| Clowning Around ($ 0.99, Trial) | ||||||||||||||||||
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| Crazy Casino (Free) | ||||||||||||||||||
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| Chromatic (Free) | ||||||||||||||||||
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| Tangled Birds (Free) | ||||||||||||||||||
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| Monster Stack (Free) | ||||||||||||||||||
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| Physi Bricks (Free) | ||||||||||||||||||
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| Angry Birds Uncovered (Free) | ||||||||||||||||||
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| SteamBirds ($ 1.99, Trial) | |||||||||||||||||
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| Orientle (Free) [New+Cool] | ||||||||||||||||||
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| Angry Birds ($ 2.99, Trial) | ||
| At last, after a series of (good) clones including Pandas vs. Ninjas and Chicks’n’Vixens, the original Angry Birds comes to close the Must Have Windows Phone 7 Games for this summer.
Windows Phone 7 is a complete platform, now that Angry Birds is available for it. |
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| The king of the casual games is a symbol for the Windows Phone 7 and its App Marketplace to have reached the first stage of maturity. After the good news about the Mango features that analysts predict will make WP7 a contender to iOS and Android, now the WP7 marketplace has the games that people want to play, and the number one is still Angry Birds.
If you have lived on another planet for a year and a half or so, Angry Birds is a physics game where you sling birds with your finger trying to take down green pigs who stole the birds’ eggs. |
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| The game is fun, of course, and challenging: there are multiple types of birds that work best with the different materials the pigs use to build their defense fortress. Black birds explode and work well with stone; blue birds multiply in the air and work well with glass, yellow birds work well with wood and so on..
As you progress through the levels your skills are tested: aim and release the sling correctly, use the right bird for the right job and crumble the card castle that the pigs build to defend themselves. |
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| There is a lot of gameplay here, so the $ 2.99 price tag is not out of this world, even if the game costs less on other platforms.
Right after the initial introductory levels, the things get serious quickly: passing a level becomes a precision and tactics challenge (well, sometimes it’s just luck). If you are then going for all the achievements and try to get 3 stars in all stages, things become really hard – it will likely take tens of hours to get all the 3 stars achievements. |
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| Verdict (version reviewed: 1.0.0.0) | ||
| Yes, Angry Birds celebrity is overwhelming and excessive, but the game is fun, trying and the value is definitely there. Graphics are hilarious and sounds exhilarating.
If you played it on other platforms you might want to replay and go for the Xbox Live Achievements and the friends leaderboard – show your friends how good you are at throwing birds! |
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| Penguin (Free) [New+Cool] | |||||||||||||||||
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| Plants Vs. Zombies ($ 4.99, Trial) | ||
| PvZ is just a fantastic game: part strategy, part tower defense, and most of all F-U-N.
Zombies are attacking your house! You defend your turf planting vegetables that can throw pea-bullets to the zombies taking them down as they advance on your lawn. You gather resources in terms of solar energy that either drops from the sky or is generated by sunflowers, then you can spend it to acquire more plants. Different types of zombies and plants give a great variety to the game: attackers range from the plain undead to the pole vault jumper to the Michael Jackson zombie. A total of 26 types of zombies with different characteristics will attack and require adjustments in your defense tactics. Defenders range from peashooters to cherry bombs to potato mines. Use 49 perennial types to defend your doorstep: select the right tactic in every wave or zombies will soon knock on your door! |
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| The game is frenetic, at the beginning of the levels, you barely have the time to collect the sun rays that you have to spend them immediately; then in the middle of the level unfolding you need to save resources for the grand finale: a huge wave of zombies approaches at the end of each level: you better get ready!
Everything is made with great humor and style: the art has an awesome ironic aura, the zombie animations, movements and explosions are simply hilarious. Even achievements and leaderboards have the ironic style of the game. PvZ has become so iconic that Pop Cap has received 41 offers for a movie made with its style. |
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| The experience is completed by different game modes and mini games: Adventure is the main story and when you are done, 20 mini-games, puzzle mode and Zen Garden mode open up to give you even more fun time. PvZ is definitely one of the WP7 Xbox Live Games that provide the best value for your money, and we think that at $ 4.99 is a great price – you will get tons of fun gameplay for 5 bucks. | ||
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| Verdict (version reviewed: 1.0.0.0) | ||
| PvZ is available on every system on the planet (Xbox, PS, DS, iOS, Android, PC and Mac) and is finally available for our enjoyment on your WP7 phone of choice – well, make good use of it and enjoy every minute! | ||
| Danger Wing (Free) [Growing Apps] | ||||||||||||||||||
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| Sonic The Hedgehog 4: Episode I ($ 6.99, Trial) [New+Cool] | |||||||||||||||||
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| geoDefense ($ 2.99, Trial) |
| The Windows Phone 7 Must Have series of Xbox Live Games continues this week with geoDefense. This is a tower defense game, as the title suggests, and possibly the best so far on WP7. We already reviewed two great tower defense games: Next War and Big Guns. geoDefense is the perfect balance between the two: fast but not too short; intelligent but not boring; requiring the right time and effort to beat its levels. |
| The game offers 28 levels: 10 easy, 14 medium and 14 hard. The goal is to kill all the creeps with your towers before they get to your base and take a life away from you – once all the lives are lost, game over!
There are five tower types: Blaster (your typical cannon tower), Laser (goes through enemies, good to blast creeps in a row), Missile (area bomb), Shock (slows down creeps) and Vortex (builds up a large attack from dead creeps). Each tower can be upgraded up to seven times to get to their maximum power. There is a lot of game to play here, enemies come in different variations and the levels are designed with a specific strategy in mind. You have to apply the right strategy to the variation of enemies and the level layout or you will soon lose the game and have to start over. Remember: you will be challenged and fail. Multiple times. But then you will find the right strategy to beat the level and you will be gratified!! |
| Besides staying alive, there is a score mechanism. The score is in points, depending on which type of creep you kill; but there is a catch – the score has a multiplier that increases every time you take down a creep, based on where it was on the level: the closer the creeps explode to your base, the more the multiplier increases.
For example: making a creep explode at the beginning of the track is worth only a x1 multiplier increase, the final stretch is worth x5, the zone close to your base x10 and a creep exploding by hitting your base is worth x20 (and you lose a life)! To build up score you will have to use dangerous strategies, building your defenses to the end of the track rather than the usual beginning of the other tower defense games! |
| The great vectors-based graphic style and explosions reminds Geometry Wars. Sound is passable, lacking a little pace and rhythm, but ok.
As every Xbox Live game on Windows Phone 7 there are Achievements and Leaderboards (friends only leaderboard though). The only defect we found is that it’s hard to place the laser towers exactly where you want to, at least until you learn well the placement mechanism, which comes after playing a few games. |
| Verdict (version reviewed: 1.0.0.0) |
| geoDefense has already been a hit on iOS and now is getting ready to do the same on WP7: this is the best tower defense game on the platform, try it with the free trial option and you will agree with us. |