By PCWorld Staff Get the Most From Your Games
The iOS version came out back in January and was very well received by consumers and reviewers alike, for good reason: it's addicting, and the fact that it's on your phone makes it impossible to put down. Also, it's free (though you can pay to unlock extra features).
The free version gives you one team (The Council) with the option to purchase more teams at a price. Currently there are 3 other teams you may buy, all with their own unique abilities and units.
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This week’s games will have you fighting robots and puzzling your way past monsters but the biggest free game on this week’s list is a free multi-platform first person puzzle game where you’ll be manipulating gravity for your own purposes.
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The release of the new World of Warcraft expansion Mists of Pandaria is fast approaching, and this week Blizzard displayed the opening cinematic to the game at the Gamescom conference in Cologne, Germany. As always, Blizzard’s cinematic team has some cutting-edge CGI to show off and we thought it was worth your time to take a look at.
This time around the cinematic centers on two members of the game’s Alliance and Horde factions who crash on a mysterious island and discover…well , let's just say it's something you probably aren't expecting to see. But why ruin it, when you can just watch the video yourself?
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As excited as I was with that small taste of footage, seeing the naval battles in Assassin's Creed 3 at Sony’s E3 press conference immediately dashed my hopes. I was afraid you wouldn’t have full control, that it would just be another gimmick; rest assured, I got some hands-on time with the naval battle sequences and they are just as good as they look. Earlier this month, Ubisoft flew me down to their offices in San Francisco for a look at how the ship-to-ship combat in Assassin's Creed 3 is shaping up.
It isn’t often that you find something in games so outstandingly beautiful that you can’t do anything but stare and soak it all in. That’s exactly what happened as soon as I took the wheel of a ship in Assassin’s Creed 3. I couldn’t help it; as I took cannon fire from nearby enemy ships, I watched the waves and how the ship reacted to them. It’s truly remarkable. It was hard to believe that it was running on anything current-gen, let alone just a PlayStation 3.
As waves crashed over the side of the ship, water spilled onto the deck, shipmates slipping as they tried to reload their cannons and move about the deck. Cannons fired from the enemy ships, sending cannonballs flying my way. As I braced for impact, they struck the ship. Particles of wood splintered from the mast and railing, leaving fire where they once stood, fires that were soon doused by the pounding waves.
As much as I wanted to stand there and watch the ship slowly fall to pieces until it finally sunk, I pulled myself out of it and turned the wheel. After bringing the sails from half-sail to full sail, the ship sped to life, tearing toward the enemy ships. This is where things got interesting, as I had to plan out my course of attack, making sure that the side of my ship would be facing the broadside of the enemy vessel at the exact right moment. It became almost a game of chicken (if extremely slow-moving chicken). When the enemy fired upon my ship, I almost felt the need to duck. The vision of dozens of cannonballs flying at you is terrifying; if I would have been on a real ship when this was happening, I would have jumped off and taken my chances swimming to shore.
While we didn’t get to go aboard the ship ourselves, we did get to see what it looked like as Connor climbed aboard the enemy ship, signature tomahawk in hand. He was able to move swiftly, using the ropes and masts to swing toward his enemies. He even used a rope shot ability to hang an enemy soldier from the mast. Not content to leave anything standing, he shot a pile of explosives and started running toward the edge of the ship, managing to jump off just in time and escape off into the sunset. It worked extremely well and looks just as smooth as land combat does, which is very impressive.
It didn’t matter how much time I spent looking at my ship navigating between the beautiful islands, I was in awe. That feeling carried over to the combat, and I can’t wait to see more than this slice of gameplay. It feels genuine, and the sense of scale is massive; if this short sequence that we played is any indication, it’s safe to say that we can expect great things from Assassin’s Creed 3. We’ll have more coverage as we approach its October 30th release date.
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Free-to-Play FPS juggernaut Team Fortress 2 is finally releasing its long-rumored cooperative mode. After years of team-based deathmatches and flag captures, this week we'll see the release of the game’s Mann vs. Machine update, which is expected to add a new mode that deploys a legion of robotic foes (shaped like TF2 classes, of course) for you to destroy with the help of up to 5 friends.
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Sound Shapes is something that could only come from Jonathan Mak, the creator of Everyday Shooter. It's an extremely unique musical platformer that tasks you with creating the soundtrack as you play through the level. Every time you collect a note in a level, the game will change in real-time to add a corresponding note on the soundtrack as it's playing. It's a simple concept that continues Mak's pension for creating music with simple gameplay, working as brilliantly as ever.
Presentation-wise, everything is extremely minimal in Sound Shapes. You've got a simple menu system that makes it easy to figure out how to do everything without much explanation. In fact, simplicity is a theme throughout the entire game, right down to the short tutorial sequence that teaches the basics through proper gameplay rather than slow explanations. After the tutorial you won't ever see another explanation, but you'll learn what you need to do just by doing it. It was so simple that I didn't even realize how much I had actually been taught until the end of the game.
Sound Shapes features five albums from four different artists —I Am Robot and Proud, Jim Guthrie, deadmau5, and Beck— that all utilize significantly different mechanics that develop as the music is formed. The different environments contribute to the development of the music as well, as the sounds of firing cannons or enemy lasers zap to the beat. It makes it extremely useful to listen to the music and learn how the level is operating.
After completing the main campaign, Beat School and Death Mode are unlocked. Beat School attempts to teach the basics of beat creation by tasking players to match the beat pattern to the track played. It's a really neat idea, but I found it to be exceptionally difficult, requiring more trial and error than actual skill. Death Mode is, as the name implies, a mode where you die over and over again. It's comprised of several seemingly simple challenges that require you to gather a certain number of notes in a selected amount of time. It's incredibly difficult, but addicting at the same time, thanks to that "just one more try" style of gameplay. 
Perhaps the biggest part of Sound Shapes is the level editor and user-generate dlevels that extend the gameplay long beyond the short three-hour campaign. The level editor is simple to use and even though it might seem like a gimmick, using the back touchpad to manipulate objects works surprisingly well and integrates into the workflow immediately.
Sharing a level with friends is as easy as hitting Save and watching your level go live for the world to see. It's even easier to find new user levels to play through, as there's a whole section of the main menu dedicated to it. There's plenty of sorting options too, making it easy enough to look through without seeing the same level multiple times.
Sound Shapes is beautiful. It's one of the most elegantly designed games in recent memory, showing the creativity and care of the developer throughout. It does some unique things in level design and musical arrangement that separate it from similar titles. I can't wait to see what the community can do with the tools available to them, and at only $14.99 for both the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita versions, I'm more than confident that there will be thousands of great levels soon.
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Maybe it’s just me, but despite all the continuing Olympic coverage I think the most exciting news of the week is the fact that we landed a nuclear powered robot on freakin’ MARS. So imagine my excitement when I learned NASA had developed a game you can play as the new Mars rover itself. Even better, that’s just one of three games in this week’s roundup.
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