This Week at 148Apps: January 19-23, 2015

Warm Your Winter With New Apps!

 

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.

Trivia Crack

 

The exercise of flexing your brain muscles through the art of trivia has always been a concept that many still struggle to entertain themselves with. Even in this day and age some just downright avoid it. One of the biggest factors to why people find trivia so intimidating is the overwhelming pressure it instills in a competitive environment by creating an immediate divide of accessibility between the savvy and the casual, with little compromise considered towards the latter. Trivia Crack strives to tear down that wall by creating an asynchronous multiplayer climate that allows for a slew of social avenues that are seamlessly available to in a manner that’s geared around doing everything it can to acclimate to anyone who plays it, without having to make any sort of intellectual concession as a result. --George Fagundes

The Hunger Games: Panem Rising

 

Your base of operations in Panem Rising is the underground city of District 13, where the rebels are conspiring to infiltrate and take over the Capitol. But overthrowing an entrenched government is best done in baby-steps, so your early missions mostly involve traveling to different districts and helping its residents against individual acts of the Capitol’s tyranny. Taking down a threat primarily involves tapping the “explore” button over and over in an area, which carries you forward. Each step costs energy (warning: you run out quickly), and yields prizes like coins and fighter cards. Fighter cards are your key to winning battles against the Capitol’s goons. Most of the cards you pick up off the ground are for low-level workers with little battle worth, but you may occasionally find powerful cards based off notable characters. The low-level cards you discover serve as effective feed for your heroes. --Nadia Oxford

Adventure Time Game Wizard

 

Essentially two games in one, Adventure Time Game Wizard is part platformer, part creation tool. The Adventure Mode is where the meat of the game resides, with you leaping from platform to platform and attacking enemies along the way. You switch between the likes of Finn, Jake, Ice King, Flame Princess, and BMO, each offering their own abilities and talents. Original voiceovers, as well as an appearance from ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic, is a sweet move to endearing you more to the game. A significant problem arises with the control scheme, though. While your left hand manipulates a sliding pad to move around, your right hand taps buttons to jump or attack. Neither fully works as well as you’d like. It’s too easy for your finger to slip and not tap the button you desire, and sliding just isn’t as effective as using a virtual d-pad or joystick. You’ll often find yourself fighting more with the controls than enjoying the action. That’s a shame as it’s a reasonably enjoyable romp with some nice fan service. --Jennifer Allen

Handle

 

Assuming you have a Gmail account at your disposal, Handle is sure to make your work more organized and your life less stressful. It combines To Do Lists and Calendar functionality alongside email capabilities, ensuring everything is tied up neatly. Somehow it does all that for free, too. Setup is pretty straightforward with a tutorial guiding you through the paces. If you’ve used any organizational tool before, Handle should make perfect sense to you. A swipe to the left or right takes you wherever you need to go, with sections divided according to To Do, Calendar, and Email. Email is fairly typical of any email app but with some subtle additions; namely, you can choose to add an email to your To Do list or add a reminder to your Calendar linked to the message. You’ll find yourself doing this often and saving yourself time while you plan. --Jennifer Allen

Saved

 

It might not be the most inexpensive of budgeting apps, but Saved gets the right balance between offering the features you need without overcomplicating things. It’s certainly a convenient way of helping you keep track of what you’re spending money on. The thinking behind it is that you want to be able to do everything quickly. No one wants to spend time having to enter lots of figures as that’s the kind of thing that puts you off doing so particularly often. Instead, with Saved you can just enter a monthly budget (either differing each month or a set amount all year) and add things as you go along. --Jennifer Allen

Pepi Ride

  Pepi Ride is a new car-driving app that is bright and colorful, allowing children to drive vehicles around different paths. Car-driving apps where children need to navigate a track are becoming commonplace, which I can understand as these apps remain quite popular with my son who holds no grudges and this driving genre is certainly not the most unique idea to hit iTunes. Having said this, Pepi Ride is an app that I appreciate as it has enough content to keep children’s attention for quite some time as well as to help them with their problem-solving skills as they navigate areas that become more and more complex . To start, children will have a chance to choose one of four cars complete with driver – be it a boy or girl, as well as two fantasy animals that are then customized by children – complete with a variety of paint colors to choose from as well as the option to use a spray can, paint brush, or pencil point. There is also wheel selection as well as a chance to add sticker-like details and other ornaments, be it attachable horn choices or the like. I also enjoy how transparent the spray paint effect is, allowing one to layer different colors together for an airbrushed appearance. The selections offered here to personalize one’s car have enough options to make a variety of different looks, yet I appreciate how the effects one can choose for the car are limited in order not to overshadow the driving experience within this application. --Amy Solomon

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

 

Hungry Hal

  Hungry Hal is a reversal of the typical zombie runner. Rather than fleeing in terror from the undead menace, Hungry Hal casts the player as that undead menace. Taking control of Hal, the player must hurtle down a course, avoiding obstacles and snacking on brains to reach his final destiny, whatever that may be. Hungry Hal plays like a typical runner. There are multiple lanes on the screen and swiping up or down moves Hal upwards or downwards. However these controls are rather poor. There is a second of delay before Hal moves, often enough to plow into an obstacle or miss a human. It can just be impossible to move Hal quickly enough, especially if the humans are two lanes away. --Allan Curtis

9 Elements: Action Fight Ball

 

While it looks like a generic anime-styled garbage fills Google Play all the time, 9 Elements: Action Fight Ball is very distinct and fun. It combines two very different genres with a surprising simplicity, although I wouldn’t mind if it was a little more complex. 9 Elements: Action Fight Ball is an sports action game of sorts. A bunch of colorful characters play a very violent variation of volleyball, using magic and weapons to confuse and knock out the opponents. Each round, the player needs to score more points than the opponent while the timer counts to zero. If he wins, he gets some magic rocks that he can use to upgrade his character, or purchase a new one. The characters differ by their stats, as well as by the style of their attacks and super attacks, although the basic tricks remain the same for all of them. --Tony Kuzmin

WWE Immortals

 

The fans of WWE can rejoice: they got a cool new fighting game, titled WWE Immortals. It gives all of the famous WWE characters even more crazy and unrealistic abilities and pits them against each other in teams by three. If this isn’t enough for you, then mind that they also get really violent finisher moves and exciting battlegrounds to fight in. If this also isn’t enough, then I know about WWE even less then I thought, sorry. In all seriousness though, WWE Immortals is a surprisingly good game – at least when compared to the previous WWE titles that I got to play before. It looks and sounds great, almost comparable to the fighting games on the consoles. There’s also a ton of different characters to chose from – even though they’re not as different as they seem. More surprisingly, it does require some skill to win. --Tony Kuzmin