Guns 'n' Glory
Guns 'n' Glory is a tower defense game at heart, sure - or perhaps it'd be more accurately described as a tower offense game - but it's got a vibe so charming, from its cartoony graphics to its Yosemite Sam-style Western motif, that you can't help but set it apart from the others. Your goal is to recruit a band of outlaws and set them up in strategic positions on a map in order to ambush unsuspecting settlers, lawmen, and various other plunder targets.
Above: Kinda like those old Wells Fargo commercials, except the wagon train gets shot
A wide cast of characters taken from a variety of Western tropes makes up your gang, and just like every other tower defense title, you have a cyclical gameplay process: you recruit members to get money which enables you to recruit more and more effective members, which gets you more money, etc. The gameplay here isn't so much the draw as the aesthetic and the fact that it's done so well.
Like most tower defense titles, there's no multiplayer here. But the game presents an ever-increasing challenge, and some of the later levels, especially those involving the famous "gold train" seem damn near impossible. Still, Guns ‘n‘ Glory will keep you coming back over and over until you’ve mastered the challenge.
Jewellust
Get it from the Android Library
Some games for Android are, let's face it, straight-up rip-offs of successful titles for other consoles. Jewellust is one such "homage," in this case to the wildly successful casual game Bejeweled. But hey, originality isn't everything in our world, we're gamers, right!?
Above: Taking all of Pharaoh's wealth
Jewellust, for what it's worth, does a pretty damn bang-up job of replicating the addictive matching gameplay of Bejeweled, only changing the ostensible setting from random-collection-of-fantasy-tropes to "Ancient Egypt." Really, though, the backgrounds and music don't really matter as much as the gameplay, where you'll match up gems of the same color to break out lines in a grid, earning points as you do so. The overall goal is to break chains containing special "mosaic" tiles – gather enough of them and you will complete the level, moving further into the world of ancient Egyptian stuff.
Controls are simple click and drag with a finger and are precise enough that you rarely find yourself grabbing the wrong jewel with an errant press. A big advantage of this one, too, is that it's not a system hog, so if you have an older Android device, you should be able to run it without much fuss.
Although the single-player campaign is fairly short (about 30 levels that you can breeze through pretty quickly), the game does include a never-ending Survival mode to keep you interested, and you can share your scores on the online leaderboards, too, if you're into that sort of thing. If you can't have Bejeweled, you might as well get the best clone you can – and Jewellust is that clone.
Feb 13, 2011
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