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I recall with fondness the endless speculative arguments I heard around the elementary school lunch table in the 90s: who would win in a fight between Batman and Wolverine? Goku and Superman? Bill Clinton and Emilio Estevez? (There was always that one weird kid.) Imagine the same arguments happening in a university zoology department, and you might just find the inspiration for Animelee, an old-fashioned one-on-one fighter recently published in the Play Store. It's all about animals beating the crap out of each other. Check out the eye-popping trailer below:
If you were distracted by tons of Google I/O coverage or our NVIDIA SHIELD review yesterday, there's a slim chance that you missed the even bigger news: Kung Fury is now on YouTube. Stop reading this and go watch it now. Then come back here and read about the official mobile game for the indie movie, Kung Fury: Street Rage.
If you're tired of pretending that The Rock is a literal golem or playing the trading card version of wrestling, then the WWE is ready to deliver a (slightly) less fictional experience to hungry gamers. WWE 2K (that's the publisher 2K, not the year 2000) takes the familiar 3D fighting formula from decades of console wrestling games and shrinks it down into a mobile title. Even more impressive is the price: a single dollar with no in-app purchases in sight, at least for the moment.
Dear readers: I have a confession to make. I completely forgot about our monthly best-of games series, because when the event came up on the calendar I was busy drooling over the new SHIELD set-top box and other Game Developers Conference-related stuff in San Francisco. Here, belated but hopefully still appreciated, are my picks for the top seven Android games of last month and a few honorable mentions.
Mortal Kombat fans have been looking forward to Mortal Kombat X, the newest next-gen entry to the long-running fighter series, for quite a while. Now, as they've already done with properties like Injustice: Gods Among Us and WWE: Immortals, Warner Bros. is preparing a mobile companion app to go along with the much more complex console game. It will be available sometime in April, probably around the same time that the full game is released.
The Rhythm Of Fighters is a quirky take on SNK's storied history of 2D brawlers... that plays like a swiping, tapping musical game. This unique title has met the same fate of other games by big publishers who apparently wanted more bang for their buck, and shifted from a paid game to free-to-play. (See Assassin's Creed Pirates and Asphalt 8 for other examples.) But if you spent the measly dollar that the game cost when it launched, don't fret: SNK is here to placate you with free stuff.
Have you ever seen marionette puppets feign a martial arts battle? They look a lot like the fighters in Dragon Finga, a 2D brawler that lets the player control multiple points of articulation at once to take on enemies. Usually rag doll physics in 2D games look a little janky (see Flop Fu for a good example), but Dragon Finga's tongue-in-cheek take on classic Hong Kong fighting cinema is a surprisingly effective game in its own right.
Crescent Moon has been one of the more reliable developers on the Play Store as of late, and their newest game is definitely worth a look from anyone who enjoys a good old-fashioned beat-em-up. Nakama evokes the spirit of 2D side-scrolling fighters like Streets Of Rage or Double Dragon. At least, it's like Double Dragon might have been if you played it at 200 frames per second.
We don't have Tekken. We don't have Street Fighter. We don't have DOA. But Namco just gave fighter fans one hell of a reason to celebrate: the original SoulCalibur is now available on Android. The Dreamcast port of this arcade fighter favorite has long been considered one of the gems of the genre, and you can play it on your phone right now. It's a pricey $6.67 and compatible with Gingerbread and up.
Fans of classic beat-em-ups, it's time to get excited. while it's true that there are more than a few entries in this genre available on the Play Store already, almost all of them owe at least some inspiration to the great Double Dragon of arcade fame. DotEmu, no slouch when it comes to breathing new life into classics, is bringing all three of the original games to the Play Store sometime in the near future.
The Tekken series is one of Namco's biggest properties, a beloved handful of games that helped pioneer the 3D one-on-one fighting genre. Tekken Arena is an embarrassing mobile cash-in, with no 3D element to speak of and barely any portion that could be called "fighting." It might just be the most absurd deviation from the central element of a gaming property that I've ever seen.
Welcome to the latest entry in our Bonus Round series, wherein we tell you all about the new Android games of the day that we couldn't get to during our regular news rounds. Consider this a quick update for the dedicated gamers who can't wait for our bi-weekly roundups, and don't want to wade through a whole day's worth of news just to get their pixelated fix. Today we've not one but two robot games, a cartoon tactical version of Game of Thrones, an audio endless runner, a poultry endless faller, and reverse Asteroids. Without further ado:
You know that feeling you get every once in a while, when you suddenly have this undeniable urge to punch a bear in the face? Tim does, and when his family is kidnapped by a secret conspiracy of ursine overlords, he's got the perfect excuse to indulge. The pixelated, flannel-wearing hero of Fist of Awesome is out to punch everything that moves and kick everything that doesn't.
At first, the screenshots of I, Gladiator make it look like the latest in a long line of Infinity Blade clones. But wait, dear reader: this is no tired, overproduced button-masher. This is a new, exciting, fresh overproduced button masher, which attempts to adapt the feel and controls of a big-time console beat-em-up like Devil May Cry for mobile devices. What does that mean? It means you can actually walk around and pick which bad guy you're about to dismember.
There's something strange going on with SNK's The King of Fighters. Way back in March of 2012 an Android version of the classic 16-bit 2D fighter series was published, with a frustratingly short list of supported devices and no small amount of technical problems. The app disappeared from the US Play Store before too long, only to reappear this July. Now there's a brand new version, The King Of Fighters-A 2012, available alongside the original Android release.
Welcome to the latest entry in our Bonus Round series, wherein we tell you all about the new Android games of the day that we couldn't get to during our regular news rounds. Consider this a quick update for the dedicated gamers who can't wait for our bi-weekly roundups, and don't want to wade through a whole day's worth of news just to get their pixelated fix. Today we've got a startlingly realistic skateboard game, a proud dungeon crawler, and a super-sized take on Rock, Paper, Scissors. Without further ado:
Welcome to the latest entry in our Bonus Round series, wherein we tell you all about the new Android games of the day that we couldn't get to during our regular news rounds. Consider this a quick update for the dedicated gamers who can't wait for our bi-weekly roundups, and don't want to wade through a whole day's worth of news just to get their pixelated fix. Today we've got a big-budget (but free-to-play) zombie FPS, a game in which Snoop Dogg teaches you the ways of kung-fu fighting, a new version of a game that really didn't need a new version, and an infamous Flash game/exercise in frustration. Without further ado:
Welcome to the latest entry in our Bonus Round series, wherein we tell you all about the new Android games of the day that we couldn't get to during our regular news rounds. Consider this a quick update for the dedicated gamers who can't wait for our bi-weekly roundups, and don't want to wade through a whole day's worth of news just to get their pixelated fix. Today we've got an unfashionably late Batman game, a giddy throwback to beat-em-ups of yore, a 2D top-down shooter (minus the shooting), and a couple of free demos for Kairosoft's pixelated favorites. Without further ado:
Ah, the golden age of pulp fantasy. When men were men, women were women, and gigantic, toothy, screaming monsters were everywhere. New iOS pilgrim God of Blades takes its inspiration from the muscle-bound heroes from Cimmeria, slaps them on a two-dimensional endless runner background, and throws in more swords, axes, and clubs with a nail on the end than any undead warrior could ever need.
Minibash, a 2D fighter that originally sprang forth from the Toribash community as a flash and iPhone game, recently hit version 1.0 for Android thanks to Nabi Studios. The game is a brilliantly simple 2D turn-based fighting game, in which players train, morph, and fight their respective characters - kicking, punching, and decapitating other players to progress through tournaments, or practicing in single-player challenges.