Leading up today’s Fresh Games are a couple of free apps that include new, exclusive levels for a two very popular games in celebration of the holidays. Cut the Rope and Beyond Ynth both released free holiday-themed apps this weekend. Fans will want to grab these, and if you haven’t checked out either of them yet, now is the time to get a free sample of both.
Cut the Rope: Holiday Gift (iPhone, iPad) Free
Players of the popular puzzle game, Cut the Rope, already got an update with some free levels for the holidays, but now developer Chillingo has dropped those levels into a stand-alone, free version of the game.
Download Holiday Gift and you’ll get a winter- and Christmas-themed version of the game that adds a few cool elements, as well as some new requirements for strategy. Cut the Rope has you using swipes to cut various ropes strategically to swing a piece of hanging candy into the mouth of Om Nom, a little green monster. In Holiday Gift, instead of just getting the candy in the monster’s mouth, you’ll have to make cuts to get the candy to swing through various levels to hit stars before finally winding up in Om Nom’s mouth. It’s a great little game, especially since it costs nothing to download.
Beyond Ynth: Xmas Edition (iPhone, iPad) Free
Just like Cut the Rope: Holiday Gift above, Beyond Ynth’s makers, FDG Entertainment, have five exclusive snow-filled levels of this puzzle platformer for us in the form of a free app. In Beyond Ynth, you control a bug that has to get through puzzles by getting inside and moving various wood boxes with different ledges in them. You move the boxes by pressing against the edges and rotating them end over end — the boxes link up with other boxes and pathways depending on how you roll them to let you move foward.
In Xmas Edition, Beyond Ynth throws in a few new features, including icy walls that make you slide and render it impossible to push boxes; sliding down snowy hills; a cold outdoor atmosphere that will kill you if you stay out of a box too long; and snowflakes that will take you out even faster than the environment.
Pirates vs. Ninjas vs. Zombies vs. Pandas (iPhone, iPad) $0.99
There seem to be more clones of Angry Birds in the App Store every day, but at least they’re usually imaginative. That’s the case with this app, which is exactly what it sounds like: pirates, ninjas, zombies and pandas, at war.
Like Angry Birds or Fun With Death, various characters are packed into structures, and it’s your job to fire other characters, like pandas, at them in order to collapse the whole thing and squash those that are inside. It requires some strategy, physics puzzle-solving, and precision aiming in order to earn the top score you can on each level. While this is a game you’ve seen before, it’s hard to argue with 45 levels of pirates, ninjas, zombies and pandas for just a buck.
