TouchGen: Slitherine, the developers who last year brought us the port of the critically acclaimed Battle Academy, have ported a new, older, title to the iPad. Legion is a game in the tradition of Creative Assembly’s Total War franchise. It is a game of strategy and large-scale tactics that places the player in semi-historical situations centered around the Roman Empire.
TouchGen: Alien Hive is a match three slider puzzle that invents a formula I have not seen previously. At first glance it looks like an ordinary match three game, but as you can only move the tile next to the open space it becomes an entire new game. The match three gameplay is not your usual affair either, but rather more like that found in Alchemy and Triple Towns. When you match three, or more objects you get a higher-grade object. These in turn can be matched to produce even more valuable objects.
JIG: Alien Hive, a game by Appxplore is a blend of match 3, sliding block puzzles, and resource management with some alien breeding mixed in. It's all a bit reminiscent of Triple Town, where you shuffle items around to fill in gaps and help tiles evolve to be all that they can possibly be.
The question of what to do with the match-three genre is a persistent one.
Gamers continue to lap these simple time-wasters up, but it must be getting harder and harder to find a new twist on stacking three or more coloured blocks together to make them disappear.
