The controls are very slick. You can either tap a location and your character automatically walks to this point, or you can drag your finger round and control your character’s movement directly. All in all, the actual game engine and controls are a triumph that Glu Mobile can be very proud of. But how does 1000 fare as an actual game?

The aim of the game – as the title suggests – is to find all 1000 items hidden in the world. In the game world this translates into wandering round looking for various in-game features. such as pink trees, doors and windmills that can sometimes hide items. You tap on these features, and roughly 1 in 5 will reveal an item. Very occasionally you will meet hooded figures called Wanderers. What or who they are is unexplained, at least it hadn’t been explained by the time I collected over 500 items.

A nice touch (which encourages exploration) is that all the world starts off in grey and as you walk around you bring colour to the world. This made me find every nook and cranny in order to colour 100% of the world, but since there is no story to speak of, this colouring the world is completely unexplained other than as a game mechanism.

As well as collecting items in the game world, you can also find them in the real world. There are two ways to do this. The first way involves “Gifters”. You tap a button to look for Gifters, and if you find any they will give you a present once per day. In reality these Gifters are Wifi access points that your phone is detecting. Unfortunately not every access point becomes a Gifter, but only ones registered in some way with Glu Mobile. In my area I have only found 2 Gifters, so in my experience this is a bit of a non-starter as far as features go. But potentially if you’re in an area such as a city where there are a lot of Glu registered access points, this may be of more interest.

The second real world item collecting method actually overlays your character on a Google map of your area and then randomly drops about 20 items onto this maps. As you walk or drive around you will automatically pick up any items that you get within about 100 metres of your location. This method works well, and is the quickest way of amassing items. The only issue is if you’re driving down a road (by this I obviously mean being driven as we all know you should never play around with your phone whilst driving) – as you move off the current map screen you will be moving out of the area where the 20 items are, you must therefore refresh the item drop to get 20 new items. This means when driving about 1 kilometre you have to hit the refresh 3 or 4 times, otherwise you wouldn’t actually accomplish anything. It’s a shame that the game can’t add a new item onto the map, in roughly the vicinity of the direction you moving in, for each item collected.

1000: Find ‘Em All has achievements for various tasks such as certain amounts of presents collected, amounts of map coloured in and in game animals scared etc. But these aren’t tied into any of the social network-style services such as Plus+ or OpenFeint, so whilst they are nice to get, they aren’t really adding to anything greater than an in-game tick sheet.

I really wanted 1000 to be great; it looks good and all the elements of the game work well technically. But there are certain flaws with the real world interaction elements as I’ve mentioned, and there is no story to mention. Also as beautiful as the game world is, there are no inhabitants and no point to the various locales you walk through. In my play through the game I started off playing in game in order to get all the in-game achievements (such as 100% colouring the map and scaring butterflies), but once these were done then the in-game world is actually the slowest way of collecting items. You end up just using the map collecting system when you’re on a journey – keep refreshing the map every few minutes and you can very quickly pick up hundreds of items. So this totally destroys the whole game and it quickly becomes and exercise in grinding.

If I was to recommend any changes for Glu Mobile for an update or new version, my suggestions would be:

• Have some story to explain what is going on and give the game a purpose. It doesn’t have to be Lord of the Rings, it can be something basic like trading the 1000 treasures with some evil tyrant for the life of a princess/girl you love. (Glu – If you’d like to use this imaginative story feel free to contact me and I’ll flesh it out a bit, maybe come up with character names etc)
• Make every access point a gifter, not just specific registered ones
• Get the map collection system to auto-update
• Allow your character to collect multiples of items and then trade these with other players
• Integrate either OpenFeint or Plus+, I guess this would help with the trading suggestion
• Expand the game world element of the game, make it a real Pokemon-style RPG, have characters to chat to, tasks to complete, dungeons and caves to explore and enemies and bosses to fight

All in all, whilst it lasts 1000: Find ‘Em All is fun, but you can finish the game with all the achievements in under 10 hours. Towards the end it does get quite monotonous. But Glu have made a solid game that – with a little work – could be an absolute classic iPhone title. I just hope that someone from Glu reads this and takes my thoughts onboard.

[Since this review was written, Glu have released an update, which includes some social networking hooks, namely Facebook Connect and a global leaderboard – Matt]

1000: Find ‘Em All
Version reviewed: V1.0
Category: Games
Developer: Glu Games, Inc.
Current Price: £1.79
Works on: iPhone & iPod Touch

Try The Demo

You might think that’s an obvious one and in a way it is, but there are valid reasons for me saying that.

Red Bull Air Racing aims to recreate the thrills of the high speed racing series on your iPhone. When you first load up you get a video showing you the real deal that they are aiming to replicate, and to an extent Artificial Life have succeeded. They have created a nice looking tilt-controlled racing game which features the official circuits and planes from the Red Bull series. It also allows you to customise both planes and courses to your heart’s content.

So why do I recommend trying the demo first?

Well, despite all the good points, a racing game of any type either wins or loses based on its controls. Despite re-calibrating numerous times I couldn’t quite get the controls to fit my style. Even with me trying to adapt to the controls being imposed on me, I found them limiting. Rather than a nice analogue feel to the steering – where the more you turn your phone the more the plane turns, and responds to small touches in order to get the perfect racing line – you are stuck with a system where the plane only turns in fixed increments.

Tilting the phone will activate the first increment, tilt it further and you activate the next which means that you are constantly twisting your device left and right in order to try and get your plane to somehow stay on the racing line.

Another major turn off was the loading screen, or more to the point the regularity with which it appears. Fair enough you can do your full race without a loading screen, but even navigating from one part of the menu to another brings up the loading screen, and it isn’t as if it is just a brief appearance either, it will be there for at least 5-10 seconds. As you can imagine, clicking into a menu, getting loading screen, realising it’s not where you want to be, exiting, loading screen, selecting next option, loading screen can get quite annoying.

It is a real shame that these issues exist as technically and graphically Red Bull Air Racing is a nice game. All in all these things might not be deal breakers for some people, but hopefully these are issues Artificial Life can fix in future updates. Since the issues are there it really stops me from recommending the game for you to go straight out to buy, but since there is a free demo version available I would recommend giving that a go, seeing what you think and then deciding for yourself if it’s worth upgrading to the full version.

[For some reason, the lite version isn’t free, but costs 59p. I find this a bit strange – if you’re going to shell out, then there’s not a great deal of difference between the free and paid versions. Why not make it free with only one level? – Matt]

Red Bull Air Race World Championship
Version reviewed: V1.0.1
Category: Games
Company: Artificial Life
Current Price: £1.79 (currently on sale)
Works on: iPhone & iPod Touch

Gameplay

If you’ve never played one of these stacking games before, let me briefly explain the premise. In this case you’re a farm worker who doesn’t have enough room in the fields for all your sheep to graze, so you decide to solve the issue by stacking them on top of one of one another. The sheep are dangled over the field from a swinging crane and you tap the screen to release them. You get points for each sheep stacked and extra points for how accurately they are stacked. As expected if your stack gets a bit wonky, then it will start to sway, and the wonkier it is, the more it will sway.

This is basically all there is to the game, and for these type of games that’s the key problem – there is no longevity to the game play. They usually rely on the draw of high score tables, which Sheepstacker does too, but in their favour Tiny Tim have done a few good things – they have introduced two additional game modes and also badges to earn.

Additional Game Modes

The modes are:

• time attack, and
• Baa-lance

In Baa-lance this mode rather than you controlling the sheep dropping sheep onto the field, the sheep automatically drop. You are controlling a cart using the tilt sensor and are having to try and catch the sheep as they fall. These game modes work well and do add to the game as they give you a bit of variety.

The badges I referred to are similar to Achievements on the Xbox 360 and Trophies on the PS3. I’ve seen quite a few iPhone games implement a similar idea and I think that is good as it gives you additional aims and adds to the replay value as you want to try and earn all the badges to complete the set.

But as good as these points are, it doesn’t change the fact that unfortunately Sheepstacker is repetitive. Despite the badges and three game modes it doesn’t have the longevity to keep you playing in the long term.

How could Tiny Tim improve Sheepstacker?

They could introduce an online highscore table to compare your scores with others, potentially Facebook Connect would serve a similar function, providing updates as to your best results and new badges you have won. I think a platform wide badge/achievement/gamerscore system provided by either Apple or a 3rd party could provide and expand on some of these features. Another area that would help with longevity would be some form of multiplayer, be it online or just local.

As much as I think there are areas that could be improved on I think that Tiny Tim have done well with their first release on the iPhone, it has good graphics, good solid game play and for a pick up and play casual game I think it does well for giving you good solid game play. Would I recommend it to a friend? Well it wouldn’t be the first game I’d recommend, but for a cheap fun game you do get a lot for your money. I look forward to future releases from Tiny Tim Games.

UPDATE: Sheepstacker 1.1.1 released.

Sheepstacker
Version reviewed: V1.1
Category: Games
Company: Tiny Tim
Current Price: £1.19
Works on: iPhone & iPod Touch
UK App Store Link

How do you review an RSS reader? In theory a good reader should not really be noticeable as it is merely a conduit to the information you want to read, and therefore – using my line of reasoning – anything that detracts from you getting to your information can be classed as a negative. You may not agree with my logic, but hopefully, as I give you good and bad points to Readello, you will understand my line of thought.

The Good

Acceletron have succeeded with Readello in many areas. The first I’ll focus on is the aesthetics. Again people may disagree with me, but my attitude is that Apple have put in place certain UI conventions and in most cases there really is no point trying to re-invent the wheel. Obviously some developers pull it off and you get great software out of it, but more often than not you’ll end up with some garish unusable mess. Fortunately Acceletron have resisted the temptation to play and have kept things simple, which in the case of an RSS reader is a good thing. Ideally you don’t want a cluttered screen distracting you from reading your feed.

Readello is the first RSS reader I have tried on the iPhone which integrates with Google Reader, and again hats off to Acceletron, they have done a good job in mirroring the features you find on the web interface, including having your tags and folders preserved. Things aren’t quite perfect, but I’ll get to that in a minute.

If you find an article you want to keep, just click “Add Star” and now even when you purge your feeds of read articles and it seems to vanish, this article will have been transferred across to the Starred section

The final area where Acceletron have done well is giving people choice: do you want to browse posts by topic, feed or purely a list of unread feeds in the order in which they were posted?

The Bad

Unfortunately everything is not perfect with Readello. As good as the integration of features is with Google Reader, the process of syncing is noticeably slower than other RSS readers I have used.

A common flaw with iPhone RSS readers that sync with a web based service is the inability to add feeds from your device, and unfortunately this trend is also present in Readello. I know it’s not a deal breaker, but it would be nice to have. Something that some may not regard as a deal breaker, but unfortunately I do, is having to open links in Safari. Many other RSS readers [such as Byline – Matt] have their own built in browsing feature. Again, it is just a little thing, but the flicking from Safari to the menu then back to Readello when you want to continue reading just gets annoying and interrupts your flow when reading feeds.

The final area where Readello loses points is that it can get really slow at times. Start flicking through posts and after the first few (which I would guess it caches), everything starts to slow down and posts don’t load instantly. Since the data has already been downloaded during the sync process this delay can’t be blamed on net connection issues – it must be an issue with the app.

Also, when I first synced it had been a few days since I’d read my regular feeds and ended up downloading 800+ posts, this too seemed to have a negative effect on the speed of the app.

Conclusion

All in all I’d say that Readello is quite good. Is it worth £2.39 when you can download better RSS apps for free? Well that’s up to you to decide. If you’re after an RSS reader that syncs with Google Reader and Acceletron can fix the few niggley flaws in an update then I would says yes it could be worth the money. If though you’re like me and you aren’t attached to Google Reader and you would like something that works rather than having to wait for an update, then I’d say give Readello a miss, for now at least.

Readello
Company: Accelotron
Version: 1.0
Category: News
Current Price: £1.79
UK iTunes Store link