Injustice: Gods Among Us
Free
Who would win in a fight: Batman or Superman? Wonder Woman or The Flash? Green Lantern or Green Arrow? With fast fisticuffs and walloping super powers this game lets you work out those very debates using eye-popping visuals and ridiculous, over-the-top action.
It begins as basic boxing-and-tossing, but once the blows build up enough energy, you can trigger outrageous finishing sequences. The Flash will run the circumference of the Earth to build up a stratospheric blow, Green Lantern likes to bury his opponents under a flight of jet fighters, while Nightwing will summon his cycle for a bike beating that turns his opponent into a super skid mark.
Just three characters are given to you at the start, and so the joy here is in fighting through ladder tournaments in order to unlock new characters and new abilities that will lead to these outrageous bouts.
There are thirty-seven characters to unlock, including alternate versions of DC heroes, super villains such as The Joker, Deathstroke, and Sinestro, and large-sized opponents including Bane, Doomsday, Solomon Grundy, and Lex Luthor in his exo-armour.
Yes, in-app purchases are offered to let you skip ahead, and while there are delays you can pay through every dozen or so fights, they often come when you need a break anyway, so it manages to avoid some of the pressures of Free-To-Play. It’s good fun and a proper companion to the console game of the same name and concept hitting stores on the 16th.
Swirl It
Free
This is a location-based wine diary. When you’re out dining you can have the app use GPS to make a note of the restaurant you’re in, then add an entry for the wine on the table by typing in its name and adding a photo of its label. From there you can tap “Swirl It” to mark that you like the wine or “Spit It” to remember to stay away from it in the future.
The clever twist is that as you add and “swirl” new wines, the app will note the qualities of your selections and assemble them into a graphic display of your palette. You may learn that you prefer wines with an Earthen quality or a light, fruity taste, for example, and the idea is to educate yourself so you can better choose wines you’ll enjoy in the future.
The downside is that the app is new and so its database of wines is still growing. You may have to add an entry yourself, especially for local and Canadian labels (a problem most wine apps face at first, but do correct over time). The app borrows its restaurant information from Foursquare, so again, you may have to add an entry here or there.
That you can share your diary entries with others and follow their feeds of dining photos and taste selections is a fun feature and smart as both wine and good taste are very social in nature.
TSN Masters
Free
This golf app does very little, but it does manage to get one very important thing right. It offers live, streaming access to the upcoming Masters Tournament. Canadians have a very frustrating relationship with large events in the US. From The Oscars to the Superbowl, broadcasting rights have either blocked official apps from being released here or limited their content considerably.
The official Masters app is no different. Yes, it has layouts for all the courses and detailed entries on all the players, but if you want to watch the event you need TSN’s app too. A new update this year from TSN shows the network trying to match the official Masters app with leaderboards, news posts, and support for five live feeds, but in presentation, depth, and most importantly support for Android users, the Masters are still ahead.
The Room
Free/$1.99
Some mixed news for Android users here. Yes, this 2012 iPad Game-Of-The-Year puzzle is now available on android, but due to difficulty testing it across many devices, is only available for a limited number of handsets.
Should your Android phone be supported, you’ll find The Room a very immersive experience, a three-dimensional room with intuitive touch controls that lets you turn objects about, slide, turn, and push triggers with curious actions. The object is to unlock an ornate safe, but of course there are many layers of secrets and switches to doing just that.
In time, the creators at Fireproof Games hope to expand the number of supported Android phones with more testing, so if your phones comes up as incompatible, it’s worth checking back later in a few weeks.
