Best Windows apps this week
One-hundred and fifty-seven in a series. Welcome to this week's overview of the best apps and games released for Windows 8.x and Windows 10 in the past seven days.
This is the second week without an app of the week award. That does not mean that the apps and games listed below are not entertaining or worth a try.
If you like games, you may want to check out the new Bloons Monkey City game, for instance, which is well designed.
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.
Discounts This Week
Red Stripe Deals are back. Up to six applications and games are discounted and highlighted in Windows Store each week.
The following is this week's selection:
- Queen's Quest: Tower of Darkness, an adventure game set in a magical world for $3.49
- Digital Diary Pro, a personal electronic diary for $0.99
- Crumble Zone, an arcade game for $0.99
- Invoicing, Billing + Time Tracking, an invoicing app for $1.49
- Sound Meditation, sounds that help you relax, meditate or sleep for $0.99
App of the week
None
Other apps
Helps you study new languages by offering to pronounce text that you enter.
The app supports multiple languages including English, German, Japanese or Russian.
Please note that you need to have the selected language installed in Windows 10 under Language > Speech components in the settings before you can use the application. Items can be saved as mp3.
This is a port of the popular translation application that translates Spanish to English and English to Spanish.
The app can be used offline, and you get examples, regional usage and contextual information besides direct translations of words or phrases.
SpanishDict displays suggestions as you type, and features an option to listen to audio pronunciations (Internet connection required).
Bloons Monkey City takes the popular tower defense series to the next level by adding city building to the mix.
Basically, it is half city management and half tower defense game. Instead of unlocking new towers or upgrades while playing the game, you do so by building new structures and researching items in the city management part of the game.
The tower defense part comes into play when you expand your city, as you need to conquer tiles to do that. Each tile you want to add to your city needs to be captured by completing a tower defense mission first.
You may connect with friends and help each other out, and compete against other players in weekly events.
The free torrent client features a basic interface but that is sometimes all that is required to download torrent files.
Since it is basic, it does not offer features such as setting upload and download speeds, managing ports, or background loading.
This is okay for the occasional quick download but not if you download torrents regularly due to the lack of features it ships with.
Dragon Friends: Green Witch is a city/empire building game set in a fantasy land that is full of magic.
Apart from expanding your empire, you are also tasked with breeding dragons in the game and evolving them to powerful magical creatures.
The game features different types of dragons that you can breed, a quest system that tells you what to do next, and social features such as helping friends out by allowing them to breed dragons faster.
Connect all power lines, houses and parks to the grid in this challenging puzzle game.
All game elements can be rotated and you can only proceed to the next level if everything has been connected to the grid, and if there are no lose ends on the map.
The game features hundreds of maps of increasing difficulty.
This is a boss-only shoot'em up game in which you take control of legendary birds to fight against boss monsters.
The birds that you unlock throughout the game have different abilities, and you may upgrade them to make them stronger.
Notable updates
TuneIn Radio's update makes it a universal application. The update improves podcast playback performance and content organization on top of that.