APPLE ARCADE:
Apple has over 100 games that are accessible through Apple Arcade. You can download and play as many of them as you’d like, and you’ll pay just $4.99 per month. But with so many games available, where should you start?
Here we have review summaries of a few games available in Apple Arcade. You can start with the games listed here, and then branch out on your own. The only limitation you’ll have to deal with is the amount of storage available on your device. You may need to uninstall other games to make way for new ones.
This game is a battle royale shooter in the vein of Fortnite, but it’s simplified down to twin-stick shooting that works fine with either a touchscreen or a gamepad. Familiar Fortnite concepts are reimagined: Good gear drops in refrigerators instead of crates, and the weapons consist of innocuous toys like icing-dispenser sniper rifles or popcorn shooters. The really big difference, though, is the only currency you have to spend in Butter Royale consists of the cookies and tickets you get from ordinary play. That makes Butter Royale a decent alternative for parents who don’t want their kids draining their bank accounts to, say, buy a Ninja skin.
You can read our full review at go. macworld.com/btro.
This is soccer without the slow bits while
still allowing for the nuances of specific playstyles and tournaments, whether it’s the Italian Catenaccio style or the 1930 World Cup. It’s wonderfully easy to play and pick up with either the touchscreen controls or a gamepad. You can play solo or you can hop into two-player local matches with other real people. There’s even a party mode that lets multiple people partake in a tournament of sorts, and you even have the options of playing games with either a “friendly” mode or one with penalties.
Read our full review at com/chsc. go.macworld.
This is a followup game to 2014’s wildly popular Crossy Road, and it wears much the same pixelated aesthetic. This time, though, developer Hipster Whale has delivered a platformer that unfolds in a procedurally generated tower with floors that change every time you bounce through it. You spend each level jumping from ledge to ledge with a member of a cast of unlockable characters that includes
everything from a chicken to a “Big Fat Pig,” bouncing on the heads of blocky birds and solving puzzles along the way. It’s designed for local co-op for up to four players who can play either on the same device with multiple controllers or through Wi-fi.
You can read our full review at go. macworld.com/crcs.
Doomsday Vault draws inspiration from Norway’s real-life Svalbard Global Seed Vault, which houses “backup” seeds for agriculture in case life as we know it on this planet ends up going down the can. This game is a puzzler, so you spend time scrounging through the sad ruins of a flooded city, a “complex,” and a spaceport for the few remaining plants. You have to find one or more seeds and store them back in your vault. The game manages to combine both entertainment and education in a manner few developers ever achieve. Maybe it’ll encourage us to cherish and preserve
what we have before we end up in the situation that Doomsday Vault depicts.
You can read our full review at go. macworld.com/doom.
In this game, a dragon named Zantorian has locked away the poor Prince Rupert in a castle and she won’t let him go unless the princess (you) manages to pony up around 250 gems. You’ll run into some spiky mushrooms, some plants that spew ink, and a few grumpy bumblebees. Flame traps occasionally pose a problem, but those are never so challenging as the big gems floating out on the lily pads. Miss them and fall in the water and you’ll lose all the powerups you’ve amassed while barreling through bubbles with question marks in your speedy hunt for shiny rocks. One bubble might give you a shield, while another might pull all the neighboring gems toward you.
You can read our full review at macworld.com/kncs. go.
Creativity is great, but sometimes you just want to blast some aliens—and that’s pretty much what you do here. Your little craft can fire in a circular direction, either to hit big space rocks or to riddle the hulls of pirate ships that pursue you. You can collect materials to craft more than 50 types of guns to use on roughly 60 different enemies, and you can use warp gates to jump among the various procedurally generated asteroid-strewn passages. Sometimes you’ll have to fight off waves of enemies in order to grab
artifacts from forgotten alien civilizations, all while being careful not to overheat your gun or deplete your ship’s shields.
You can read our full review at macworld.com/nway.
In this multiplayer augmented reality game, you’re “the guys in the van,” so to speak—the Simon Pegg character in Mission: Impossible or Penny in Inspector Gadget— and you’re guiding Charles, a not-so-bright spy, go. through a 3D digital model. Charles tiptoes through every facility he infiltrates, fully confident that you’ll use your “Spymatic 3000” to open the sealed doors and turn off the laser walls and security lights that threaten to thwart him from nabbing the goods. This is the first game that seriously entertains Apple’s AR vision, and also the first AR game that feels like it’d be fun to recommend at a party.
You can read our full review at go. macworld.com/oops. ■