It’s the Game Developers Conference this week in San Francisco — how about a few free games to celebrate? We’ve got Fun With Death, an Angry Birds-style physics puzzler that takes things further to become even more challenging; Crazy UFO, a game not unlike Super Mega Worm, in which you terrorize livestock; and Groove Pillars, an interesting take on the match-three genre. None of them will cost you a dime.
Fun With Death (iPhone) Free (was $0.99)
You’re death, and something you screwed up has got the heaven-bound and the hell-bound souls all mixed together, and scattered on and within structures for some reason. So you call on your demon minions to help you get things straightened out. Like Angry Birds, you hurl your demons at the structures, hoping to knock them down or otherwise get the demons inside to hit the souls.
There’s an extra caveat, though, which takes Fun With Death up a notch: you can’t just destroy everything in your path the way you do in Angry Birds. You actually have to squash some souls, while saving others. Hell-bound souls need to be destroyed by demonic impacts, but blue souls, which are often very close to red souls, need to remain undisturbed. It adds quite a layer of challenge to Fun With Death, which is definitely worth the purchase price of free.
Crazy UFO (iPhone, iPad) Free (was $0.99)
Once again, it’s cows against aliens — only this time, you’re the alien and you’re trying to abduct cows to study them. Trouble is, the farmers don’t exactly take kindly to your cow abductions; and neither do the cows, for that matter, as they’re too big for your saucer and eventually explode. If you’re familiar with Super Mega Worm, you’ll see the similarities here as you fly around the 2D landscape, abducting a certain number of animals before the time limit expires.
Each animal you abduct adds an interesting entry to your alien almanac, which you can check any time, and you can also upgrade your ship as you go to better perform your livestocknapping missions. Crazy UFO also takes you across different landscapes, which all present their own challenges as you move your UFO by tilting your device and try to beam up animals by tapping.
Groove Pillars (iPhone, iPad) Free (was $0.99)
You’ll recognize Groove Pillars’ match-three gem game style right away, but it doesn’t play like Bejeweled. Instead of swapping gems back and forth wherever you choose, you can only manipulate the bottom row of gems — meaning you have to slide gems around and reposition them at the bottom to clear rows and keep the columns getting blocked up at the top.
It sounds complex perhaps, but it’s really not at all. Groove Pillars includes two gameplay modes: the first, Marathon, includes a timer and encourages you to rack up a high score as fast as possible. The much more zen Relax mode allows you to just play with no constraints and see what score you pull down.
Download the free Appolicious iPhone app
