Three interesting and casual games are on offer in today’s Fresh Games list. Monsterball A is a distance game that requires you to use physics principles like gravity and centripetal force to get as far as you can; BeamOut is a tilt-based brick-breaker in which you try to help aliens gather sheep; and Subsolar requires a quick and precise tapping finger to rack up the points. Read about all three below.
Monsterball A (iPhone) $0.99
Here’s a distance game with a little mindless reflex challenge for you, but with a bit more to offer than the standard fare. Monsterball A lets you control a ball, which is flinging itself out into space as far as it can go. You can fly through the air for a short way, but before you fall, you can tap the screen to tether the ball to a string it produces, allowing it to hang in space. The physics of the movement get the ball swinging, and if you tap again at the right time, you can fling your monsterball forward even further. But wait too long and the ball loses its momentum, the swinging stops, and you fall.
Monsterball’s simple one-touch controls make it really easy to play but tough to be very good at. The sky you traverse is filled with stars that give you a boost in momentum, so aiming for and hitting them is key to racking up any kind of distance. Monsterball’s Game Center connectivity lends it leaderboards to let you see how you stack up against other players, as well.
BeamOut (iPhone) $1.99
Aliens and sheep — it’s a fascination echoed in a lot of different iPhone games, as it is in BeamOut, a game that puts you in control of a crashed flying saucer on a search for sheep-based lifeforms. This casual arcade title uses tilt controls to glide your ship along the ground, bouncing off things like a greased pinball. It’s a tough game to control, requiring you to avoid slamming into hazards while trying to collide with different items to score points.
A block-breaking game with a great art style and 30 levels to play through, BeamOut includes Game Center and OpenFeint support for leaderboards and achievements to keep you working to find new things to do in the game. It’s a tough game to master, but BeamOut is an addictive tilt game that’ll keep you busy.
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Subsolar (iPhone) $0.99
Tap photons to capture them in a targeter, while avoiding anti-matter — that’s all there is to Subsolar, although the game gets decidedly more complex than that before long. An arcade puzzler of sorts with a great sci-fi soundtrack and look, your ultimate goal is actually to find a new home for mankind, but to do so, you need to keep your ship powered by collecting photons before they hit the bottom of the screen.
Things get more complex with the addictive puzzler gameplay as you capture power-ups, and gather superprotons to activate new powers for your targeter. They’re different depending on the planet you’re exploring and change up the gameplay as you use them. Capturing photons seems like a simple premise at first, but acting fast and with precision gets challenging in a hurry.
