Out Tonight: Sentinel 4, Pako, Boxpop, and more*

Fire on the mountain.

*I’m lying. There’s no more. It’s just those three games, but that made the headline seem really sad. Truth be told, this is a pretty slow release week for proper games, but there’s three offerings I thought would be worth a second look. Trailers and chat after the break. UPDATE: There’s a game I forgot about! 1st&Goal is a football sim board game adaptation. Details below. First announced just a couple of weeks ago, Sentinel 4: Dark Star is the latest installment in an iOS tower defence series that’s been running for almost as long as there’s been an App Store. This one has 26 maps through which the enemy will obligingly route his units so you can destroy them, and developers Origin8 tell us that there’s more towers than ever before in a Sentinel game. All righty then. Sentinel 4 is a Universal app, out tonight at midnight wherever you are (or 11pm Eastern in the land of the free and the home of the brave) for five dollars. Android types, fear not — Sentinel 4 for your platform is in the works, I’m told.   PAKO isn’t really our sort of game at all — it’s an action game about driving a wildly out of control car for as long as you possibly can before it inevitably crashes. But I played this one myself when I was at PG Connects in Helsinki a couple of months back and I thought it was quite amusing. Finnish studio Tree Men Games bewilderingly released as a Windows Phone exclusive earlier this years, but remember that they’re Finns. Nokia and all that. PAKO is a buck on iOS and it’s out later tonight. Tree Men recommend playing it on nothing older than an iPhone 5.   Finally, minimalist puzzler BoxPop is the product of FreshPlanet, the new employers of 164‘s Comrade Brad. It looks perfectly nice and we are all sworn to support Comrade Brad as you no doubt recall. BoxPop is free later tonight, and it’s iOS Universal.

Based on a 9th-century analysis of chess, we’re told.

If none of this levitates your flying saucer, check out our recent reviews of Cuban Revolution wargame Heroes of the Revolution, the Coding Monkeys’ not-so-casual casual puzzler Rules, Inkle’s magnificent 80 Days, and the iPad port of Blood Bowl.

UPDATE: I’m dumb and forgot all about 1st&Goal, which a PT reader tipped me about earlier this week. (Drop me a note if that was you — I’ve misplaced the note.)

This one just dropped onto the App Store with no PR at all. As you might have surmised, 1st&Goal is an American football-themed game and it’s based on an existing tabletop game from 2011. Developer R&R Games is an unknown quantity and there’s no video, but the screenshots look promising. 1st&Goal is out right now and it’s an iOS Universal app for $5.

We normally never post screenshots with marketing copy on them but this is the only game in town.