Best Windows apps this week
One-hundred and fifty-one in a series. Welcome to this week's overview of the best apps and games released for Windows 8.x/10 in the past seven days.
Microsoft will launch the first major update for its Windows 10 operating system in the beginning of November to all users featuring improvements, fixes and new features alike.
Polarr Photo Editor is the app of this week. While not cheap, it features an impressive set of tools to edit photos.
As always, if I missed an app or game that has been released this week that you believe is particularly good, let me know in the comments below or notify me via email instead.
Red Stripe Deals are back. Microsoft added them to the new Windows 10 Store. You find them listed under Collections when you open the store.
- Gro Garden. organic gardening educational app for kids for $0.99
- Reading Trainer, app to improve reading speed and retention for $1.99
- Doodle Kingdom, popular puzzle game for $0.99
- 16bit Trader, mixture of trading game and adventure for $0.99
- Fate of the Pharaoh Full, an adventure game in ancient Egypt for $2.49
- The Phenomenon, an adventure game for $1.49
- Token2Shell/WP, SSH client for Windows for $0.99
Best app of the week
Polarr Photo Editor (14.99, free trial available)
The photo editing application has been designed to be the ideal photo editor for bloggers, students and photo professionals.
It supports the most popular image formats as well as RAW images, 50 presets to apply filters quickly to photos, and tools to make manual adjustments to the loaded image.
The tools enable you to change colors, exposure or temperatures among many other things, and the batch export option makes sure that you can save all processed photos in one go at the end.
The app ships with tutorials that explain the basic concepts of improving images using the tools provided by the app.
Other apps
Space Marshals ($4.99, no free trial)
Space Marshals is a tactical top-down shooter that combines Wild West adventures and Science Fiction.
It plays similar to games like X-Com that use the same mechanics. It features different characters and different types of weaponry, as well as armor and other useful items like grenades.
The game won't work with mouse and keyboard, only touch or with a gamepad.
Cortanium ($1.99, no free trial available)
The application adds more than 20 commands to the personal assistant Cortana.
Among the commands are options to get TV recommendations, your daily horoscope, to check the free space on OneDrive, to generate a random password or to quickly check in to FourSquare.
You may request additional commands to be added to the app once you have purchased it.
This is a new spin on the popular board game Trivial Pursuit. While you are still answering questions to beat your opponents, you are not moving across a board anymore but answering sets of three questions directly.
There is a time limit for answering questions and lots of social features like playing against your friends on Facebook or on the system you are using.
The game supports premium currency which you can use to spin again to pick another category or to get help answering questions.
Good news is, you don't need to connect the app to Facebook if you don't want to.
The racing game puts you behind the wheel of a monster truck. Play single events or the championship, pimp the truck and buy better trucks once you have earned enough money to do so.
The game features a practice mode that you can use to get acquainted with the controls before you play drag or freestyle races.
Graphics are quite nice for a Windows Store application but not comparable to the graphics of cutting-edge PC games.
This is an 8-bit spin-off of the popular Doodle-series of games. It is a puzzle game at its core but this time with 8-bit style graphics and sounds for that special retro-feeling.
The game itself has not changed at all: mix and match different elements to create new ones and use them to build things.
Notable Updates
- The official Nascar application is ready for Windows 10.
- The Guardian app has been released as a beta app for Windows 10.
- Timber, the Tinder client for Windows supports "superlikes" now.
- Tiny Troopers 2 update with special Halloween uniforms.