20 tracks, and a ton of races against opponents of varying difficulty. As you win races, you earn money, which is used to upgrade the various performance aspects of your car. There is a lot of gameplay in the career mode, so from a value perspective, this is truly a winner.

In addition to the career mode, you can also play multiplayer with friends or against random strangers. You can play on Wi-Fi and cellular. You can also play local multiplayer with a friend using Bluetooth.

To put it simply, the gameplay is damn fun. The way the cars handle is awesome. Low-level cars slide like crazy around corners, which forces you to be creative in your turning. High-level cars drive super fast, which requires skill and precision. You can smash into other cars using nitro and send them flying. All of this combines to make some good old racing fun.

Controls

I bet you like when a game gives you options for how to control it. Options are great, and the guys and gals at The Binary Mill realized this and included four different control methods in the game. They also included the ability to choose whether you want the cars to accelerate automatically or if you prefer manual control over your speed. They even give you the option to flip the controls, which is perfect for lefties.

The controls in the game work swimmingly. I tried each of the control methods, and I found that I preferred the tank method over the others. That said, they all worked great, and it all comes down to comfort and personal preference.

Presentation

Mini Motor Racing looks beautiful. It has an ultra clean art style that is visually pleasing. The most impressive part of the game from a visual standpoint is most certainly the environments. Each track looks fantastic, and they have so much variety in the style that it never becomes boring.

The menus in the game are easy to navigate, and the options screen is easy to get to either from the main screen or in game. This is important because you will want to test out the different control methods to find the one that suits you best.

Seriously, this game looks and sounds amazing. I really cannot stress enough how good it looks. I like the visuals so much that I felt the need to include a second paragraph reminding you of how beautiful it is.

Suggestions

The only suggestion I could possibly come up with is the matchmaking for multiplayer. It was not always easy to find a game if you are trying to play with random strangers. Maybe a lobby would help, where you could choose the room instead of just sitting on a loading screen waiting. I did find some games, but it was not nearly as easy as I would have liked.

Conclusion

This game is downright incredible. When it first came across my desk, I was not overly excited to play another iOS racing game. I looked for a flaw; I tried as hard as I could, and I just could not seem to find one in the actual game play. The only thing that keeps this game from being perfect is the fact that connecting to a multiplayer game was not as easy as I would have liked. Still Mini Motor Racing is a game that is not to be missed. 9/10

Earlier this month iLounge reported several rumors regarding the iPhone 5, one of them being that the device will feature a smaller dock connector that is “closer to a pill shape”. iMore is now reporting a similar claim, a move towards a smaller dock connector.

iMore has a pretty good track record on predicting features of upcoming Apple products. The report does state however that Apple is currently in the still in the prototyping phase and the design is not set in stone.

Despite some rumors to the contrary, according to our sources Apple still hasn’t finalized the design of the next generation iPhone 5 (or whatever Apple ends up calling iPhone 5,1). No giant screen. No 16:9 aspect ratio. No metal back.

[...]

Once again we’re hearing that if the screen size does change, it won’t be by a lot (no larger than 4-inches). We’ve heard nothing to indicate a planned change in the aspect ratio either way (and such a change still doesn’t make much sense to us).

The report notes that the aspect ratio has no plans of being changed, which is a good thing if you ask me. Analysts are predicting that iPhone 5 will be released around September/October, as opposed to an earlier June/July launch because of supply issues.

[via iMore, macrumors]

It’s hard to have sympathy for Tyler, the “hero” of Clear Vision. He loses his job after slacking off, takes up a gig as a sniper-for-hire to pay his apartment rent and ends up living the good life. But the most jarring part of the experience is that his unwarranted rise to glory happens within the span of, at most, thirty minutes.

Clear Vision (17+) ($.99)  iOS Universal

Clear Vision’s gameplay is extremely simple: you assassinate targets by lining up a headshot with your sniper’s scope, accounting for distance and wind speed in doing so, and then hitting the fire button to blow some unlucky sap’s brains out.

A few levels throw in various tricks to mix up the monotony, such as calling your target’s phone to figure out which person to kill, and another turns to interrogation instead of shooting, but ultimately you’re doing the same thing over and over across 20 levels.

It’s hard to say it gets old, however, as you can blow through the game in under a half-hour easily. This is can be attributed to both the lack of content or difficulty. Throughout the entire game, the only shots we messed up were due to a poor description of who the target was.

To pad out the game, the developers threw in a mini-game of sorts called Underground Boxing, but all it amounts to is betting money on one of two boxers, the winner of which is decided by the equivalent of a coin flip. The thing is, you’ll get sufficient money to purchase new sniper rifles by playing the missions, and losing money can actually halt your progress. The only incentive is getting enough money to buy the top sniper rifle, although it does nothing special. This is a feature you should leave untouched.

Clear Vision’s 17+ tag is pretty disingenuous. There is nothing here, bar some cartoonish blood from dead stick figures, that isn’t suitable for people under 17. Many games with lower ratings have more graphical and interesting violence, if that’s what you want.

Clear Vision also suffers from poor typeface and grammar, as well as failed attempts at comedy. The in-game newspapers and emails between missions attempt to make you chuckle but try too hard.

The biggest problem with Clear Vision is that you can play 13 levels for free in an online flash game. If you’re interested in wasting a few minutes behind a sniper rifle, you might as well do that.

Happy Tuesday everyone! If you missed our Twitter announcement @TheAPPera because you aren’t following us, make sure to correct that. Besides our FREE games today, we will be giving out NOVA 3 soon as well!

Saving Yello 

“Yello, a helpless goldfish at the mercy of his 7-year-old owner, Mathilda who loves playing with him outside his beloved bowl. You must fling Yello back to safety. Get even and destroy Mathilda’s toys along the way!”

Tower Defense: Lost Earth 

“In search of resources that are no longer provided on Earth, you followed a probe released by humans years ago in hopes of discovering an alternative planet. Take command of towers with special weapons to hold your defense against endless waves of enemies on the hostile alien planet.”

Download both games today only!

When N.O.V.A. first came out, there was a strong resemblance to the Halo series. Back then the graphics took us all by surprise when we first saw the game demoed at an Apple event.

Near Orbit Vanguard Alliance 3 (Universal: $6.99) 

“Four months have passed since Kal ruined the Volterites’ plans by sabotaging their war factories, and stopping the extraction of the Judger Artifacts. However, following the assassination of President Folsom, the government surrendered the colonies to the Volterite Protectorate in order to prevent civil war between the increasingly pro-Volterite citizens.”

Presentation

After it’s initial release, Gameloft was back at it again with an enhanced version on the iPad, which was demoed at the original iPad keynote. Again, we were taken back. Since then a lot has changed hardware wise, and with N.O.V.A. 3, Gameloft takes full advantage of that.

Although you’re back playing as Kal Wardin, you’ll now be equipped with a sleeker suit, with telekinetic abilities making a return. Visually, the game now reminds me a lot more of Crysis rather than Halo, and that’s perfectly fine. Where the game really shines is when you play it on the new iPad. Besides a few hiccups during some scenes, the game runs surprisingly smooth with amazing graphics. N.O.V.A.3 focuses on more realistic-looking environments, starting off in the ruins of a future San Francisco, but moving on to larger levels like an abandoned Judger spaceship; they all look gorgeous. The other devices also seem to run the game fine, with the iPhone 4S actually running the game a bit smoother, but not as eye-catching. Graphics aside, Gameloft also stepped up its game with the voice acting. Although still not great, it is a noticeable improvement from some of other Gameloft games (like 9mm).

Controls

Gameloft continues to have the best FPS on touch screens to date. If you’ve ever played a Gameloft FPS, than the control scheme should be familiar to you: dual-stick controls, with swipe gestures for swapping between weapons and powers. On top of that there are buttons for grenades, sprinting, and jumping.

You can customize the controls a bit, by enabling gyroscope controls for more fun, or auto-aim to help out those of you having issues with the touch controls. If there’s one complain about the way the game controls is that it feels a bit cluttered on the iPhone, compared to playing it on the iPad’s larger screen. There’s not much Gameloft can do about this though, and for what it matters, you can still play the game perfectly fine on an iPhone or iPod touch.

Gameplay

N.O.V.A. 3 doesn’t exactly revolutionize the FPS genre on the AppStore, but Gameloft sticks to it’s proven formula and delivers a great game. Despite some minor frame rate and control issues, N.O.V.A. 3 goes straight for the gold and tries to provide a console FPS experience on the go, and it comes pretty close.

One of the first things you’ll notice right from the beginning is that the game has larger environments that allow movement around the map as you fight your enemies. The core gameplay will remain the same, which is taking out the bad guys with a variety of weapons. The A.I, while nowhere near genius level, certainly feels more natural and aware than in some other games (like MC3, for comparison).

Occasionally you’ll have a turret, mech, or another character who will provide backup, that will spicen up the gameplay a bit. Putting aside the single player, N.O.V.A 3 once again nails the multiplayer portion. There are 6 different modes, including ‘Capture the Flag’, ‘Team Deathmatch’, and perhaps my favorite ‘Freeze Tag’. Multiplayer can be anywhere from 2 to 12 players across a variety of maps, and in my experience when playing over WiFi the multiplayer worked almost flawlessly.

Conclusion

N.O.V.A.3 is unlike anything on the AppStore right now, with a good chunk of content on single player, addictive and varied multiplayer, and gorgeous graphics. There are some minor grips with frame rate and controls, but you can easily put that aside and just enjoy the game. N.O.V.A.3 is a great step forward for console style games on mobile, and things can only get better from here.

Haptic technology is something that has been rumored to be a feature of every new iOS product that is about to come out since Macrumors uncovered an Apple patent back in 2009. Thanks to 9to5mac and PatentlyApple, rumors have returned for iPhone 5.

“…today’s surprise invention packs a punch with a wildly intelligent multi-tiered haptics system. The system will actually allow an iDevice display to deform so that it could provide the user with a button, an arrow or even a geological map to physically pop right out of the screen to give it 3D depth.”

“If that wasn’t cool enough, Apple’s patent discusses a flexible OLED display that could be used for video glasses.”

Should Apple really continue on with this endeavor, they could easily reshape the mobile sphere once again with the most advanced and forward thinking touchscreen keyboard. Typing will be a lot easier in the future when it becomes more interactive and that’s just for aesthetic purposes. Think of what Apple could do with this in terms of accessibility.

New iPhone is rumored to most likely appear in Q4 of this year. Apple has time to integrate haptic technology between now and then. Between you and me, I still think we’re at least one year off until this fully materializes.