This week’s big game Thursday night has seen a variety of quality titles. Leading the pack is Groove Coaster, a rhythm game from the creators of Space Invaders Infinity Gene, followed by racing shooter Mad Wheels. Roboto, our third game, is a 2-D platformer with a great graphical style, and Gameloft’s Silent Ops puts players in the roles of three deadly secret agents.
Groove Coaster (iPhone, iPad) $0.99
Fresh from the minds that brought us Space Invaders Infinity Gene comes Groove Coaster, a rhythm game not unlike the extremely popular Tap Tap Revenge series, but a little more stylized. Each song in Groove Coaster plays along as a line with several nodes moves over the screen, and each node represents a moment at which the player is meant to tap along with the beat. The closer you get to hitting the notes at the right times, the better your score.
As you play through the game, you’ll unlock new avatars, visual skins, levels and difficulty modes, and your progress through the game creates a unique level based on your performance. Your scores and achievements get tracked through Groove Coaster’s integration with Game Center.
Mad Wheels (iPhone, iPad) $0.99
A 3-D racer in the vein of the extremely cool Death Rally, Mad Wheels is all about shooting other racers and playing dirty in order to come out the victor for each track. As you race through the game’s tracks using a virtual control stick to steer, you’ll collect weapons that allow you to fire missiles, drop mines and unload machine gun bullets on your adversaries.
Each track is littered with shortcuts and boosters to help you get a one-up on the competition, and Mad Wheels’ graphical design and controls make it very easy to play and be responsive. You’ll get points based on performance and speed on each level, and you can change the way you play with Mad Wheels’ Challenge and Wi-Fi multiplayer modes.
Roboto (iPhone, iPad) $2.99
Roboto is a platformer in which you play a robot who rides on a hover-board. Your board gives you a lot of special abilities, like the ability to jump off walls and hover in the air. The goal in Roboto is to progress through the game to impress a female robot while racking up big points by collecting shiny gold lug nuts and gears.
You get 30 levels for your purchase of Roboto, in which you’ll have to solve puzzles to traverse each stage and deal with obstacles like gravity that switches from the floor to the ceiling and back again. Your scores for each level are tracked on Game Center’s leaderboards.
Silent Ops (iPhone, iPad) $6.99
Another big 3-D title from Gameloft, Silent Ops puts you in the boots of a stealthy secret agent whose mission is one of infiltration, intelligence and snapping the necks of hapless, unsuspecting guards. Silent Ops is a fairly cinematic title, featuring full voice acting and 20 minutes of cut-scenes to help tell the story of three secret agents, each of whom you’ll play as and each with different abilities.
In addition to its standard single-player campaign, which you can attack all by yourself through seven levels that span the entire globe, Silent Ops features an online competitive multiplayer mode capable of housing as many as 12 players in a single match.
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