Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing

 

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Almost every publisher has lost its way with its biggest franchise at some point during its life.

The best games in the biggest franchise of them all - Star Wars - have come not from within the LucasArts stable, but from third parties.

By the same token, Sega's ability to make a hash of Sonic games over the years is well-documented. No surprise, then, that it should take Sumo Digital to master the one element that's proved to be the bane of Sonic's life: his speed.

Racing ahead

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The one advantage Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing has over Sega's own calamities, however, is that this is not a platformer. As a consequence, Sumo Digtial's inspiration is inescapable, and runs coherently behind almost every element of Sonic's stab at racing: Mario Kart.

The game is unashamed of the association. Instead of trying to banish each and every reference to Mario Kart – or, even worse, copying it pixel for pixel – the developer has taken the elements that work and adjusted them to fit around the Sonic mould.

First up, let's look at the similarities. For starters, the very structure of play – competing in three cups made up of four tracks each – is a familiar one. On track are five rivals, and your task is to bump and slide your way to the front of the pack.

Aiding you in your mission is Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing's supremely balanced controls.

Acceleration is handled for you, but you steer by gently turning your iPhone like a steering wheel. In this regard, Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing is without equal: Sumo Digital has nailed the often delicate nature of accelerometer controls, and the rest of play flourishes as a result.

Destination Sega
Skill rather than luck determines your fate, and the courses – which reach out across the high points of Sega's library, from House of the Dead to Samba Di Amigo – do their best to stretch your talents.

It's this very range of settings that helps set Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing apart from the competition. Though arguably not as tight a package as Mario Kart as a result, Sumo has ensured the game has a nice sweep of circuits.

Short and sharp tracks, for instance, are hectic affairs that can be won or lost on the last corner, with pickups often deciding the outcome.

As you might expect, the game's question marked boxes contain a variety of treats, including those that boost your own speed as well as those that hamper the pace of your rivals, rockets being the most prominent example.

Long courses, in contrast, require a far smoother approach, calling for a knowledge of the racing line and an ability to drift.

It's this need to drift – and pick up the speed boost that results – that defines much of Sonic & Sega All Star Racing's play. It's a simple enough trick to pick up, assigned to a yellow button in the bottom right of the screen, and it works best in the deeper tracks, where it's possible to build both a healthy lead and gain much satisfaction when you pull it off perfectly.

Star billing
The biggest draw for many players, however, will not be the sublime range of courses, or even Sumo Digital's deft grip on the game's controls, but rather the cast of characters both the Sonic and Sega licenses bring to the starting line.

The inclusion of Shenmue's Ryo Hazuki and Crazy Taxi's B.D. Joe in a title otherwise dominated by Sonic and co. is as offbeat as it is shrewd.

Courses and characters combined, Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing is no shrinking violet, and the ability to take on both the game's brilliantly balanced AI controlled rivals as well as those in the real world (both local and wi-fi enabled multiplayer on offer) means there's reason enough to immerse yourself in it fully.

A nice addition is the game's mission mode, which hands out supplementary tasks like collecting coins or passing through gates on an open plan course.

Turn back the clock a generation and Sonic's latest wouldn't have looked out of place on PS2 or Xbox in terms of content, style, and gameplay. In fact, on almost every level imaginable Sumo Digital has surpassed all competition on iPhone, and placed Sega's much maligned mascot firmly back on the right track as a result.

tower defence: lost earth

There is no way to beat around the bush, so let's just get this out of the way from the start: Com2uS trademarking "tower defense," for Tower Defense: Lost Earth [$2.99 / HD] is a little bonkers, like if Call of Duty was granted a trademark and changed its name to First Person Shooter. Not only does it peeve off a bunch of developers caught in the legal crossfire, it also gives players incredibly lofty expectations for the final product when it's branded as the "officially trademarked" game of tower defense.
Thankfully, it delivers, albeit through a kitchen sink approach more than an innovative one. This is in fact a tower defense game and you'll get every single tower defense trope you've ever run into. The core campaign takes the preset route approach, where you'll set up your units on a grid and the enemies will take a predestined path. There are, however, seven different challenge stages that offer more variety, including several that utilize freeform defense where you create the enemy paths by obstructing the enemy's movements, like in Fieldrunners [$2.99 / HD].


You'll have nine different units to choose from, each of which act as you'd expect in a tower defense game and counter the ten different enemy types in different ways. Enemy diversity is limited to slow, fast, and slow then exploding-into-fast-creatures. Killing enemies and shooting at certain environmental structures yield crystals that can be turned into more units. Some of the stages have actual resource-gathering units associated with them, but don't expect it to be a major part of the experience. The limited units and enemy types means each stage has a relatively restricted number of ways to complete it, which is altered slightly based on the difficulty setting you choose.
There are three difficulty settings, each changing the number of enemies, your starting resources or the score awarded. There are also four different game modes, the standard defense mode, a survival mode, a resource gathering mode and an attack mode. The first three are pretty self-explanatory, but the attack mode changes the dynamic of the game in an unusual way. You'll have to defend by setting up towers as you usually would, but you'll also have to expand through the level to get your units close enough to a boss to attack it. At times it's more annoying than it is innovative, as the core game doesn't change and it ends up just adding a layer of grinding.
But for the most part, the game is well balanced and well paced and you probably won't find yourself getting stuck too often. There were a few levels that stumped me where I was wishing there was a help or skip function, but for the most part, if you follow the "rock, paper, scissors" approach to defending against enemies, you'll get through the campaign on the easiest setting with little trouble. As far as strategy is concerned, there are two different ways you can approach a match, either by upgrading your units (you get two upgrades to each unit) or by scattering a ton of units across the map. Upgrading seems to work better in the long term, but your mileage may vary. If you find yourself in a pinch, each level offers you one additional attack with a one-time use. These include gas that slowly drains enemy life, a ship that drops bombs and others.
Perhaps because Com2uS is already in deep water with a lot of players because of the trademarking, it should come as no surprise the game is well executed. Visually, it has the same look as a lot their RPGs, with well-animated sprites, diversity in the environments and a reasonably long campaign. The menus and interface are well laid out and work well on both the iPhone and iPad. Although the game is refined, it's still generic sci-fi nonsense, clearly inspired by the menus of nearly every single PC science fiction game in existence. The sound doesn't live up to the visuals, with comparatively underwhelming enemy and weapon sound effects.


The campaign does feature a story mode, but it reads like pretty much every RTS storyline ever written. You need to expand to save the human race and to do so, you've decided to exploit the resources of an alien planet. The inhabitants aren't too keen on this idea and start attacking your settlements by running at your guns in waves. It's commendable Tower Defense: Lost Earth tries to add a narrative layer, but the fact you're the invading party, not the defending one makes the story come across as more ridiculous than it already is.
There is leaderboard integration with Game Center as well, but the options are relatively limited. With as much development effort that was clearly dumped into the game, you'd expect to see a bit more stat tracking, trophies or more complex leaderboards. That's only going to matter to some people, but for statistics nerds, the streamlined leaderboards might be a bit of a disappointment.
There is no way around the fact that naming your game after a genre is really not that wise of a decision, but Tower Defense: Lost Earth does a good job of providing exactly what you'd expect from it. Still, it's hard to shake the feeling the game is missing something — it's a well-executed genre game, but it lacks character. It's not going to fundamentally change what we expect from the genre, it's not going to shift mountains or alter the collective consciousness, but it will give tower defense nuts a deep and nicely packaged experience– And really, what more can you ask for?