This Week at 148Apps: August 17-21, 2015

The Apps of August With 148Apps

How do you know what apps are worth your time and money? Just look to the review team at 148Apps. We sort through the chaos and find the apps you're looking for. The ones we love become Editor’s Choice, standing out above the many good apps and games with something just a little bit more to offer. Take a look at what we've been up to this week, and find even more in our Reviews Archive.

Tribe

I’m not going to question why you need to but we’ve all had those moments where we want to share a video in the most private of fashions, right? That sounds a little oxymoronic when you consider the open nature of Instagram and Vine but a solution is in sight. Tribe gives you the means in which to create and share videos, but with only 10 of your phone contacts. It works well, too. No videos are shared on a server and only the creator can choose to save or share them. Videos can only be five seconds long and silent, which may limit what you want to do with them, but it’s a pretty effective system. Your friends can simply tap on a video to let you know they appreciated it, and you can ‘whistle’ at them to request a video back. --Jennifer Allen

BattleLore: Command

The land of Terrinoth is in peril. Can you guide the Daqan forces to victory over the daemons of the Uthuk Y’llan? Fantasy Flight Games' Battlelore Command is based on the popular strategy board game. Here you'll be put in charge of the human forces of the Daqan - complete with calvary, melee, archers, golems, and even a few Roc-riding Ariel units. The game uses a hex grid, random powers, and predetermined sets of moves for you to choose from. The trick is that moves will become unavailable until you refresh them, so choosing your strategy wisely is mega-important. Just a heads-up: you won't win the tutorial level, and this is a omen for things to come. Due to those limitations on movement each turn the first few levels are surprisingly difficult. In order to succeed you have to pay careful attention to what each unit can do and which powers you have available on each turn. --Jessica Fisher

Loot & Legends

Loot & Legends is a free-to-play, turn-based strategy game that tries its darndest to capture the look and feel of playing a tabletop role-playing game like Dungeons & Dragons while simultaneously creating its own, card-based loot system. Although it sounds a bit peculiar, Loot & Legends is largely successful in what it sets out to do, making it a pretty awesome package for strategically-minded, dungeon-crawling enthusiasts. For anyone familiar with age-old fantasy tropes, almost everything in Loot & Legends' structure and lore should be unsurprising. Players make a party consisting of a warrior, priest, and wizard, all of whom go on adventures battling goblins, kobolds, lizardmen, etc both for the greater good of the world and for loot to make them ever stronger against more difficult foes. --Campbell Bird

Monsters Ate My Metropolis

Monsters Ate My Metropolis is an exceptionally colorful and vibrant card game. Dispensing with too much focus on the cards, you’ll find yourself destroying cities with the help of lumbering kaiju. It’s a great concept for a game but its execution suffers from a few issues right now. Learning the game is fairly easy, although mastering it is another matter. You assemble a deck of cards then are dealt three each turn. You pick out which card to use based on its power and element, before unleashing it against your opponent and hoping for the best. You can boost how things go through completing a brief mini game that tends to involve you either tapping frantically or timing one tap just right. Each attack builds a meter which can eventually lead to you unleashing a mega attack on your enemy’s city. --Jennifer Allen

Age of Defenders

It’s been a while since I last played a tower defense game and Age of Defenders has reminded me of exactly why I enjoy the genre so much. It could do with offering a little more speed to proceedings, but other than that, it’s a solidly dependable release. There’s a story in there, one told through cutscenes and snippets of dialogue, but I’ll admit I didn’t pay huge attention to it, although there are a few moments of light humor to glean from the dialogue. It does provide convenient context for the tutorial though. Age of Defenders is split into two distinct forms of strategy gaming with a defensive side of things and an offensive side. --Jennifer Allen

Other 148Apps Network Sites

If you are looking for the best reviews of Android apps, just head right over to AndroidRundown. Here are just some of the reviews served up this week:

AndroidRundown

Stickman Tennis

Stickmen? Tennis? Nah, I don’t mind giving Stickman Tennis a shot. We are talking about a tennis sim with stickman, right? The gameplay utilizes a tennis court — of course — with a lengthwise view, much like one would watch a real tennis match on TV. The stickman populate the whole thing, from the players to the personnel to the spectators; the graphics are subdued, and the sound feels familiar. The game incorporates a bunch of virtual buttons — three for specific shots: lobs, slices, and strokes with topspin. In the training module, one learns that timing is of essence, and the power of a shot can be affected by how long one “holds” the button down. To the left, there is a directional joystick that the player can use to control the direction of the shot. --Tre Lawrence

Oddwings Escape

Oddwings Escape gives players the opportunity to take on the persona of birds looking to escape from a lab in which evil experiments are being performed upon them. Graphically, the game is a visual feast, with liberal use of colors that –at first — reflect a jungle-ish motif. The game consists of travel ways, and mostly boils down to a timed, rated race that requires the player to get from point A to Point B; there is a distance challenge to start it all up. --Tre Lawrence

Cartel Legend: Crime Overkill

If AL Pacino’s Scarface played a mobile game, he’d probably spend more than just a few minutes with Cartel Legend: Crime Overkill. Some of it might look familiar. The locations are enjoyably stereotypical for the type of game this is, from storied casinos to expansive mansions that would make even Tony Montana do a double take. On their own, the scenes look nice and visual perspective is adhered to fairly well. The player takes on the persona of a deadly assassin, and a major task is to get from the beginning point to an endpoint, designated by a green overlay. --Tre Lawrence

All this, plus news, game guides and even more reviews than we can share here!