Edutainment: A form of entertainment designed to educate as well as amuse. This week, meet the living definition of the word inside Cube It 3D Free. Brush up on your spatial abilities by simply adding and removing cubes from each structure. Sounds easy, right? It is, up to a point. Perfect for kids as well as adults! Jumping game fans will fly to heaven after playing Jump and Fly for a few minutes (or hours), while art and puzzle gamers will find Feed Me Oil HD to be downright slick. Finally, Companions brings top-notch dungeon crawling RPG goodness to your Apple tablet.
Cube It 3D Free (Free)
The next time you have a few minutes to burn, you’ll be faced with a choice: spend it mindlessly blasting some baddies or jumping ever-higher between platforms, or work on your 3D spatial skills. Cube It 3D Free is one of the first edutainment apps to hold my family’s attention, keeping father and son glued to our shared tablet for more than an hour at a time. You’re confronted with stacked cubes of various colors and sporting different designs. The goal? Make the group on the right side of the screen match the one on the left. You’ll need to zoom in and out, then add and remove blocks to complete the puzzle. It’s a right-brain intensive app that may very well enhance your creativity as well as bolstering your spatial abilities.
Jump and Fly ($0.99)
The good people at Diesel Puppet are serving up a fresh helping of platform jumping goodness, and at a dollar menu price. All the usual elements of jump game success are here – platforms, clouds, fans, springboards, and other elements to launch you ever-higher, along with a cute main character and some of the most sensitive accelerometer code I’ve ever experienced. You’ll barely need to tilt your iPad to get this wingless (but not flightless) little guy from location to location. Toss in a hearty helping of moving and time-bomb platforms, the ability to jump through the sides of your screen only to reappear on the other, plus power-ups and other helpful collectibles, and you’ve got yourself a must-have app that jumps to the top of the heap.
Feed Me Oil HD ($1.99)
Leave it to Chillingo and HolyWater Games to turn our angst over high crude oil prices and channel it into a mind-bending puzzle game that’s two parts art to one part physics game, with just a dash of hyper-realistic oozy/gooey oil baked in as icing on the cake. Your goal is simple: Guide time Texas-tea from the broken pipe, across the play field, and into the waiting maw of each hungry oil-eater. You’ll employ things like wind, oil magnets, windmills, fans, platforms, and other objects to push, pull, or actively fling the dinosaur and plant remains across the screen. The fewer objects you use to channel the flow, the more points you’ll score. And once your items are in place, you’ll have to tweak them seven ways from Sunday to get the flow just right. With 49 levels to tackle, and four bonus levels unlocked as you earn points/stars along the way, there’s more than enough bubbling crude-goodness to go around for the low-low price of two sawbucks.
Companions ($4.99)
I’ve lost count of the number of dungeons I’ve crawled over the years. Add in never-ending catacombs from titles like Gauntlet, and there’s been more loot pillaged and ranged/melee weapons deployed by my magic users, archers, tanks, and humans that I could shake a stick at. That’s why Companions was a must-download for this RPG fan, and I’m happy to say that if you’re looking for a Gauntlet experience that lets you control four party members simultaneously, crawling your way through never-ending dark and dangerous underground locations, then this game is for you. Ignore the tutorial and jump right into the campaign, where the difficulty of the controls and action ramp up considerably within the first few minutes of play. Be sure to take advantage of the tactical pause feature if things get out of control, and the hint system (despite 30 second pauses between each) is sure to get you out of the toughest spots. The main campaign will keep you engaged for weeks to come, while survival mode will challenge your skills to stay alive as long as possible. If you’re willing to tough-out the trial by fire introduction to the controls you’ll come to appreciate the top-quality game that is Companions.
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