iPad App Review: Hangman RSS HD 1.1.0

The other day I was reading TUAW and they had made a post about Hangman RSS HD for the iPad. Generally I would not be too intrigued by a hangman game as it is an old game that I played as a child with friends and we generally would play on paper. Hangman RSS HD however is currently a single player game so I hope you will not want to compete with others on-line or via Bluetooth.

I bought the game last night and I have found that it can be very addictive. From the time I bought the game last night until now I have played for 37 minutes and won 62 out of 83 played games. The unique twist that Hangman RSS HD implements is the fact that every hangman level is created from current news which is pulled from RSS feeds on-line. You might be asking yourself right now since it pulls the questions from the internet does this game require you to always be connected to wifi? The answer is no. The game pulls down the stories and stores them locally so if you want to make sure you are always playing with current news you should connect it to wifi from time to time so that it can update it’s internal list of articles.

Now that I have covered the basics of the game lets start talking about the actual game play. I will first cover all of good and then the bad points for this application. Pulling articles from the current news and using those for the levels is quite a good idea. As you play you are also keeping up with the news going on around you and even on easy I find that some of the levels are rather difficult if you are already not keeping up with the events taking place currently. I have had levels that talk about the earthquake in china to levels about the national enquirer. The game seems to mix the news rather well so that you are not getting levels that are very similar which is nice since repetitive levels would get annoying. The graphics for the game are pretty good and the UI is very appealing to the eyes. I could see myself playing this game for hours at a time without having to worry about an ugly UI getting in the way and becoming painful on your eyes. In the images below you can see some of the features that I have been talking about. One of the best features I think is the ability to actually read the news stories in the application. They seem to be using a Web View when you click on an article because it loads the original website allowing you to read the full article.

There are a few features that I would like to see implemented in a future release however. Currently you can only play the game in portrait mode it does not use the accelerometer to rotate the screen when you flip the iPad. This may seem like a small annoyance for most people however if you use your iPad outside the sun may become too bright for you to see the screen. I get this every day when I am on my way to work and generally I will put on my sunglasses. The issue I have found is that the iPad has problems with polarized glasses when being used in portrait mode. You cannot see the screen because of something to do with the polarization, however if you turn it to landscape mode even with sunglasses on you can see the screen. You might now understand why I find this to be a minor annoyance.

Another feature that I would suggest is to allow the list of RSS feeds that the device uses to be customizable. I would love it for instance if I could add a bunch of Java Development related feeds to the game and actually try to learn something about Java from the game rather than using world news or feeds that are non-customizable.

All in all I think this is a great game that will consume quite a bit of my time however with the few drawbacks that I have mentioned I give it a 3 out of 5 and I think it is well worth the price of $2.99.