App Store Essentials: All-in-1 Gamebox is 26 times cheaper than it should be… and counting!

26-in-one. Too good to be true?

All-in-1 Gamebox is one of those apps that has been hanging around the Top Ten for a while now, and currently it is sat in pride-of-place at number one. It’s an interesting concept: you buy the app for $1.29, and with every update another game is added for free, meaning your initial investment of $1.29 keeps on delivering more-and-more value.

Having started with eight games on-board back in October 2009, the app now boasts an impressive twenty-six games, so the return on investment is very good! But if you’re like me and are sceptical by nature, you’ve probably seen it and thought “26 games for a $1.29? Must be rubbish” and passed on it. Well, a couple of months back I gambled $1.29 (big risk-taker, me) and bought a copy. Read on for my review of this box of delights.

So many choices!

It won’t come as much of a surprise that the bet paid off: after all, at the same price as just one low-end app I only needed to enjoy just one of the included games and I’d have come up trumps. What might be a surprise, though, is that with just a few exceptions, almost every one of the games contained within the collection is easily worth $1.29 in its own right and as such I’m delighted to add this to our growing list of App Store Essentials.

Robo Rush: Get your Mario fix here

One thing not made clear in the product description in the App Store (presumably due to legal concerns) is that these aren’t just random little mini-games, but in many cases full-blown remakes of some of the most iconic arcade and console games ever made. For example, Robo Rush is a practically blow-by-blow remake of Super Mario Bros: the only difference is the darker graphical tone with the main character being a robot and instead of coins you’re collecting nuts and bolts. It’s clever stuff and the screen-shot won’t necessarily give it away but play it for two minutes and it’s unmistakeably Mario and every bit as fun to play. If you’ve been looking for a Mario-style platform game for your iPhone, look no further because you just found it.

Neander Block: a great Bejeweled 2 clone

Other titles that will appear instantly familiar include Neander Block (Bejeweled 2), Bubble Master (Pang) and the not-so-cryptically-named Operation iWolf (which is naturally a remake of classic 80′s 2D first-person-shooter Operation Wolf). There are others that are very familiar to me, but I can’t quite place the original. These include Hot Pursuit, which is a top-down racer not unlike Spy Hunter, 1945 Ace Destroyer and some others that appear to be remakes of recently popular iPhone titles such as 3-2-1 Jump (which is just like Doodle Jump), Jailbreaker (which is very much like Ovenbreak) and I’m betting there are a heap more that I just haven’t noticed are like something else.

Operation iWolf

The titles are very varied and are of a good quality. Many have a consistent, stylised graphical feel that is clean and simple, but not to the point that it feels ‘cheap’. There are some that don’t appeal to my particular tastes such as iUFO Catcher that tries to mimic those mechanical grabbing claw games you get at arcades, and a few strategy titles such as Ancient War and Knight’s Odyssey. That’s not to say they aren’t good – they’re just not my ‘thing’ so I can’t get into them enough to even tell you what they’re about.

But that’s the beauty of this app – you’ve paid $1.29 so you really don’t care that some of the games aren’t to your liking. What makes it so great is the surprise and delight you feel when you find a game that you instantly know and love from the past, and then find another one just a few minutes later.

Make your selection: the main UI

The overall UI that binds all the titles together is very nice with an easy and consistent way of backing out of a title out to the main menu across the majority of the titles. OpenFeint, the online leaderboard system, is employed at ‘core’ level so it works across all of the included games. There is also Facebook and Twitter integration for those who really must insist on filling up their friends’ news feed with how well (or not) they’re doing.

It’s hard to find negatives for an app that’s so cheap and bursting at the seams with value but one thing I would say is that running this app does seem to make my iPhone run hot and drain the battery quite quickly so you may need to exercise caution when playing on a depleted battery. It also weighs in  (currently) at a hefty 179MB and the updates are large in size and frequent in number so be prepared for lots of lengthy update downloads.

All things said, this is a great value app that you’ll come back to again and again. Possibly the best gaming $1.29 you’ll ever spend. Go get it.

– All-in-1 Gamebox [iTunes]