![]() ![]() The gameplay is simultaneously simple and compelling, made more challenging as more pegs are added and different limited-use special powers are linked to the green pegs every handful of stages. Though our prior full review of Peggle covers all of the major gameplay details, it suffices to say that both games involve shooting a ball 10 or more times from a cannon at the center top of the screen, attempting to remove all of the red-colored bricks and pegs from a maze-like collection of blue, red, green, and purple items. Sold as an in-app purchase within the previous release of Peggle, a game that won our iPod Game of the Year Award back in 2008, Peggle Nights adds an additional 60 puzzles and accompanying intermissions to the original title, plus new challenges and awards. Well, PopCap Games’ Peggle Nights ($3/$1) has finally arrived for the iPhone and iPod touch after two years of waiting, and though it mightn’t be exciting news at this point, there’s no doubt that it’s great-and an incredible value for the price. Some things take so long to happen that when they finally do take place, they’re hard to get excited about no matter how great they are. Overall, Black Pegasus is worthy of our high recommendation, albeit with some small caveats that take it out of the rare flat A category that Sandstorm helped to define. That said, iOS first-person shooters have come a long way in both performance and expectations since last year, and this sequel offers more of the same rather than charting new territory as its predecessor did in the App Store. See our full Modern Combat 2: Black Pegasus review for all of the details it suffices here to say that while this game mightn’t be as ambitious as the very best releases in its genre for other devices, it’s very close to completely excellent as a $7 iPhone and iPod touch title-omission of true iPad support aside, it’s impossible to ignore the value that Gameloft is offering here. Flash forward a year and there’s a sequel, Modern Combat 2: Black Pegasus ($7), which will sate fans of the last game without completely blowing them away in the same way: it offers generally impressive graphics, solid audio, and the same sort of gameplay, each with little tweaks rather than wholesale changes to the prior formula. Gameloft’s military-themed first-person shooter Modern Combat: Sandstorm won our 2009 iPod/iPhone Game of the Year Award for good reason: it was a breakthrough release in the App Store, bringing portable console-caliber gameplay, graphics, and audio together in a way that no other App Store title had before. On the other hand, Cut the Rope’s pleasant but looping music is good, but not great. Thereafter, the addition of other objects-bubbles, blowers, spikes, and more-transforms what initially seem like simple puzzles into more complex challenges, with the prospect of seeing the third and fourth themes (foil box and gift box) adding incentives beyond the raw fun of the action to keep on playing. Regardless of whether the concept has been done before elsewhere, ZeptoLab’s implementation here is nearly pitch perfect: the Om Nom monster and simple backgrounds are cute, but most of your attention focuses on the smoothly animated ropes that hold the candy, then on the timing and physics required to swing the candy in the right ways towards stars and his mouth. Cut the Rope starts with 100 different levels, using your successes at star gathering to unlock themed “boxes” of additional stages, promising that more are forthcoming. ![]() The challenge: to get the stars, you need to use swipe and tap gestures to slice ropes and animate objects that make the candy sway, float, and dangle in different ways. Your goal is to get the monster fed while touching the candy with up to three stars as it moves closer to his mouth, so although you win and can move past the stage if you feed him, you’re supposed to try and get bonuses for each star you touch along the way. There’s a hungry little green monster on the screen, and candy in the air above him on a rope-that’s the basic premise of Chillingo and ZeptoLab’s Cut the Rope ($1) and Cut the Rope HD ($2).
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