The first of two Armor Games offerings to make the list this month, Heir is a deeply engrossing and deceptively simple title by AG employee Tony. With clear roots in the likes of Shadow of the Colossus and a strong sense of optimized controls, Heir has players guiding a hero simply called "The Pale Stranger" as he scales a series of massive monsters on a quest to prove his mettle to his king. Despite its adventure trappings, there is no combat in Heir. Instead the game consists of a free-flowing platform and hazard play style that rewards timing, concentration and more than a little courage. The environments are intentionally disorienting, the roars of the mountain-sized monsters shaking the screen while the levels themselves shift. On more than one occasion during Heir's three chapters the player is asked to take leaps of faith and brave circumstances that would be certain death in a traditional game. Though short and a little rough on the graphical side, Heir is fully-realized adventure like none other in the browser medium.
Joey Betz and designer Con Artist had a genuine hit in Crush the Castle for Armor Games, so they had a lot to live up to with their long-awaited sequel to the king of all demolition games. Crush the Castle 2 keeps the delightful physics of the original and instead concentrates its innovation on diversifying the destruction. Tasked with forcibly deconstructing various structures and taking out all those inside, the player is armed with a catapult and a variety of different kinds of ammunition to do the job. The classic payloads of boulders and bombs are still there, but Betz threw a lot of clever toys into the mix for the sequel. Players get access to everything from castle-melting acid to bottled lightning and magical vortexes as the game progresses. Crush the Castle 2 isn't as challenging as its predecessor but the nifty ammo makes it a fun day's distraction. The game launched with a level builder feature and a database of player-created castles, but only a handful of user designs have been as interesting as the official material and it doesn't take much to slow the system down to a crawl. A good idea, but it needed better execution.
Programmer Badim of Elite Games released this inexplicably popular title in June with an aim for the growing smartphone app market. Doodle God is a paper-thin game, really barely a game at all, but it's nonetheless addictive. Players start with a few basic categories of elements (Fire, Water, Earth and Air) and have to go about combining them to create new categories and elements until all 115 have been discovered. Some of the combinations are a little nonsensical (Stone + Life= Egg?) but the game saves its less rational moments with its sense of humor (Human + Dinosaur = Corpse). Doodle God feels like one aspect of a much bigger, more interesting game, but the fact that so many players have been compelled to pursue all 115 elements demonstrates how well the game plugged into the very basics of why people play games. There's a sense of accomplishment in Doodle God even if it's a bit empty.
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