In January of last year, Liv Games’ debut title [$0.99 / $1.99 (HD)] really redefined the side-scrolling castle defense genre. It had a huge cast of interesting heroes and enemies, a fantastic art style, tons of humorous dialogue, and a huge single-player campaign to play through. But what really made it stand out was how it used so many different iterations of the strategy defense formula, making it feel like many different games in one and a fresh experience throughout. Exactly a year to the day after the release of Legendary Wars, Liv Games put out its pseudo-sequel Monster Wars [ Free ], which we really liked in our review. It took basically everything from the first game but re-imagined it from the bad guys’ perspective, letting you play with the monsters as the protagonists. Also, it dumped heaps of new content, improved visuals, and lots of new odds and ends Read More

I first saw Monster Wars a little while ago at Macworld as Liv Games was just publishing it, but the title has been out for a little while now and I've had a little longer to play with it. Monster Wars is not only another huge content pack for Legendary Wars, with tons of new stages, modes and units to play with, but it is a nice iteration on the series as a whole, with a lot of subtle but solid improvements to the gameplay. Unit animations are generally better across the board, and the controls work basically the same. I still sometimes have trouble keeping track of which heroes I'm controlling and which lanes they are supposed to be in. The UI is much improved. The pacing of the game shows that Liv Games has learned quite a bit about how to move players from level to level. The new Read More

We first checked out Liv Games over a year ago with [$0.99 / HD], a great take on castle defense. Now the developers are back with Monster Wars [$0.99], the latest addition to the genre. Billed as a ‘follow-up’ to their previous game, Monster Wars succeeds at preserving the same great gameplay of its predecessor while tweaking elements and offering a new story complete with a load of new units. For folks that played Legendary Wars, Monster Wars will feel very familiar. The majority of campaign missions still feature the same castle defense-style gameplay where you collect resources, build units, defend your own castle from the opposition while simultaneously moving forward attack units to take out the opposing fortress. The campaign also brings back the side-scrolling ‘hack n’ slash’ levels from the previous game (for better or worse). Each successful mission rewards players with coins to spend on unit upgrades, with an Read More

I first met Liv Games' Orian Livnat at last year's Macworld, where he showed me a wild game called Legendary Wars that mashed up a number of different genres and ideas in a mix created by Livnat and his family and friends. At the time I thought the game was a really interesting idea, but even I didn't expect the kind of success Liv Games has seen. A year later, the company had multiple booths in the mobile app showcase section at Macworld | iWorld 2012. Even while also running the show during the day, the team was hard at work on releasing the followup to Legendary Wars, Monster Wars. That game is out now, and as you might imagine from the title, it follows the other side of the story, that of the monsters from the original game. Just like Legendary Wars, the graphics are colorful and the animations are Read More