The free iPhone game Trawler Report: Holidays are coming with Amateur Surgeon and Elf Command
7th December, 2009
If this week’s Christmas-themed picks tell us anything, it’s that there’s not long left to go to get those Christmas presents ordered. If Royal Mail strikes again, we’re all doomed.
Wouldn’t it be better if we could all buy our Christmas presents over the App Store. Want to buy someone a book? Buy them an iVersion from the Books section. Want to send a Christmas card? Why not do it over your iPhone?
Of course, scratching off a virtual price sticker is a lot harder than getting rid of a real one. Yes, it’s a pipe dream, but take this week’s two festive freebies as a warning that it’s time to check what’s on the Christmas lists of your loved ones.
Elsewhere, you can have fun blasting cute things and dabbling in neon.
The best free iPhone games on the App StoreAmateur Surgeon Christmas Edition
By Adult Swim
Type Full
What would you do if your private jet collided with a mid-flight Santa, very nearly ripping him to shreds? Well, this is the important question Amateur Surgeon Christmas Edition deals with. Santa and all his helpers are all in a bad way, and it’s up to you to patch them up.
Elves have Christmas lights wound tight around their hearts and bits of shattered bauble stuck in their bodies. Using a steady finger and some fairy dust, you have to nurse them back to - relative - health.
Amateur Surgeon Christmas Edition doesn’t offer as much content as the original Amateur Surgeon, with just five major operations to undertake, but it’s a nice little self-contained game that should get the more sick-minded among you into the Christmas spirit.
By Godzilab
Type Demo If you took away a Rolando’s ability to roll of its own free will but still made him the lead in a game, you’d end up with something like iBlast Moki. Instead of rolling the cute round characters that populate iBlast Moki, you blast them.
That is, you place bombs underneath them and then hit the 'boom' button. In each level, you’re just trying to get your Moki to the pulsating exit portal, but it can be more difficult than it seems when levels are physics-based and full of obstacles.
The Lite version lets you check out the first few levels from the 70+ of the full version. Check out our full review for more on iBlast Moki.
By BitForge
Type Demo Mix the trajectory-obsessed gameplay of something like Puzzle Bobble with the aesthetic of Geometry Wars and you’ll end up with something not entirely unlike Orbital, in which you launch luminescent projectiles into the play field using a roving canon.
Once these projectiles have stopped bouncing about, they expand to as large a size as possible without overlapping with any of the other circles on the screen.
Your aim is to get rid of these circles by whacking them with more projectiles. It’s stylish, challenging, and thoroughly worth a look.
By Square Enix
Type Demo While there are several publishers that are frequent Trawler travellers, Square Enix isn’t one of them - and yet here we are with an appearance from one of their games, the second week in a row. Song Summoner is in some ways more what we’d normally expect from the Japanese gaming veteran.
It’s a turn-based battler, where you fight on a familiar grid-based battlefield. However, Song Summoner has a wild card up its sleeve - you can use your own tunes to ‘make’ fighters in the game.
This Lite version features quite a high talking-to-action ratio, but you can tap-skip on through the blurb if you just want to get a taste of the action. The full version has 30 hours of gameplay, too.
By Retro Dreamer
Type Full Next to the rest of this week’s picks, Elf Command looks a little unambitious. All you’re doing in it is directing robots to pick up presents along a conveyor belt, filtering them down into four different chutes.
However, it’s so well done that Elf Command picks up this week’s top spot. There are no levels as such, but as you progress the present orders you need to fulfil get more and more complex, demanding that you get those fingers and eyes moving fast.
For its simplicity, Elf Command is surprisingly slick. All you do is drag a line from a present to a chute and the robots do the rest. There’s one thing that could make Elf Command even more attractive, though.
We’ve got three words to say to publisher Retro Dreamer - online scores, please!
By Nate Chiger
Type Full Last week, we cast a concerned eye upon an app based around the writer of the Monk TV series Andy Breckman, and now the bumbling detective is haunting the Trawler once more thanks to Monk Phobias & Quotes.
There are clearly several Monk obsessives out there on the App Store. This app tells you about Monk’s 38 ‘documented phobias’ and offers up 60 Monk quotes, probably including some of Breckman’s not-that-famous zingers.
We’re starting to feel like we’re stuck in a Monk re-run, so here’s hoping he doesn’t pop up next week.