This Week at 148Apps: May 6-10, 2013

The App Experts

So many apps, and so little time! Just look to 148Apps for the best app reviews on the web. Our reviewers sift through the vast numbers of new apps out there, find the good ones, and write about them in depth. 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. Want to see what we've been up to this week? Take a look below for a sampling of our latest reviews. And if you want more, be sure to hit our Reviews Archive.

Sid Meier's Ace Patrol

Ace Patrol is the latest title from Sid Meier and the team at Firaxis Games. Set during World War I, it’s the player’s job to guide a squadron of pilots in strategic turn-based gameplay. The free-to-play version features one stage from the British campaign with six single-player missions for players to engage in. If they want to play and beat the full campaign, which is three additional stages, they’ll have to purchase it for $0.99 cents. Players are given a choice of three missions to choose from at the start of the game. Missions have a wide range of objectives, such as having players attack an enemy train, protect a surveillance plane, attack an enemy bomber, and dogfight in ace vs ace action. Players are able to decide on what mission to select based on the objective or how many points it offers. Those points are multiplied depending on the four available difficulty levels and help provide better scores for the leaderboards. --Andrew Stevens

Infuse

A particularly situational app, some users will look at the feature set of Infuse and wonder just why they need it when the built-in Videos app does everything they want. Infuse is for those users who want to play videos from other sources, without the need for conversion first. That covers quite a few different needs, from those wanting to watch family videos taken on a different device to those wanting to watch their converted DVD or blu-ray collection, while on the move. It’ll even allow users to view video attachments that have been emailed through. Regardless of one’s needs, Infuse is an attractive and useful app. Covering many of the more important bases, Infuse offers support for over 14 file formats, such as AVi, M4V, FLV, MOV and OGM. Plenty of audio formats are catered for too, such as the increasingly elusive Dolby Digital Plus format. Infuse works smoothly too, with little significant slowdown noticeable during my time using it on either my iPhone or iPad. --Jennifer Allen

Las Vegas!

One of the biggest constants in casinos is also a very simple concept: the house always wins. Sure somebody might hit the jackpot or win a few Blackjack hands against the dealer, but statistically (and by an overall average) the house always come out on top. Not so with Las Vegas, Ravensburger’s iOS port of the board/dice game. In this particular casino the player always wins, even when they lose. The rules of Las Vegas are fairly simple; players (and possibly AIs) take turns rolling right dice. The numbers each one lands on represent one of six casinos on the board, each with a range of cash values up for grabs. They then have to “bet” their dice by placing them in their casino of choice with the highest bid earning the pot. Conversely if there’s a tie all matching bids cancel each other out. Naturally larger bids have a better chance of winning but the toss up is that it means fewer and fewer dice each following turn. There’s a certain amount of strategy to placing each bet and it’s possible for savvy players to sneak in and grab a 90,000 casino with a single die while other players vie for the top spot and negate each other. After four rounds all the cash is added up and a winner is declared. --Rob Rich

Star Command

Star Command is a sci-fi simulation game that clearly takes cues from Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek universe. Although the game takes a few missteps in parts of its design, the whole package is so charming that it hardly matters. Anyone wanting a good Trek-like combat experience should stop reading this review and go buy it now. For everyone else, here’s how Star Command plays: Players begin by choosing a captain and a ship to command. From here, an in game tutorial gives just enough information on hiring crew members, building rooms on your ship, and how combat works, and then promptly throws you into the thick of it. Before you know it, you’ll be commanding your engineers to put out fires by sick bay while your weapons crew has to abandon their battle stations to combat enemy aliens that have beamed aboard. --Campbell Bird

Other 148Apps Network Sites

If you are looking for the best reviews of kids' apps and/or Android apps, just head right over to GiggleApps and AndroidRundown. Here are just some of the reviews these sites served up this week:

GiggleApps

Little Red Riding Hood

Little Red Riding Hood by Nosy Crow is a universal app that I have eagerly been anticipating for quite some time, and I can say with much excitement that this app is worth the wait. This is a re-telling of the classic story with a few great twists along the way. A special app, Nosy Crow has added some wonderful new elements to a classic story, specifically allowing children to choose one of many paths they would rather take as Little Red travels through a forest on her way to Grandma’s, collecting numerous objects along the way as well as meeting new characters. --Amy Solomon

Zoe's Green Planet

Zoe’s Green Planet is an interesting universal application about diversity. This is the story of Zoe, an inhabitant of a green planet with a demographic of entirely green people, seen vividly with the use of illustrations with heavy paper mache elements creating a subtle 3D effect, as well as a tactile, slightly distressed feel that I find appealing, as I do the numerous shades of green that make up the palette of this app. One day, a red space ship lands on the green planet. Inside is a red family who would like to visit other planets and makes a home on the green planet. They have a daughter who is Zoe’s age, and they go to school together and become friends. --Amy Solomon

Brains My Body

Brains My Body is a very nice interactive app for children which teaches about basic anatomy and diversity and includes fun facts about the body. The look of this app is crisp and clean, with colorful, textured woven fabric used as the background for these activities. Also of note are the layered ambient sounds heard throughout, consisting of a beating heart, blowing wind and wind chimes – interesting choices I have enjoyed listening to. --Amy Solomon

AndroidRundown

Goomy: to the Rainbow Land

Goomy: to the Rainbow Land is an interestingly styled platform running game with a unique set of characters. Goomy came personified as ball that took nine different forms. Legend has it that he wants to make it to the mythical, happiness-filled Rainbow Land. However, the journey is not without dangers but of course, how could we have expected anything less? The playing area was an expansive end-to-end platform, with Goomy traveling from left to right. The traveling area was irregular in design, with land masses of different heights interspersed with deep, lethal canyons. The graphics were rich in color, with playful artwork highlighting the elements of the game. The animations were smooth, and did a good job of adding to the fun factor. A lot of time seemed to have been put into creating the six or so different playing environments. --Tre Lawrence

Punch Quest

One of my favorite games of 2012 was undoubtedly Punch Quest. Rocketcat Games’ endless puncher’s only flaw? It wasn’t on Android yet. Well, Noodlecake Games, in their first published title after the launch of Super Stickman Golf 2, have rectified this situation. And oh how sweet it is to be playing this amazing game on mobile. Unlike most endless runners where there’s little to no combat, this is all about punching one’s enemies. It’s more of a beat ‘em up with automatic running instead of an endless runner. The fighting is surprisingly complex despite there only being three different inputs: forward punching, uppercutting, and blocking, though each has different functions based on different situations. For example, uppercutting in the air is actually a dive punch. Upgrades can tweak the way that punches work, or give them special functions. But it’s the interplay of the attacks and the way that each enemy has a particular strategy that works best – and ones that don’t work quite so well – that players need to learn and master in order to do well at the game. --Carter Dotson

Modern Snake

Snake is one of those games everyone knows. It’s popularity was forged in the mall arcades of the 70s, and it has been ported to almost every platform. Ever. Everyone has redone it, and so any developer that touches it best come correct. Modern Snake, at the very least, excels in the area of minimalist design. I liked that there were no extraneous elements; it kept enough familiar designs, like the segmented snake, and tossed in colors and touchscreen compatibility to differentiate it from the original forms. The green worked well on the stark white playing area. The developer did well to add options to spice up what would otherwise be a one-dimensional game. There were options to speed up or slowdown game speed, to have a two-player local game, to play with or without walls and to play with on-screen directional buttons or by swiping. --Tre Lawrence