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Pennies – Personal Money, Budget & Finance Manager ($1.99) by Magnetic Zero is a simplistic app that wants to help you keep track of where your money goes. If you liked apps like Next and Clara, then Pennies should be right up your alley.

Oh, budgeting — it’s a tedious thing to do, but it’s something we all need to do because not all of us are rich. While it’s nice to have a lot of disposable income, sometimes we just have to plan out how we spend our money so that it can last us a long time. I haven’t been that good with budgeting myself, but I’ve been trying to do better with Mint, my personal finance app of choice at the moment. But of course, I’m always searching for new apps to try out, so when I stumbled upon Pennies on the App Store this week, I had to give it a shot.

Pennies has a minimal design, but it still looks elegant and beautiful. The app makes use of light, pastel colors (green, red, blue) to indicate how you are doing with your budgets for the indicated time period, so you can get an idea with just a single glance. The sans-serif typography that is used is also incredibly legible and easy to look at, regardless of the small or large size. It’s also fast and responsive, so navigating around the app is a breeze.

On the first launch of Pennies, it will ask you to set up your budget. There are three options for this: monthly, weekly, or one-off budget. If you are not familiar with a one-off budget, it will never repeat and is for a set time period. The next step will be to select the start date, which can be today, a certain day of the week, the first or last of the month, or a specific day of the month (this all depends on your type of budget). Then you pick the currency, budget amount, money left, give it a name, and ta-da, your new budget is set up.

If you created multiple budgets, you can scroll through them one-by-one by swiping horizontally on the main screen. Swiping vertically reveals the total remaining amount for the budget and how much left for today. To add a new expense on a budget, tap on the “+” button. This brings up a keypad input, and bar graphs at the top make sure you are aware of how much you have left, so you will never be left wondering. Once you have the value entered, just tap on the checkmark and it’s saved — if you change your mind, just tap on the “x.”

Going back to the main screen, a tap on the “hamburger” button will bring up a list of expenses for the selected budget in chronological order. You can swipe on items here to delete them, but unfortunately, you can’t edit them. Hopefully the developer can change that in the future.

Tapping on the budget button in the top right corner of the screen will bring up your budgets, and you can add new ones as needed, make changes to existing ones, or delete them. You can access the app’s settings by double-tapping anywhere on the screens — a little weird, but it works. Pennies has toggles for sounds and reminders, in case you need some nudging to keep you on track.

Pennies is a simple budget tracker, and is great for anyone who needs a little push when it comes to managing their money. I love the plainness of the app since it’s intuitive enough for anyone to use it from the get-go. However, it could still use some improvements to make it even better. A big one that’s missing is sync — I would need a way to get my data out of the app if necessary, so it would be nice to have either iCloud or Dropbox for that. It also should let users be able to edit their expenses in case a small typo was made, rather than requiring you to delete and add it again.

The developer has also promised some bonuses in future updates, including synced budgets with friends, family, and partners, as well as a spending wizard in case you need help figuring out how much you should be setting aside for everything. And to make it more fun to use, sound packs and rewards are on their way.

At the moment, I’m not into manually keeping track of my money — that’s why I use Mint — but if you are able to discipline yourself to do it regularly, then Pennies is a good option on the market.

I recommend checking out Pennies for yourself if you need a manual budget tracker to help you manage your money. You can find it on the App Store on the iPhone for $1.99.

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Star Knight ($0.99) by JungSang You is an action platformer game that will give you a real challenge. If you grew up with platformer games and want a real gem to add to your collection, then Star Knight is worth a look. It joins the ranks of other fine platformer games like Le Parker: Sous Chef Extraordinaire and Goblin Sword.

As someone who grew up in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, I have many fond memories of platformer games in general because that’s mostly what I played as a child. Even though I never considered myself to be one of the best platform gamers out there (I can’t do speed runs), I always enjoyed the genre because it was just fun and was a good test of my basic hand-eye coordination and reflexes. Even though I don’t consider many platformers on iOS to be great due to the controls (physical buttons will always reign supreme), with a few exceptions like the Mikey Shorts games, I am still eager to check them out when there’s a new release. When I happened to come across Star Knight (no, not the overpowered Star Knight armor in Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate) on the App Store, I was intrigued because of the screenshots and the game itself looked incredibly fun. After spending some time with it, I’m not disappointed.

Visually, Star Knight is gorgeous, and one of the main reasons I decided to check the game out in the first place. It features a beautifully minimalistic aesthetic that will appeal to plenty of people, and personally, I find it to be like a mashup of Limbo and Alto’s Adventure, due to the soothingly colored backdrops but dark silhouettes in the foreground. The game retains a 2-D perspective, but due to the background, you get a nice bit of depth, and the vignette effect makes everything in the center pop a bit more. The character sprites are rendered nicely, as they sport a kind of “chibi” look to them. The enemies all have their own distinctive appearance and it is easy to tell them apart from each other, especially as you find yourself in new areas in later chapters. Animations are fairly smooth and fluid in the game, though it does feel like the attacking motion is a bit laggy at times. The game also has a whimsical and captivating atmospheric soundtrack that is a joy to listen to in the background, and sets the mood well. Overall, the developer did a good job with the graphics and audio of Star Knight, and it’s a good reason to dive into the game, even if you had no interest before.

Falling in the footsteps of other platformer games before it, Star Knight is level-based, and players will find five chapters available, though the later ones have to be unlocked chronologically. Each section has about 12 stages to get through, so you get a good amount of content for your buck. Up to three stars can be earned on each level as well, in case you want to be a perfectionist and go back and replay them to get a perfect ranking. Players have the opportunity to acquire coins in the game that can be spent on purchasing better weapon upgrades for their character, and there are runes that can be collected to unlock powerful skills to aid you in battle. Replay value is fairly high if you want to perfect and collect everything.

The story of Star Knight involves the peaceful planet of Gaon that is now under attack, and Dark Dragon Nidhogg took away the sun. It is now up to Naro, the Star Knight himself, to overcome all of the challenges that await him and bring back peace to Gaon.

Controls in Star Knight are fairly simple and intuitive, though the button placements are also customizable in case you don’t like the default positioning. In the bottom left corner will be two directional buttons for moving left and right. In the bottom right corner will be the other two buttons, which are used for jumping and attacking. I found the positioning for attacking and jumping to be a tad off for my liking, so I moved them so that they are next to each other instead of in a quarter-circle formation. Once the buttons were in the right spot for me, it was easy to get used to the controls and it’s pretty responsive to touch. I did feel that attacking had a bit of lag between slashes when you tap the button rapidly though, so maybe that can be optimized in the future.

As you make progress in the game, you’ll want to access the shop to check out better swords that you can purchase with those shiny coins and make sure to equip them before going into a stage. You start off with the basic wooden sword, but you can get elemental swords and even ones with magical properties later on. The more expensive a sword is, the more damage it will do, respectively. On top of getting coins and gems, you’ll want to keep an eye out for those runes that are hidden somewhere on each stage. When you collect enough of these, you’ll be able to unlock a new skill and equip it (up to three at a time) to make it easier to overcome your foes. While I think it’s pretty easy to grind for the coins, there are in-app purchases for coins if you are feeling impatient.

I’ve only just started Star Knight, but I’m finding it to be rather enjoyable so far. The game looks exquisite with the contrasting colors and silhouettes, the music is delightful, the controls are nice and customizable, and the game is definitely challenging the further you get. While it starts off easy enough, be prepared to die quite a few times later on, and the game makes sure you know how many times you’ve failed as well, since it keeps count. Fortunately, there are checkpoints so you can start from the last checkpoint if you die, which is always nice. Regardless, Star Knight is a great addition to the action platformer genre.

I highly recommend giving Star Knight a try if you are in the mood for a challenging action platformer game where you can hack-n-slash your way through minions of darkness. You can find Star Knight on the App Store as a universal app for your iPhone and iPad for just $0.99. There are in-app purchases for more coins.

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