Boom Beach is One Year Old!

Boom Beach is the last game released by Supercell, the Finnish company widely known by Clash of Clans and Hay Day.

After the success of those two titles, Supercell presented Boom Beach, an interesting evolution of Clash of Clans. Both games share a basic principles, but the differences are important.

In Boom Beach, you also have a base that you need to defend from the other players, who will try to raid your island to steal your resources. Each player has his home base in a tropical island, and you will be able to explore a few island in the archipelago that surrounds you.

When you start the game, there is an enemy in the archipelago, who had several islands under his control. You can free their towns from Hammerman's rule, and thus, the citizens of those islands will send you gold, wood and stone.

With these resources you can upgrade your Head Quarter, unlocking new buildings for your base. You need to strategically place the sniper towers, machine guns, mortars, mines and cannons to stop the invading forces, but at the same time, you will try to overcome the defenses of the other players.

With one Gunboat and some a Landing Crafts, you will choose some troops, train them, and navigate to other islands to attack them. If you win, that island will be under your control and you will get resources.

In a similar way than Clash of Clans, there are different troops available, with different characteristics. You can upgrade them spending gold and recruiting as much troops as your Landing Crafts admit.

The main difference between both games is the battles. In Clash of Clans there isn't much strategy involved, the troop attack their favorite targets but once released on the battlefield, there isn't much that you can do to direct them.

In Boom Beach you have flares that you can sent to direct your troops to the selected targets. This gives you a much better control about the flow of the battle. The Gunboat can also fire artillery and Medkits, and the way you use them can change the outcome of a battle.

The strategy is a key factor in Boom Beach, and every battle is a challenge.

 As the other games from Supercell, Boom Beach is free but includes in-app purchases. You can buy diamonds, which are used to speed up the waiting times. However, every week you will obtain a reasonable amount of them, so buying them is really an optional choice.

Boom Beach is a great game, and if you enjoy Clash of Clans, you should definitely give it a try. You can get it from Google Play and the App Store.

Source: Supercell.

Google releases a collection of watch faces: Street Art

Android Wear has been around for a while and finally Google has released the first collection of watch faces. The whole collection is named Street Art, and it brings a great piece of art to your watch.

There are a lot of different paintings included, all of them featuring some piece of street art from Google Art Project. There are some well-known names behind those images, and you can get the whole collection for free from the Play Store.

The artists responsible for the beautiful watch faces are Aitch, Andre Fernandes Trindade, Cheko, DRAW, Drawing Jesus, Erik Otto, Gemeniano Cruz, God Mess, Hugo Lucas, Katch, L Is Not An Artist aka Luísa Cortesão, Mariana Dias Coutinho, Mercedes deBellard, Mercedes deBellard & Cheko, Nark, Nicolae Negura, Paulo Arraiano, Pedro Batista, Phibs, Reach, Samina, Slap, Sublinismo & Cheko, Tamara Alves & José Carvalho, The Empty Belly, Tinta Crua, and Will Barras.

When you install the app, you will have a few customization options. You can choose the style of the hour displayed by choosing among three options: minimal, analog or digital.

The minimal option uses a couple of small circles moving along a circle to show the time, while the analog face is a conventional round watch face. The numbers and hands and displayed over the picture and it's obviously more suited for round devices.  Finally, the digital face shows the time at the bottom, so you can see almost the full painting.

In addition, you can also decide if you want to see the date or not.

And that's all. There isn't any more options. The painting will change every few minutes to the next one, so you can't choose one and keep it on your screen. It's quite a drawback, and probably in some update Google will add some more options.

However, if you like this street art style, it's really worth a try. The paintings are really great to look at, so you can download the app and check if you find some that you really like.

You will find the Street Art app at the Play Store.

Zombie Highway 2 available on Android

Zombies are leftover characters today, and Zombie Highway 2 is one of the last titles we've seen in the games scene.

Zombie Highway 2 is a sequel of an acclaimed game developed for smartphones and tablets with Android and iOS where our greatest and almost only goal was to kill all these undead while we survived the apocalypse through improved car loaded with weapons. What gives this Android game does not seem to be an experience that differs too much with the prequel that has already had its reputation, and we still have as objective to eliminate all the zombies that cross our path.

Even if you succeed to see some changes that make the gameplay a new and exciting element, as is the addition of Nitro will allow us to travel to faster speed to crush these threats at full speed. Also we see new content has been added to tap, as well as what we already knew of the series, we see a total of 6 new remodeled cars, 17 new weapons redesigned that can level up, including 4 super weapons of mass destruction.

We will also see that the challenge increases with not just 4 zombies completely new from the total of 10 redesigned, plus more than 50 challenges that we meet as additional objectives. As a final detail, we will meet daily challenges that we can complete to receive additional rewards, not counting a few levels are randomly generated for each as a unique experience.

As for the graphic quality of this new release on Android, it can be seen that it is a more than satisfactory not only for the implemented models, but the lighting in the game. All this combined will give us more than satisfactory experience to hunt zombies at high speed, although it would need a minimally midrange processor to run it smoothly.

Zombie Highway 2 available on Android

Stormfall: Rise of Balur, a dark world of fantasy and legends

For many, Stormfall is already well known for quite some time, since it is available on Facebook. After years of waiting, Stormfall: Rise of Balur has finally arrived in a version for Android aimed at mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets.

Stormfall: Rise of Balur is a Massively Multiplayer Online game in which you play a warrior who has been chosen to lead the battle against darkness and restore peace to the land of Darkshine. The game, which is pure strategy, will keep you playing a handful of hours.

During the game, you must take control of your people, in which it begins by constructing buildings and investigate new soldiers and arts with which you will beat in combat. As you go up in level, climb on the position and you will unlock new options. Unlike other games, in Stormfall: Rise of Balur you will be in constant contact with other players in the world, and you can forge alliances to fight and conquer new places.

The game has a mechanical quite similar to Game of War: Fire Age, although unlike it, especially in the graphics, because the game has been adapted from Facebook to mobile and graphics are in high definition, so the gameplay is pretty good. In addition, it is available in several languages, including Spanish and English (dubbed, not only written), and every day you play you can get premium items for accelerating the construction or recruitment of troops.

Among the soldiers who can be recruited to build your army there are barbarians, paladins, umbrian, dragons and magicians, but there are many more types of troops which form your own fleet, you can send them to fight other players in PvP server.

Highly addictive, Stormfall: Rise of Balur is a mixture of the original game created for Facebook and Game of War, but improving the graphics and gameplay aspects. It is a good adaptation of the game for Android, although clear differences are serious and would be interesting to connect accounts both smarphone/tablet and PC. If you are looking for a fun game to play, do not hesitate to keep an eye on Stormfall: Rise of Balur, available on the App Store.

Stormfall: Rise of Balur, a dark world of fantasy and legends

Hook, a minimalistic puzzle from Rainbow Train

There are lots of puzzle games on the Play Store. They are specially handy when we have a few minutes to spare because we are waiting for the train, we are in a cue or just because we want to relax for a little bit.

The great point about puzzles is that they make us struggle to solve all kind of situations, most of the time without any other adversary than ourselves.

Hook is one of those puzzle games. There is no time limit, no score, no adversary to beat. There is only the puzzle and our ability to solve it. It is an extremely minimalist game, without vibrant colors or detailed designs.

The idea is simple, we need to clear the screen. In each puzzle, we will find a kind of entangled mess of lines, mixed with switchers, spin wheels and press buttons. The objective is avoiding any of them to crash into another, watching carefully how they overlap.

The puzzles are simple at the beginning, but then they get more and more complex by adding connectors and split branches, which can be activated from different pressing buttons. If you make some bad move, the puzzle restart, and you can try again.

The developers, Rainbow Train, describes it as a minimal, relaxing, puzzle game. Is so minimalist that there are no menus nor achievements, just the black lines on the beige background. Even the music is trying to calm you, with soft sounds that helps to provide this kind of relaxing atmosphere.

Hook looks simple, bur if you like puzzle games, it will surely catch you interest. If you want to give it a try,it will give you some good moments to test your skills. It is available for Android, Windows Phone and iOS, priced at $0.99.

PPSSPP 1.0, the Best PSP Emulator for Android

Sony has not been as successful as expected in their jumps to the handheld, dominated with an iron fist since the time of Nintendo Game Boy and only smartphones have achieved part of market. Precisely on mobile phones, and tablets, we can enjoy PPSSPP now, one of the best, or the best, PSP emulator for Android.

PPSSPP has since 2012 allowed emulate PlayStation Portable in Windows and other operating systems, the Android version has now reached version 1.0 after a season in beta. Although the PSP did not show all the potential it had, left a good number of titles that deserves to be played, as GTA Stories or Metal Gear: Portable Ops, you can now enjoy games on your phone or tablet. PPSSPP is free with ads but you can pay to remove them from your display too (Gold version is available in Play Store for €4.99).

PPSSPP also allows the ability to configure the keyboard or external command to your taste, scaling to HD screen. Remember that the PSP had a resolution of 480 × 272 píxels. Obviously, you hould bring the games in ISO or CSO format. 

It goes without saying that there used to emulate the PS Vita and is only compatible with the first portable console from Sony, although as we said did not have the catalog that many expected seeing what the Japanese company had achieved their domestic and PlayStation has a good number of games worth trying. PSP haf an enviable catalog of the best portables around on the history. Kingdom Hearts, Metal Gear, Final Fantasy. With so many great game, they just do not really need the catalog of Vita.

Finally, there are other alternatives, such as FPSE or ePSXe, although all consume the life of your battery in a few hours. Pitty that smartphones are seen as limited by their battery though. Emulation of 3D consoles in Android is complicated because of the GPU these devices usually have and drivers.

Luckily the PSP is a fairly easy platform to emulate and PPSSPP team have worked tirelessly to improve and optimize to get an excellent emulator on all platforms.

PPSSPP 1.0 requires Android 2.3 and higher versions.

Version: 1.0.0.0 Size: 15M

Odd Bot Out: use building blocks, electricity, and physics to escape the robot factory

In the world of smartphones is everytime becoming easier to find good games around. In addition it should be noted that not only large companies with many resources manage to create good titles -take a look at Space Liner-. On the contrary, indie games often  offer pleasant surprises in stores, so we like to show some of them occasionally.

Odd Bot Out is an indie  attractive proposal. This is a title for Android developed by Martin Magni, which come fully into a mix of platform and puzzle where physics is very important. In Odd Bot Out the author puts us in the shoes of a detective robot that after failing an exam, must escape the factory, a simple argument but that leads to hours of entertainment on your Android devices.

That is due to their physical working system that will challenge you to play with blocks, switches, lifts, levers, rockets and even with the task of building strange artifacts, all along no less than 100 levels. There are two versions of Odd Bot Out, a complete version and a demo. In the demo you have 10 full levels and from there you can play the rest with in app purchases. The full version is a payment of 1.99 euros, price reasonable enough to enjoy their hundred levels. 

Source: AndroidPolice