National Rifle Association Releases Shooting Game

The National Rifle Association has released an iOS game called NRA: Practice Range. It’s a free target shooting app that features a variety of real guns. You can unlock more guns for a buck apiece via in-app purchase. The game’s release is surprising, because the video game industry is one of the groups the NRA has blamed for real-life violence.

NRA: Practice Range is a very barebones target practice app that lets you shoot in three modes: Indoor Range, Outdoor Range, and Skeet Shoot.
The controls are handled either using the gyroscope or an analog stick. Neither work well, leaving you with floaty-feeling controls. If you’re looking for a target practice game, you’d be much better off downloading something like Bullseye Factory or even Can Knockdown 2.

The loading screens are stocked with facts and tips like: “Gun Safety Tip #4: Know your target and what is behind it.”
There’s also an information section that sends you to the NRA website for pages related to gun safety, NRA news, and the like.
It’s ironic that the NRA has released a video game, because games– along with music videos and movies– are where the NRA has laid the blame for real-life violence. In a statement on the shooting in Newtown, Connecticut last month, NRA president Wayne LaPierre made the following statement:

And here’s another dirty little truth that the media try their best to conceal: There exists in this country a callous, corrupt and corrupting shadow industry that sells, and sows, violence against its own people, through vicious, violent video games with names like Bulletstorm, Grand Theft Auto, Mortal Kombat and Splatterhouse.

Power Rangers Legends game Review

So we’ve apparently reached a point where we can consider the “Infinity Blade style” a thing now. For better or worse the game has changed the face of iOS gaming and there’s going to be a lot of imitators. Some, like Avengers Initiative or Dark Meadow, have been fairly successful.
And on the other end of the spectrum we have games like Power Rangers: Legends, which is a shallow, boring experience.

Power Rangers Legends Review

In Power Rangers: Legends you play as the spandex clad space-warriors as they defend the Earth from the evil Lord Zedd and Goldar. If those names don’t mean anything to you, don’t fret.
Since Legends doesn’t even make the slightest attempt to do anything interesting with the property, it hardly makes any difference who the villains or heroes are.

Like putty in your hands.
The Power Rangers Legends game plays pretty much exactly like Infinity Blade.
You have buttons for dodging, blocking and special attacks and you swipe on the screen to perform moves like attacking and parrying. The main problem here is that the combat is so dull and the controls so bad that making any kind of progress is going to be a frustrating combination of luck and sheer perseverance.
The buttons are barely responsive and the game seems to register our swipes for attacking on a seemingly random basis.
Even if the buttons worked well, it really wouldn’t make a difference as combat is just beyond boring. A typical battle goes like this: your enemy appears on screen and stands around for a while, kind of swaying back and forth like he’s drunk.
When he decides to do something, the attacks come so slowly that you’d swear you were fighting under water. The funny thing is that since the controls are such a disaster, even enemies moving in slow-motion can be shockingly deadly. There are special attacks and power moves available but they rarely add anything to the coma inducing skirmishes you’ll be putting yourself through.

Power Rangers Legends game issues

Power Rangers also crashes on a fairly regular basis.
We played the game on both an iPhone 4S and iPad2, and the game would quit on us quite often.
When power house games like Infinity Blade 2 can be played with no trouble at all for hours on end, Legends has no excuse for being so buggy. It also has really long load times, and since you’ll be dying a lot, you’ll be waiting quite a while to get back in the fray.

Power Rangers Legends a fan game

Power Rangers: Legends is a game for fans of the show and no one else. And even Power Rangers fans might be disappointed by what is essentially a cheap knockoff of far superior games. The game is simply terrible and should be avoided by everyone.

Repulze game Review

The Repulze game is a sci-fi hovercraft racer that certainly tries its best to nail down the visual stylings of the PlayStation classic WipeOut.
Without a doubt, Repulze it’s a great-looking game and has an excellent sense of speed, along with some tweaks on the genre that help give it a bit more identity. The game takes advantage of its touch screen platform with solid and sensible controls, and a design philosophy that encourages short bursts of play.

Repulze review

Repulze offers up 9 different tracks and 6 mean machines to test out. As usual, only a couple of each are available at first, and more are unlocked as you collect badges. The whole focus of the game is on completing specific achievements on any given track. These might include crashing fewer than three times, hitting specific time goals, or matching the red and green energy polarities properly.

In the future, traffic will be eliminated.
Polarities hold a particular importance in the game. There are red and green force fields all over the track. Running through the proper polarity color earns the ship an energy boost– get three boosts and you earn a turbo. Hit the wrong polarity and the ship suffers a serious bout of deceleration. It’s an interesting wrench to throw into standard racing and works for the most part.
The problem with this system (and the game in general) is that this polarity gimmick is actually taking the place of competition. While later tracks throw in the occasional slow moving bus or something, there are no other racers on the track. It might simply be due to technical limitations of the game’s 3D engine, but still makes for a serious oversight.

Fog, however, will not.
Thankfully, Repulze game does look beautiful. The tracks range from sci-fi cities to the Martian landscape and are all impressively designed. Billboards and periphery background activity mirror the console game Repulze is trying to pay homage to, and the pulsing techno soundtrack works well.

Repulze game controls
The game can be controlled with either arrows on the bottom of the screen or through the accelerometer. Both work, though we had to tweak the sensitivity of the motion controls to get them to feel stable, and ended up using the touch controls anyway. Tapping the screen activates the boost power as well.

The developers have already announced that updates are on the way (called ‘phases’ in this case) that will add even more racing modes, but as is, Repulze is a fun and challenging racing game. While the lack of any competition be it AI or human is a noticeable flaw, the rest of the game is exceptionally well made.
The price is also a steal for such a gorgeous game, making it worthwhile for racing fans.

Cut the Rope game Review

Cut the Rope is a downright adorable action-puzzle-physics game. It’s also fresh, challenging, gorgeous, and highly entertaining.
It has simple rules, intuitive controls, and can be played in short bursts or blitzed through in a marathon gaming session. In short, it’s exactly the type of game most people who own iPhones want to play. And play it they should!

The goal of each level is to feed a piece of candy, suspended by a series of ropes, into the mouth of a cuddly little monster named Om Nom, who is located somewhere on the screen. To do that, you have to cut the ropes in a way that makes the candy swing, jump, or fall into the little guy’s mouth. If you can do that while picking up all of the stars in each level, then you’re golden.

Cut the Rope Review

Cut the Rope is a puzzle game, so you’ll have to put on your thinking cap to figure out which ropes to cut, and in what order. Complicating matters, you’ll encounter movable pegs, spikes and electricity, bubbles that make the candy float, and whoopie cushions that, when tapped, send puffs of air that can blow the candy where you need it to go.

Be careful where you sit.
Each level of the game Cut the Rope is cleverly designed to make delivering the candy to the monster difficult but not impossible.
Solving the levels requires precise timing or delicate precision, or better yet both.

As you progress through the game’s 100 levels (more are on the way, says the developer), the difficulty mounts steadily, resulting in some real head-scratchers toward the end.
Both Crystal and Game Center provide leaderboards and achievements, giving the game a healthy amount of replay value.

Cut the Rope game issues

The only issues we have with the Cut the Rope game are some minor control annoyances. For instance, once sliding pegs are introduced, the game will occasionally think you’re trying to move a peg when you mean to cut a rope or vice versa. This can get you into trouble in some levels, but it’s mostly a minor annoyance.

Cut the Rope is a game nearly everyone will enjoy, puzzle enthusiast or not. It packs all the charm, variety, and smart level design you could hope for, while maintaining simplicity of gameplay. In fact, we’d put it right up there with the best casual games on the App Store, like Fragger, Fruit Ninja, and Angry Birds. Be sure to pick this one up.