Excellent intro - a tutorial that almost isn't - it teaches while exciting the player. One star. Great sound and music - keeps you feeling it, and sound effects allow you to suspend reality and feel like you're playing on a PS3 with a 5-channel receiver. Another star. Excellent implementation of time-shifted multiplayer - allows the closest thing to actually racing head-to-head possible on mobile devices, given modern network latency and player availability. And showing photos above the cars was an especially nice touch. A third star. Real race tracks - I knew when that nasty corkscrew was coming at Laguna Seca, and realizing that made the experience all the more exciting. A fourth star. Realistic damage - cars require maintenance... more so when you damage them. It's a nice incentive to drive well without being so expensive that you have to. And even having to change the oil was kind of a cool little "feature" - it made it seem that much more immersive. Five stars! Congratulations... or is it? After playing for more than a few minutes, one immediately begins to see the rust showing through the chrome. I really wish I could, in good conscience, end my review here. Alas, I cannot. Enter the freemium model. It's accepted that some in-app purchases might be present, especially if the initial app is free. But guess how much Real Racing 3 actually costs if you buy ALL the content? OVER FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS. Yes, really. Google it if you don't believe me - the web is filling up with blogs and gaming columns all jumping on the EA-bashing bandwagon. $10, $15, $20... maybe even as much as $40-50 if there's truly a lot of content present. Obviously, a lot of time and effort went into polishing this title. But $500? That's just ridiculous. Minus one star. Requiring cars to be purchased to access tracks - Minus another star. Sell your cars or sell your tracks. Don't make us buy one to access the other. That's just sneaky. Forcing players to wait for upgrades and repairs unless they pay? MINUS TWO STARS. That's just unethical, and preys upon those who are the most excited about your products. Talk about a killjoy. Can you say "INSERT COIN TO CONTINUE"? Intentionally designing a game to require spending money to enjoy without waiting for absolutely arbitrary delays associated with virtual "repairs" clearly puts the desire to make money off players ahead of creating a product they can enjoy. EA... why do you keep doing this to your players?!

Zombie-grandmas holding walkers? Check. Decent controls and rush-inducing speed boosts? Check. Hilarious vehicles and giggle-inducing zombie noises? Check. Absolutely free (unless you buy extras you can earn)? Check. Instant-on fun with replay value? Check. 5/5 Update adding in-game ads for other games after each run? -1

This is an excellent example of real-time strategy boiled down to it's finest, simplest elements: take over a system, one sun at a time. The visuals are simple, yet beautiful. The music is calm, yet still moves and is interesting. (You're often tempted to "play to the music", so to speak.) All in all, it's a great example for the genre. But I just finished reading a book series by John Scalzi (beginning with "Old Man's War") about galactic colonization, which really brings home the idea of how dangerous and unforgiving the galaxy can be. If you haven't read that series, consider "Ender's Game" instead. Now suddenly Auralux isn't just a pretty game - every one of those units feels like a ship. Every one of those suns feels like a colony that's just been wiped out. The game takes on more meaning and importance simply because of context. And that makes it all the more thrilling. :-) Remember: the enemy's gate is down.

The visual quality of this game is decent, owing to it's design in Unity. Actual gameplay is your basic fast scroller, with the difference that you're swimming instead of flying or running. This can lead to some frustration to the controls as movement is on a curve rather than simple up/down directional controls. But if you can get past that and like fast scrollers, you might like this game. That said, it must be mentioned that the concept seems almost like a direct rip-off from Glowfish. In both games you are a fish who must save your little friends from a nemesis who has stolen them (and your girlfriend, in Glowfish), but Glowfish has a much nicer, more polished feel. Glowfish also seems to give the concept more of a storyline, though in fairness I didn't play Fin Friends very much. One key difference between the two is that Fin Friends is designed to have a more "fun" aesthetic, where as Glowfish has a more "beautiful" (perhaps "stunning"?) aesthetic. Think of Fin Friends as more like Mario/Sonic in design style, and Glowfish has more of a Finding Nemo/Ecco the Dolphin feel. Glowfish is also a scroller, but one in which you control your own speed and that tracks your progress and upgrades. Fin friends is more of a "see how far you can get on a single run" type game. This is fine if you're just picking it up for a few minutes. Glowfish is a better choice if you're looking to sit down for more than 5 minutes and make some progress in a game. 3 stars for implementation and visual quality, but knocking the remaining two stars off for the control characteristics and the obvious concept rip-off of Glowfish.

I can understand not supporting online multiplayer, but not even supporting local multiplayer in this day and age is ridiculous. PHASE TEN IS A MULTIPLAYER GAME. Otherwise, why bother with it? Bought hoping to play with my wife while traveling so we wouldn't have to bring our physical copy. So much for that idea. Two stars because game implementation is okay. ONLY two stars because not even supporting local multiplayer (much less online) is ridiculous, considering how long this app has been around and the fact that it's 2013. (i.e. there is no excuse for a lack of multiplayer in iOS-based card games.)