We’re only days away from Christmas, and blasting zombies, combating space aliens or stealing ancient artifacts just don’t fit the holiday spirit. So we’ve compiled a list of addictive, Christmas-themed games, and holiday updates for some of the most popular games on iOS devices, to add a little snow and Santa to your iPhone this week.
Angry Birds Seasons ($0.99)
Back in October, Angry Birds maker Rovio Mobile released some extra levels in celebration of Halloween. Now the company is doing the same thing for Christmas, and has combined the 24 winter-themed stages with the ones from Halloween to create Angry Birds Seasons. While this Angry Birds doesn’t handle any different than the others, it does come with a total of 69 new stages and Game Center support for online leaderboards. As with the standard version of Angry Birds, each level has you slinging birds at different structures with a slingshot, in attempts to collapse the buildings and squash the little green pigs found inside to earn points. There are various different kinds of birds to use in each level, with different abilities useful to solve each puzzle, and the Christmas-themed levels also include gift packages you can smash to earn extra points.
Super Mega Worm vs. Santa ($0.99)
In quite possibly the coolest seasonal adaptation of a game, Super Mega Worm vs. Santa takes the premise of Super Mega Worm — controlling a massive, subterranean monster that devours animals, people, vehicles and buildings indiscriminately — and switches out the setting for the North Pole. Instead of chomping on soldiers and rednecks bent on your destruction, Super Mega Worm has to teach Santa and his elves a lesson, as well as polar bears, birds, snowmen, penguins and deer. It’s a bloody, monstrous and hilarious Christmas take on a fun concept, with the elves grabbing grenades, riding reindeer, and unloading with rifles to try to take you down. Meanwhile, you’ve got 15 levels to evolve your worm, gain new abilities, and ultimately face off against Santa. It’s the kind of Christmas game that fits right in with Die Hard on your list of must-watch holiday movies.
Cut the Rope: Holiday Gift (Free)
You might want to consider sending the folks over at Chillingo a holiday card to say thanks for Cut the Rope: Holiday Gift (free) — it’s 25 more addictive levels of their hit Cut the Rope, but in its own, free, standalone app. All the levels have a holiday theme, and feature challenging puzzle with the same mechanics. You need to get a hanging piece of candy into the mouth of your monster friend, Nom Nom, by cutting different pieces of rope by swiping. There are also stars scattered around each level that you can capture by swinging the candy into them, creating multi-step puzzle solutions that are a bit of a holiday themed, monster-feeding Rube Goldberg contraption. You can’t go wrong with free, and Chillingo’s gift this holiday season is more than worth a download.
Doodle Jump Christmas Special ($0.99)
Endless vertical scroller Doodle Jump gets free downloadable theme updates for lots of different reasons — Halloween was the most recent, but there are news ones all the time. For the winter holiday, Lima Sky released both a free update for its standard version of the game, and Doodle Jump Christmas Special ($0.99). The latter is basically Doodle Jump’s Christmas update, but bigger, because Lima Sky created more than the 20MB update download cap for the original, and decided to create a whole separate app to accommodate Doodle Jump’s new Christmas graphic set. Like Doodle Jump, the game uses tilt and tapping controls to control a little alien-looking creature that you have to help bounce as high as you can. The higher you get, the higher your score, which is tracked on a Game Center-supported leaderboard.
Christmas With Weezer ($4.99)
Alternative rock band, Weezer, put out an album of classic Christmas songs this year, and along with the six-track album is the Christmas With Weezer ($4.99) iPhone game, a version of the popular rhythm game Tap Tap Revenge 3. The game is available as a standalone app purchase and includes the album’s six tracks, plus a pair of extra Weezer songs: Pork and Beans and The Greatest Man That Ever Lived. Like the rest of Tap Tap Revenge, Christmas with Weezer is played by listening to the tracks and tapping along as prompted by three different colored markers that cross a line at the bottom of the screen, signalling when you need to tap them. If you’ve ever seen the games Rock Band or Guitar Hero played, you’ll recognize the same mechanic at work in this game. Christmas With Weezer includes multiple difficulty modes, multiplayer support, and several Christmas-themed backgrounds to go along with the rock-style Yuletide tracks.
