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Especially for all my special fans here on the EG forum: http://wosland.podgamer.com/?p=10665 |
Top 100 free iPhone games
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Rev.StuartCampbell 367 posts
Seen 8 years ago
Registered 17 years ago -
Dirtbox 92,596 posts
Seen 4 hours ago
Registered 19 years ago -
DiamondIce 1,185 posts
Seen 5 years ago
Registered 14 years ago"A full-featured rendition of the world's dullest sport that somehow makes for a fun iThing game."
You are definitely the idiot. -
disusedgenius 10,677 posts
Seen 15 hours ago
Registered 14 years agoI'd click the link but, well, y'know... -
Zomoniac 10,628 posts
Seen 8 hours ago
Registered 17 years agoDiamondIce wrote:
"A full-featured rendition of the world's dullest sport that somehow makes for a fun iThing game."
You are definitely the idiot.
But that's just about the only vaguely accurate statement in the whole article.
Except the Slingo Supreme writeup, which sums up my thoughts exactly. -
nickthegun 87,711 posts
Seen 7 hours ago
Registered 16 years agoRev.StuartCampbell wrote:
Especially for all my special fans here on the EG forum:
http://wosland.podgamer.com/?p=10665
P.S. I am wanking while I type this -
Spanky 15,037 posts
Seen 16 hours ago
Registered 18 years agoThis is why youre probably an idiot
Posted on September 01, 2011 by RevStu
If there's one thing we all love here at WoSland, it's a good old-fashioned All-Time Top 100. And from a critic's standpoint, we've long thought the gold standard was the 1991 Your Sinclair chart for the ZX Spectrum. Not for its writing, or even (so much) the games themselves, but because the list showcased an incredible breadth of game styles, such as we never thought we'd see again in mainstream commercial gaming.
That was until iOS arrived, of course. Now, for the first time in 20 years, it's once again possible to create a legitimate one-format Top 100 in which there are barely any two games in the same genre. And to prove it, that's just what we've done. But there's something even more special about this particular list.
It's not the fact that it's ordered by alphabet rather than merit. (That's just because we didn't want to have a massive week-long argument with ourselves trying to somehow compare PicoPico Fighters to Broken Sword Director's Cut and rank them against each other.) And it's not that there are probably even more genres represented here than in the YS chart, on account of the touch-sensitive screen of the iThings making whole new kinds of play possible.
It's not even that all these games have arrived in barely two years of the App Store, a pace dizzyingly faster than that with which any other format has ever managed to accumulate so many quality games. Indeed, were we judging on quality alone we could have knocked out a top 300 or 500 with little trouble. But therein lies the secret, because we're not judging on quality alone as well as demanding that all the games are really good, we've applied a strict extra qualifying criterion to this particular chart.
The truly spectacular thing about the WoSland iOS Top 100 is that every single game in this list has been available for free within the past year. Gathering together 100 great games for your DS or your PSP (let alone your PS3 or Xbox 360) even if you bought them preowned or in bargain bins would set you back a hefty four-figure sum. But if you had an iThing, you could have got yourself all 100 of these games, entirely legally, for a total outlay of zero.
(In fact, you didn't even need an iThing. Even if you were just idly contemplating the possibility of getting one in the future, you could have downloaded the games at no cost through iTunes on your PC or Mac while they were free, and then fired them over to your device if and when you got one.)
Think about it like that, and the cost of a contract-free iPhone 4 or an iPad 2 even taken purely as gaming machines starts to look like a very different value proposition compared to a 3DS or a Playstation Vita. And that's why anyone dismissing iOS as a serious modern gaming platform is a fool, whether they're doing so from the perspective of a gamer or that of a businessman.
Because these games aren't skimping anywhere down the line. When compiling the list, we consciously left out most of the "shallower" titles that adolescent dimwits with low self-esteem often dismiss as "casual five-minute Flash games". However much we love the likes of Angry Rodeo, Robot Dogs, Finger Sling, X-Baseball, Need For Cheese, Junny, The Rainy Day, Planet Protector, Get Lucky or High & Low Extended and we love them a lot they didn't make the cut here, because we wanted to make a point. (Those are all still free at the time of writing, so check them out for yourself.)
Most of the games in this Top 100 are totally mainstream in design. Most of them usually cost money. All of them are made with high production values, and love and care. There are 3D racers, overhead racers, classic platformers, platform puzzlers, logic puzzlers, action puzzlers, real-time strategy, turn-based strategy, tower strategy, casino games, jumping games, dodging games, stunt games, adventure games, sandbox games, word games, tilting games, swiping games, pinball, football, baseball, RPGs, rhythm-action, space trading, dungeon-crawlers, line-drawers, tile-matchers, endless runners, twin-stick shooters, horizontal shooters, vertical shooters, static shooters, tap-shooters, trajectory shooters, retro remakes, object-spotting, object-finding, object-slashing well, you get the idea by now, right?
It's not that we're saying the iOS platforms are the only places in the modern-day world of gaming where you can find imagination, originality, variation and invention, you understand. There's some in the world of PC indie, quite a bit on XBLIG/XBLA, and a smattering on PSN (sadly, the DS's time has passed). We live, beyond any rational dispute, in the Second Great Golden Age Of Gaming. But nowhere else are the barriers to entry for a creator with a good idea as low as they are with iOS, and they're pretty trivial at the consumer end too.
A cheap second-hand iPod Touch will get you in, and from there you need never spend another penny. You should, of course, because there are hundreds and thousands of amazing games available for the price of a Twix, but even if you restrict yourself completely to free stuff you'll find more great games than you'll ever have time to play. (WoSland's own quality-freebie-filter, Free-App Hero, has already featured more than 1000, ten times as many as are listed here.)
Prove it, you say? We present our evidence below.
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100 Rogues
If you've ever fancied trying out a Rogue game but were put off by all the nerdery, prepare to be happy. Most versions of the classic PC dungeon-crawler are swamped in unbelievably complex rules and controls, but 100 Rogues cuts through all that to present a super-accessible and funny take on the genre.
Falling halfway between the traditional ASCII Rogue and the slick and arcadey interpretation of the splendid Sword Of Fargoal, 100 Rogues offers very simple touch-and-drag controls alongside a streamlined inventory that still allows for lots of choice and depth in how you tackle the many-floored dungeon.
You can fight as either a warrior savage or a wimpy wizard with powerful magic abilities, with a third character available as an in-app purchase, and there are countless weapons and items to equip until you find the ones that suit you.
The game itself is exactly what you'd expect, ie a more strategic, fast-moving turn-based version of Gauntlet, in which you always have to be careful not to bite off more than you can chew, because if your hit points get to zero there's no way back.
It's all presented with a gentle sense of humour and retro-styled graphics full of personality, and it's incredibly hard not to start another game when you die. If you've ever even thought that you possibly might enjoy a Rogue-type game, you owe it to yourself to get this now.
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1000 Find 'Em All!
1000 Find 'Em All looks like a Zelda clone (yawn) based around GPS tracking (snore), collecting pointless trinkets (gah) and interacting with other people (yuck). In fact it's none of those things.
It's barely even a game, to be honest. You have a Link To The Past-style map to explore, and your task is to wander around it at your own pace until you've found all of the 1000 objects which are concealed in its various nooks and crannies.
In addition, the game generates 'gifters' from places your iThing finds wifi spots, turning them into characters populating the map who also give you objects. So if there's a McDonalds near you with wifi, for example, the game translates that hotspot into a person on the game map who'll give you an object if you walk up to them.
(You do NOT have to actually connect to the wifi hotspot, your iThing just has to detect it. You only get a handful per location per day, so you'll actually find more objects in the game more quickly if you get out and about in the real fresh air and visit new places, although it's not compulsory.)
There are more things to discover in 1000 Find 'Em All than we have room to describe here, but the best thing about it is that most of them are funny. Download it and find a few for yourself and you'll see what we mean. The game was clearly a labour of love, and you'll feel that love when you play it. -
RedPanda87 2,169 posts
Seen 14 hours ago
Registered 14 years agoMakes a valid point, albeit one I was already aware of, but reads like an iJank advert and is overly confrontational.
I was also going to say the list is missing some of the very best games on the iPhone (eg Rimelands, Scarlet and the spark of life, swords and sworcery etc), but then realised they've probably never been available for free.
I do miss having an iPhone as it is genuinely a great gaming device. But I hate Apple, so very much, and in all ways other than games my new android phone is much better and still cheaper. -
Spanky 15,037 posts
Seen 16 hours ago
Registered 18 years ago2XL Fleet Defence
A super-intense blend of line-drawing, castle defence and chaos management on the high seas. You control what appears to be the single surviving jet fighter on an isolated aircraft carrier under siege from enemy jets, bombers and ships. Using your long-range radar you have to plot a flight path to intercept and shoot down all enemies before they can attack the carrier.
So far so simple, and control couldn't be easier you tap to toggle between the main view and radar screen, tap to pick an enemy and wait for your jet to automatically fly to it, fire a homing missile and await your next orders. Every enemy despatched into the drink powers up your carrier's superweapon, which can clear the entire playfield in an emergency but needs a lot of charging.
The challenge comes from the speed with which the map becomes overwhelmed with enemies. By the second or third level you'll be in a panic, certain that it's just not possible to take out every enemy before they get off a shot at the carrier (whose energy bar doesn't replenish between stages).
Eventually you come to realise that your only hope is to plot the most perfect course possible because even wasting two seconds turning round to target a bomber you overshot while tackling another enemy means disaster for the carrier and soon you'll start to inch past levels that seemed completely unsurvivable.
It's a beautifully put-together game, with excellent use of audio cues to let you know when a missile's on its way and you can safely attack your next target. It's very well-balanced, and lets you get straight into serious action without several minutes of boring easy stuff first. It's not for wimps or the easily flustered, but we're rock hard and we love it.
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6th Planet
Beautiful story-based Lunar Lander game, with a comic-strip story that's actually vaguely worth following for once.
The creators of the game are a cast of stars, with the cartoon that's interspersed between the 50 levels written and drawn by the team behind a couple of Oscar-nominated animated movies. It tells an intriguing and zeitgeisty tale (there are even Wikileaks references) of political and moral intrigue that's centred around the sudden and inexplicable terraforming of the gas giant Saturn, and it's got us pretty gripped. (We're only about halfway through the game so far.)
To move the story along you have to beat a series of fairly short but gorgeously implemented lander levels, guiding a lunar module with simple, elegant controls (left and right buttons, and press both together for upwards thrust) safely to its pad past rocky outcrops, volcanoes, space station exhaust ports and a few surprises we won't spoil for you.
Beating the Story mode unlocks a bunch of extra Master stages, and every level has an individual leaderboard recording the smallest amount of fuel used to reach the pad, so there should be plenty of replay value even after you've gone through the entire story, but you should really play 6th Planet at least once just to admire the sheer class with which it's been put together.
In terms of production values it's in a different league to 99.9 percent of other iOS titles, but unlike a lot of more 'art'-type games the creators haven't forgotten about gameplay or metastructure, and we're going to stop writing now before we use too many more words like 'metastructure'. Just don't miss this one, okay?
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Airport Madness Challenge
It might look like yet another Flight Control knockoff, but this game is something much more hardcore altogether. Airport Madness Challenge presents you with the challenge of managing both landings and takeoffs, via a multi-stage procedure where you have to taxi each plane out to the runway, line it up and then take off.
At the same time, however, other planes are coming in to land, and you have to make sure they've got somewhere to go and then taxi them back safely to the terminal, which invariably involves crossing over the active runways. (If you ask us, whoever designed the layout of these airports needs a slap.)
What seems like a sedate game as you send your first jet on its way turns amazingly quickly into a terrifying frenzy of activity, and by the time you start having to cope with clouds partly obscuring the runways and night flights where everything's even harder to see, you'll be wondering why air traffic controllers get paid less than football stars.
There are some very ugly buttons in Airport Madness Challenge, which might lead you to dismiss it as the work of slapdash amateurs. Don't be fooled this is one of the most excellent chaos management games we've ever seen.
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Alien Swarm
A lovely Galaga derivative that's far better than Namco's official Galaga Remix. It's smooth and fast and tough and has been far better fitted to the iOS machines than Namco's game, in large part thanks to the automatic firing which leaves you able to concentrate in comfort on moving your ship via slide controls.
Other than that this is a fantastic classic 80s-style arcade shooter, with two difficulty settings and a cunning central mechanism whereby you have to keep collecting 'S' icons in order to maintain your double-rate fire. It previously had (and currently has) a ridiculous $5 price tag, so being able to pick it up for free was a real treat.
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Angry Honey
(still free)
A simple but brilliant music-action game that's quite reminiscent of parts of Rhythm Tengoku / Paradise / Heaven on the GBA and DS, in which you play the part of an unfortunate big lug who's committed some unspecified marital faux pas, and resultingly is under a barrage of crockery and other household items from his better half.
All you have to do is tap anywhere on the screen to smash the incoming objects in time with the music (while avoiding punching the baby, just like in real life), but Angry Honey is so beautifully made that even the most savage temper will be soothed in a matter of seconds.
The music is just one tiny loop, but clever changes of pitch and speed and timing provide for plenty of variation, and the fusillade of furnishings soon gets very tricky to maintain your combos in. It's without doubt our favourite iPhone music game.
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Aqua Moto Racing
Splishy-splashy jetski racing with stunts. It's not quite Wave Race 64 (come to that it's not quite Aqua Moto Racing 2), but then what is?
What you do get are pretty graphics and very smooth control (tilt-only, but with adjustable sensitivity so you don't have to wrench your iPod around like a deranged tanker captain trying to do a three-point turn in a paddling pool), and 18 courses across three settings, with Championship and Time Trial modes.
There's nothing too sophisticated going on here, and having to sign up to yet another proprietary score-ranking service to use the online functions (or just call your character something other than "Guest") is irritating, but the game does what it does really pleasantly and you'll get plenty of fun out of it.
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Arachnadoodle
One of those games that's just so enjoyable to play you don't even care what your score is. It's not that Arachnadoodle doesn't have plenty to offer points-hunters, because it keeps OpenFeint high scores for every one of its 32 levels and each one is bursting at the seams with opportunities and bonuses. But the core gameplay mechanism is just so lovely to play with that you won't mind if you rack up a world-beating total or not.
You're an extremely cute boggly-eyed spider, and your job is to build a web, which you do by catapulting yourself all over the screen (with a limited number of shots) and joining up pegs by passing over them. There are juicy bugs to catch along the way and increasing numbers of hazards to avoid, and when you've used up all your shots an army of flies sweeps across the screen accompanied by the stirring strains of 'Ride Of The Valkyries'. The more complex and interconnected the pegs of your web are, the more will be caught and the more bonus points you'll grab.
The game is basically a cross between Peggle and Angry Birds, but with almost none of their reliance on luck. The graphics are cartoon-sweet, the sound is superb and it's just glorious to play no matter whether you're any good at it or not. If you've got an iThing, you absolutely must have Arachnadoodle, unless you're some kind of idiot.
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Ash
An epic Japanese-style role-player with that rarest of things in RPG games a snappy sense of humour. (At least, we THINK it's a snappy sense of humour it might just be mistranslation, but we're giving it the benefit of the doubt.)
This is role-playing in the classic style of the SNES Zelda games or the early Final Fantasy titles, full of castles and knights and monsters and swelling orchestral music and interminable intro and dialogue sequences. But when it finally actually lets you play, you'll find a compelling adventure with excellent touch controls (there's also a d-pad option if you prefer) and sharp, funny writing.
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Astral
Gorgeous re-interpretation of the 'Pacifism' mode from Geometry Wars, only with more sitars. Everybody loves sitars, right?
We're heartbroken that Astral doesn't have online leaderboards yet, because it's our favourite game of this week (at time of writing). It's a beautiful-looking take on Pacifism, in which you weave your way around packs of chasers in a small arena, with no weaponry other than the ability to break booby-trap tripwires and thereby cause explosions behind you to consume your pursuers, from whose bodies you can loot tons of treasure.
It's lightning-quick, incredibly smooth, and almost as pretty on SD displays as it is on Retina ones. You get two modes, although one of them's just a Zen practice mode with no scoring surplus to requirements because this is a game that needs no training, and which is plenty gorgeous in combat.
Most art games are high on art and low on game, but this hits both nails squarely on the head it's totally focused on play, right down to the way it just starts a new game right away the instant you get killed. The music works far better than you might expect, and the whole experience is a joy from start to finish. It's even a teeny tiny 5MB download to squeeze into the fullest iThing.
The developers promise GC and OF leaderboards are on the way, so if you only download one game today, make it this one.
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Axe In Face
Of all the hundreds of line-drawing games in the App Store, our money says this is the cutest one. You play an adorable Yosemite Sam-ish viking who's had enough of all his Viking buddies trampling over his beloved daffodil patch yep, it's yet another Vikings-and-daffodils game.
Vowing never to see another of his delicate blooms crushed by their clumping, blood-soaked boots, our hero takes up his axe (which conveniently has boomerang properties and always finds its way back to his hand) and starts flinging.
The game plays exactly as you'd expect it to, which is to say that it's basically Flight Control crossed with Plants Vs Zombies and a tiny bit of Angry Birds. You start off with simple Vikings walking towards your flowerbed in a straight line, but soon you'll encounter fast-moving ones in sacks, ones carrying pine trees (you have to throw the axe through a fire first to burn through the tree), drunk ones and more, scattered through 32 levels.
Each level is essentially a self-contained minigame, with medals to win for beating it with the fewest throws there are individual level scores and a cumulative score, but the game is focused more on medals and achievements. It's not the hardest game in the world and it's a little samey, but Axe In Face is such a sheer pleasure to play that it doesn't outstay its welcome.
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Backbreaker Football/Vengeance
One of the first of the real iOS killer apps, BBF still looks great (and plays as well as it always did) despite the old-fashioned non-Retina graphics.
It was Backbreaker that gave the first tantalising glimpse of what the iThings could really do and set us on the road to the likes of Rage and Infinity Blade. Graphically stunning (it came out way back in 2009) but also fast, smooth and responsive, it's a simple dodging game that boils the sport down to its purest essence.
Your customisable player is alone on a field full of enemies, and has to jink and spin and sprint his way to the endzone as a succession of meathead thugs hurl themselves at him brutally. (The game takes particular delight in showing you their bone-crunching takedowns in sickening slow motion replays.)
As you battle through the levels the tacklers get more numerous and the field gets more restricted, with large zones blocked off by red barriers that funnel you down narrow channels towards your opponents, and that's about it for gameplay sophistication, except for the superb Showboating option that gives you the chance to risk all your good work for bonus points by rubbing the defenders' noses in it as you near the line.
Backbreaker works because it cuts straight to the fun stuff without all the boring rock-paper-scissors bits and the constant stoppages. It's all action all the time, and not much in gaming feels better than pulling off a long showboating touchdown after you've had your ribs rearranged several times in a row by hulking goons.
Three difficulty settings provide fun for all the family Rookie is essentially a simplified version for kids, which you can beat with just the spin buttons, whereas Pro should tax even decent players from very early on and Hardcore is just frightening, so it's perhaps just as well that it's locked until you beat Pro.
If we were being picky we'd have liked to see a joypad-and-buttons control option as well as the tilt-based default (because we hate having to sit up straight and hold our iThings flat we're not at school), but that's a minor criticism of a bona-fide App Store classic.
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Bad Rabbit
Ultra-stylish Copter derivative starring what must be an extremely dizzy heli-bunny who's on the lam from the law. Lumme!
We don't know what sort of a society is that puts rabbits in jail, but that's precisely the prison-based pickle our pointy-eared pet has gotten himself into in this kerrayzee cartoon caper that owes as much to Gravity Guy as it does to the more traditional chopper-style games in the genre. (We'd have called it The Straw-shank Redemption personally, but there you go. Also, if he was being kept in solitary confinement, would he be called Bugsy Alone? We'll stop now.)
Anyhoo, this is Copter brought bang up to date, loaded with varied obstacles, settings and power-ups that ensure two seconds rarely go by without something new happening. The controls are a bit different to the usual rather than touching the screen to go up and releasing to fall, here a tap effectively toggles gravity, with our Leporidan lag constantly moving either up or down until you switch his direction.
He spins past walls, guards, electrified fences and all manner of other hazards, with a neat extra touch provided by a set daily challenge on the day we're writing this, for example, you can get an extra life by surviving 400m without hitting any of the electric beams. The scenery changes every 15 seconds, but the gameplay remains the same.
This is a highly-polished effort with a lot more to it than most of the hundreds of similar titles clogging the App Store, and despite being a one-button game it never gets repetitive or dull, perhaps thanks to the strong difficulty curve. We're snowed under with great games to play as we write this, but we always find a few minutes for Bad Rabbit.
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Beyond Ynth
A top-quality sequel which expands considerably on what was already a fab puzzle/maze/platformer.
Beyond Ynth, like the original Ynth, is essentially about climbing inside boxes and rolling them over in order to get from one side of each level to the other as quickly as possible. But the follow-up diligently improves on all of its predecessor's weaknesses (such as the incredibly annoying and unfair random falling items, which are almost entirely eliminated here), adds excellent new interface features (like the rewind that lets you go back to where you messed things up instead of making you restart the entire level), and sticks a whole bunch of new stuff onto the gameplay too.
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Big Cup Cricket
A full-featured rendition of the world's dullest sport that somehow makes for a fun iThing game. Who could have ever imagined? (And who would have thought Square Enix would be involved, too?)
Big Cup's simple swipe-and-tap-based controls for bowling, batting and fielding probably won't impress serious cricket-heads, but if it was up to us then serious cricket-heads would all be shot anyway, so that's not much of a criticism.
You can play exhibition matches, some training minigames or one of three full-blown tournaments, as one of 20 different countries. (Did you even know that 20 countries played cricket? We didn't, and if you'd asked us to name them we're not sure we'd have come up with Scotland, Uganda or the USA, but they're among the sides you can pick alongside the more traditional cricket nations.)
You play full 11-batsman innings, but can choose 5, 10, 15 or 20 overs in order to make sure that a game doesn't last five days and then finish in a draw anyway. It's fast, slick and cute three words which have never before in the history of humanity been used to describe cricket and it could teach many developers a few things about boiling a sport down to its most fun essence for a videogame.
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Blocks Avalanche
Super Mario Bros meets Tetris meets Doodle Jump meets Mr Driller in reverse. We think that's just about everything, but we'll break it down for you.
Tetris is an easy one it supplies the geometric block shapes that fall from the sky. If they squish you against the floor, you die.
Mr Driller is represented by the monster that's chomping upwards at the same time, forcing you to keep climbing higher hence 'in reverse'. Fall into his mouth, you die. (The other similarity is the hammer that lets you break blocks to your left or right, A BIT LIKE A DRILL.)
The Mario element is provided by the fact that you smash blocks above you by headbutting them, and by the retro pixel graphics (especially one of the four selectable themes, which is pure Super Mario World) and the 8-bit chip music.
And it isn't really all that much like Doodle Jump, with the exception of the obvious jumping-up-a-constantly-scrolling-screen thing (which we've already covered in the Mr Driller bit). We just put that in to teach a lesson to all the people who automatically skip over any game featuring the words 'Doodle Jump'. We really hate that sort of kneejerk dismissal when there are so many games that clearly borrow heavily from Lima Sky's megahit, but do all sorts of clever new stuff that makes them worthwhile in their own right.
So now they've gone, Blocks Avalance: Bob Jump (to give it its official name) is brilliant. The Tetris comparison is about more than the superficial visual connection they way you have to very quickly assess and react to each incoming block, and in particular the way it's going to interact with the ones that are already there, is very similar. But it really does feel a lot like Mr Driller too, most noticeably in the way you progress by rushing from safe spot to safe spot.
It's challenging from the get-go, and just when you think you've started to get the hang of it it'll crank the speed up a little bit more. You're rarely more than one badly-judged headbutt or hammer-blow away from catastrophe, which of course is true of real life too.
You get OpenFeint leaderboards to test yourself against, which adds the final buff of polish to this fantastic arcade game.
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Boggle
It's Boggle. You know what Boggle is, yeah? Well, if you don't, this is it now. This is Boggle. Boggle Boggle Boggle. It's Boggle. That picture down there? It's a picture of Boggle. Being all Boggle-y and doing that Boggle stuff it does. Understandably, because it's Boggle.
(PS: Weirdly, Electronic Arts habitually operates a policy of having different prices for its games in Europe and the USA, so Boggle is often at different prices in different places, or even free in one territory and paid in the other. We don't really understand why EA does this. It makes our mind do something, but we can't quite think of the right word for it at the moment.)
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Bonsai Blast
A gorgeous Puzzloop/Zuma clone, but this one's loaded with plenty of original ideas of its own too. The core marble-matching gameplay is exactly how you'd expect, but there are all sorts of well-thought-out additions, like being able to switch between multiple shooter positions and bounce marbles off walls.
There are 90 levels (none of which outstay their welcome) in Adventure mode, and you can play an endless Survival game (with Facebook leaderboards) in any one you've beaten, so the game expands and contracts to fill however much time you've got to spare. Control is by fast and precise touch aiming, and some inventive level types and satisfying powerups keep things fresh and well balanced.
Despite dating all the way back to 2008, this is probably still the best game in its genre on any format. (Just nudging out the awesome Magnetica/Actionloop on DS by virtue of not having any levels where you have to blow on your console.)
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Braveheart
Ever played Robotron and thought 'This doesn't have enough RPG elements for my liking'? Then it is the time for you to rejoice, bold hero!
We are outraged that this completely unrelated game has hijacked the name of the famous movie about the rebellion of the proud Scots against the murderous English, but everything else about it is pretty tremendous. You'll spend most of your time swinging a mace around your head and smashing the skulls of various evil types who are obstructing your quest to avoid being executed for sexual harassment, which is a bit of an unusual plot for a videogame but who are we to ask questions?
Excellently, while there's a not-so-great option to play with twin virtual sticks, your hero Richard (you can enter your own name instead if you like, but the cutscenes will still refer to you as Richard) can also be controlled via a splendid and intuitive tap-and-swipe interface which centres mostly around drawing circles on the screen to keep your mace dealing out its spiralling trauma.
As you wade thigh-deep in blood and entrails through 20+ stages, each with multiple waves and with boss fights every few rounds, you'll have to keep on top of all manner of weapons, abilities, 'perks' and skill points, but really Braveheart is barely any more complex than Williams' classic arcade robot war and almost as entertaining. A constant diet of new enemies and powers keeps it fresh, and the action rarely lets up.
In addition to the main Story mode there are three minigames a time trial, a 60-second score attack and a boss rush with OpenFeint leaderboards if you fancy a quicker session, and the main game has leaderboards and achievements too. The presentation is flawless and the graphics and sound are beautiful and meaty, in that order.
And best of all, at least you know there's definitely no way Mel Gibson is making any money out of it.
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Broken Sword Director's Cut
One of the all-time greatest point-and-click adventure games, except now in an even-greater form. The Director's Cut adds full-speech audio to the original version, as well as a whole new story arc, and brings even more atmosphere to the superbly-written modern-day tale of the ancient order of Knights Templar.
It's been fantastically ported to the touch-screen format with ultra-intuitive controls, and features an excellent hint system that ensures you should never get too stuck, but without handing you the answers on a plate the first time you ask.
The gorgeously-painted graphics and quality voice acting immediately tell you Broken Sword is a class act, but it's playing it that really reveals its beauty. It needs a hefty chunk of space, but if a game was ever worth deleting some of your less-used apps for it's this one.
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Burn The Rope
We don't quite know how it ever got to No.1, but this twisty physics puzzle is still fun, even if its focus on pyromania and insect murder marks it out as a warning flag for sociopathic tendencies.
112 levels of wanton arson each present you with a tangle of ropes and just one match. You can choose where to set light to the structure, and from that point the flame will always try to travel upwards (while never leaving the ropes). You have to twist and turn your iThing so that the flame's path consumes the rope, and if you don't keep it moving upwards it'll gutter and die.
After a couple of introductory stages things rapidly get more complicated, with branching paths which split the flame into two whereupon you have to juggle (not literally) to try to keep them both alive, and coloured ropes which need to be burned by coloured flames, created by guiding the flame into bugs of various hues.
The levels have to be unlocked in sequence, which always strikes us as stupid and pointless in a game like this where each level has a separate high score and gives you bronze, silver and gold medals for burning higher percentages of the ropes. If we'd like to try a tougher level, why force us through 20 boring ones first? It's not like it's going to mess up the storyline.
But it's the level design that's key in games like this, and luckily Burn The Rope doesn't have many boring ones. From early on you'll really have to think about your plan as well as execute it smartly, and the stages are inventive and varied enough to keep the game fresh even though you're doing the same thing over and over again.
We'd never bothered with BTR previously as it looked as if it was one of those annoying games that demand you sit up straight and hold your iThing out totally flat like you were in church or something, but in fact it isn't since all the rotation is in one plane you can play the game happily even if you're lying flat on your back, so it's ideal for long-haired student layabouts everywhere.
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Car Jack Streets
Grand Theft Auto-style crime thrills, from the people who brought you the original Grand Theft Auto. This is a game much more like the first GTA, with overhead-view graphics rather than down-on-the-streets 3D, but the gameplay is much the same.
CJS is an old game by App Store standards (it dates back to April 2009), but it's still an impressive piece of work that gives the lie to the notion that the iPhone is all about five-minute bursts of casual Flash-style gaming. There's a big map, sharp graphics with real-life day/night cycles, a great radio soundtrack and a lot of mischief to get up to. For free, it was criminal not to.
(Honourable mention: the terrific iOS port of PS1 classic Driver, which has been free a couple of times and has far better controls than you probably imagine.) -
Spanky 15,037 posts
Seen 16 hours ago
Registered 18 years agoRed Conquest
Beware this epic RTS is much more complex than iOS gamers are used to, but it rewards the effort. Boasting all the gorgeous (and high-definition, for Retina display users) graphical flair of the Blue Defense games that it's narratively connected to, Red Conquest offers gameplay vastly more complicated than their simple target-prioritising laser carnage.
You'll need patience to get to grips with a lengthy tutorial and a daunting interface that borders on byzantine certainly by App Store standards and you'll have to employ some pretty sophisticated strategy if you're going to make any headway as the evil Red side of this particular cosmic conflict.
In truth, Red Conquest will probably be too much for most people's attention spans. But if you've been yearning for something with tons of style and a bit more depth than another Doodle Jump or Flight Control copycat, all your Christmases just came at once. It's a real pity it's not a Universal app to take advantage of the iPad's greater screen area, though.
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Robot Wants Kitty
This excellent Metroid-style platformer only has six levels, but it's great while it lasts, and at up to half an hour per level you'll still get a very respectable chunk of fun out of it before you're done. Hey, it's still longer than Pilotwings Resort, and that costs 40 quid.
The sweet plot sees you take the role of a lonely robot who wants to rescue a cute pussycat that's been cruelly imprisoned in a laboratory, so that he can have some companionship. He starts off each level almost powerless, but with a bit of exploring you can quickly find various 'apps' that enable him to jump, dash, fire a gun and lots more. Using these powers he can negotiate locked gates, blocked walls and countless monsters and bosses to reach the kitty and make a happier life for both of them. We're don't know where he's going to buy milk, but we're sure he'll figure something out.
The simple, responsive controls make the game a pleasure to play we're so happy to see so many traditional-style games finally mastering the art of making a good virtual pad, with the likes of League Of Evil and Pizza Boy and now this one consigning the awful controls of early iOS platformers to the dustbin of history.
The maps get increasingly large, and you can refer to them at any time with a quick tap on your 'bot. (Missus.) You have infinite lives, restarting at handy checkpoints when killed, and each round is a race against the clock.
Obviously the main issue with the game is the lack of levels, though the developers promise that 'Kitty Connect', a currently-disabled mode allowing the building and sharing of user-designed levels, will be live soon. We always take such promises with a pinch of salt until we see them with our own eyes, but even with only the couple of hours of content that it currently offers, Robot Wants Kitty is a delight that you'd be a fool to miss out on.
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Run Like Hell Deluxe
At last, the long wait for a Deluxe running game featuring a chasing pack of hungry cannibals is at an end. This is a superb evolution of the form, with gorgeous graphics and animation and a wide variety of interesting obstacles to jump over, slide under or clamber across as you run for your life from a variety of baddies with one common goal having you for dinner. And not in the nice way.
This is the same game as normal Run Like Hell!, and still comes with a hefty chunk of the content locked at the start. However, with Deluxe you get more to play from the off, and you can unlock all the various stages comparatively easily by playing Story mode (which is now available straight away), rather than having to either slog for dozens of hours earning enough in-game points or pay real money to open them up with in-app purchases
The four Endless levels and the pair of Time Trials that are open inmmediately are essentially all complete games in themselves, and even if you never care about unlocking the rest of the game they're tremendous fun in their own right. The first Endless stage (Beach) is a simpler version of the game where you never have to use the duck button, whereas the second (Jungle) is for more advanced players and calls for much quicker thinking, and in general things get slightly more complicated the further you progress.
There's also a new Valentine-themed standalone level, a shopping mall where our hero is pursued by a pack of love-crazed hot girls, and a variant of it called Heartbreaker where you have to take the right route to collect love-hearts rather than playing for distance. In all cases, though, you'll need fast reactions and lots of the powerups that slow down the enemies or grant you a speed-boosting adrenaline burst.
Meanwhile, the Time Trial stages take place on fixed levels (whereas the Endless ones are all randomly generated) and have no chasers, tasking you only with reaching the finish line as quickly as possible. The nature of the game is such that there's vast scope for variation in your time, and putting together a run with the minimum of tripping and time-consuming climbing and the maximum of adrenaline-fuelled running and precision leaping is enormously satisfying.
There are OpenFeint achievements to harvest and leaderboards for every Endless and Time Trial level, and basically enough game here to keep you occupied for weeks. And for some reasons it's also 8MB smaller than the non-deluxe version, so you can save a little bit of space too.
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Sentinel: Mars Defense
It might be a pensioner by App Store standards, but this is still one of the definitive tower defence games. (And at just a tenth the size of the rather bloated third game in the series, it's a lot less space-hungry too.)
We're going to presume we don't need to explain tower 'defense' games to you, as they're one of the defining forms of iThing gaming, but all you need to know is alongside the two GeoDefense titles the Sentinel games are still the champions of the genre, and the chance to pick up the original for free isn't one you should pass up.
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Shift
Highly inventive monochrome platforming genius that works far better on iOS than the original Flash-based PC version did, largely due to the far superior and fantastically clever control method it employs on the touchscreen machines.
You have to reach each level's exit not only by the usual running and jumping antics, but also by strategically 'shifting' the single-screen levels, which flips the screen upside down and inverts the colours so that what was once solid wall is now empty space, ceilings become floors and so on.
After being led very quickly through the basic mechanics of how the game works you're left to get on with figuring your way out through dozens of fiendishly-designed rooms. It's a beautiful piece of work, minimalist and hugely accessible yet taxing enough to have you scratching your head like a cat with fleas.
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Sliding Heroes
A most odd little hybrid of RPG and multi-ball wooden-labyrinth game from your pals at Square Enix. It's not that it's complicated, just that it's really quite weird.
The action takes place on a series of single-screen maps, littered with a variety of enemy creatures. You can summon up to eight fighters of your own at a time, taken from one of four character classes with the usual RPG variety of characteristics like strength, attack range, defensive power etc.
Having done so, you tilt them around the screen so that they collide with the baddies and hopefully kill them, opening up the next of 30 stages, and that's pretty much all there is to it. The trick is in using the tilt controls to control multiple characters at once so that you can use them to simultaneously attack enemies with more than one of your own fighters. (Individual enemies quickly become too tough for a single one to handle.)
It's not the fastest game in the world and the controls could do with a calibration option (going up the screen can be a bit of a trial, and you can adjust sensitivity but not the zero angle), but it's incredibly absorbing and extremely satisfying when you defeat a big monster by distracting him with a warrior while your fragile witches zap him from a distance, or lancers circle round behind and drive him into an acid pool.
The lives system is also clever, giving you a set number of 'spawns' but adding one every time you defeat an enemy, so you have to decide whether it's worth wiping out the lesser monsters (risking losing more lives than you gain) or just going straight for the bosses.
In addition to the story-based main game there's the more arcadey Endless mode, where you have a single very powerful character type and 99 lives with which to clear 100 screens of enemies. (So 'Endless' isn't a very good name for it.) The main danger, though, is probably the greatly increased number of deadly pits (both static and moving) littering each stage, which really show up the game's wooden-labyrinth ancestry.
Sliding Heroes is a real gem of invention, and for free it's an absolute must-have for any self-respecting iThing.
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Slingo Supreme
A terrible game of pure luck, that for some reason we're pathologically unable to stop playing even when our house is on fire and full of wolves.
If you have an addictive personality, then whatever you do don't download Slingo Supreme. It will eat your life. It's basically a bingo game with power-ups, and there's more or less no skill whatsoever involved in it you just spin some reels and try to fill in all the numbers on a grid. But it's well, we're not even sure what it is.
All we DO know is that once you start playing it, odd things happen to time and the next thing you know you've got 84 bottles of milk stacked up on your doorstep and an nine-inch beard. (Even if you're female, which is the really freaky thing.)
The Devil does appear in the game, which may have something to do with it. Man, we hope we haven't accidentally sold our soul or something.
SLINGO SUPREME IS EVIL AND BAD. DO NOT DOWNLOAD SLINGO SUPREME. ALL MAY DIE.
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Solomon's Keep
(still free)
Twin-stick Gauntlet with fairly minor RPG complications and almost countless hours of replay value. Evil wizard Solomon Dark is lurking on the 13th floor of a dark tower and your job as an apprentice spell-caster is to fight your way up from the ground floor and defeat him and his many minions yada yada yada.
At first Solomon's Keep seems pretty slow going, with numerous levels of plot blurb to skip through and a fairly sluggish initial pace, but when you've cleared a few rooms of monsters the game offers you a choice of powerups as a reward (faster movement, more powerful weapons, bigger energy bars and the like) and things start to get more fun.
On your first run through you'll have to play pretty carefully and tactically, adopting a hit-and-run approach where you take out a few baddies and then have to run away to recover your strength, but by the time you've beaten the game once (and enjoyed the funny credits sequence) you'll have a pretty impressive armoury and be well-placed to tackle the many new challenges you can choose from.
You can simply step up a difficulty level (retaining all your gathered powers from the previous run), or try to beat Solomon Dark without using magic potions, or in less than an hour, or any of several other challenges, all of which earn you achievements. On top of that there are three save slots (so you can try all three of the main weapons you get to choose from before entering the fray), gold to collect and new powers to buy with it, magical objects to find and equip, and a well-named Hardcore mode where no continues are permitted.
The game is full of unforced humour, with knowing references to Gauntlet and others (particularly C64 classic Impossible Mission), and it's beautifully atmospheric, with the evil wizard offering frequent interjections in a demonic, booming voice and rain lashing down constantly on the tower. (A really clever touch ambience-wise is the way you occasionally have to venture outside onto the battlements to move between areas of the tower. The gameplay doesn't change but it does wonders in terms of breaking up the endless dungeons and corridors and making the tower feel like a real place.)
It's hard to attribute too much weight to the RPG element because the skills you're offered when you level up are random each time and it's a pity Hardcore mode doesn't have scoring for when you feel like a quicker game rather than a full 13-level slog (the only wider goal in Solomon's Keep is to earn the achievements by repeatedly completing it), but there are plenty of other games to play if you want those things.
This is a fantastically engrossing game with plenty of payoff for all your hard work, and you'll happily fight your way through the 13 levels time and time again. (The tower's layout is randomised for each play, but you can access a Doom-style overlay map so you don't waste time getting lost.) Frankly you really should have bought it long before now, but for free it's a gold-plated steal.
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Soosiz
'Super Mario Galaxy 2D' is the shortest way of describing the fantastic Soosiz, which might be the single finest game in the App Store ever to have gone on a free promo.
With 66 increasingly-taxing levels spread across 7 worlds, its a platformer designed from the ground up for the iThings, and everything about it is gorgeous, from the buttery-smooth rotating graphics to the perfectly-weighted controls and the expertly-judged difficulty curve. If you didnt download this while it was inexplicably available for absolutely nothing, you might as well shove your iPod into the dark parts of a Cocker Spaniel for all the good its doing you.
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Speedball 2 Evolution
The best version yet of the finest future-sports videogame ever made in human time. We had plentiful fears about Tower Studios' porting of the legendary Amiga and Atari ST title (which, if you're THAT young, is basically handball with violence), but they all proved unfounded. The controls either dynamic virtual pad or tilt are superbly done, the revamped graphics are sublime and the game plays just like it used to. (Albeit somewhat easier, but that's wimpy modern gamers for you.)
The structure is identical to the 1990 original, with few additions other than a handful of special stadia to unlock (and the very welcome improvement that you're always playing up the screen). You can play a single Quick Match game, a Challenge tournament (using either preset or custom tourneys) or the full-blown Career mode, in which you have to take your team through a series of cups and leagues to become the world's undisputed Speedball champions.
You earn and pick up money during games to upgrade your players' abilities, which is pretty unnecessary during the early matches but will be needed when the opposition eventually starts to put up a decent fight. Alternatively you can just buy a load of cash via in-app purchase if you want to completely ruin the game for yourself.
Speedball 2 is one of the all-time great two-player sports titles, and the iOS version is no exception to that rule, with both Bluetooth and wifi matches available. Annoyingly, though, you can only challenge other players with the same type of iThing as you iPad owners can only play other iPad owners and not iPhone or iPod Touch users, for example. One way or another, though, you should be able to find an adversary and enjoy a game that's as great today as it was in 1990.
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Squareball
We laugh every time we play this game, even though there aren't any jokes in it. What's that about? Well, it's because of the sheer, insanely uncompromising savagery of how hard it is.
Squareball will kill you. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times. Most of the people who play it will probably never see more than 30-40 percent of its content. But unlike other brutally hard games, Squareball is never less than fun. It's about as simple a game as you could possibly design bounce a ball to the end of a level without going off the screen but making it through even one stage is an epic feat that you'll feel deserves a headline spot on the evening news.
It's been toned down a little since its first release, with slightly gentler Challenge stages offering an easier way in, a new Endless game where speed rather than staying alive is the issue, and a new 'Casual' difficulty setting, but don't be fooled. Squareball is still going to kick your head in. No matter how often it does, though, you'll keep coming back for another try, because the fantastic retro graphics and sound, and the simple, flawless controls, make it fun to fail. Iconic and completely brilliant iGaming.
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Star Keeper
This brilliant original arcade game is well named, because it's 60 (or 90) seconds of design genius. (What we're going for there is that it's both a 'star' and definitely a 'keeper'. Pay attention at the back.)
The simplest of premises (it's a little bit reminiscent of Qix, and not just in the fact that you draw boxes the way risk grows the bigger the area you try to 'capture' is conceptually very similar, as is the simplicity of the gameplay) conceals a game of extraordinary beauty and compulsiveness. The idea is that stars tumble into the playfield from the top and sides, and drift their way towards the bottom, where they disappear. In between those times you can try to draw a box (with a single swipe, the corner-to-corner way you would in a paint app) and capture the stars for points.
You can chain combos, but if a box forms with a star only partly inside it you'll register a 'break' and get hardly any points for it, and you'll also reset your multiplier, which you really don't want to do. There are a few other bonus rules (extra points for capturing several stars of one colour only, or for getting all three colours together), and two types of special star one you HAVE to 'break' or it'll destroy all the other stars onscreen, and one that creates a gravity vortex that sucks every other star towards it for a couple of seconds, giving you a chance to grab lots at once for big points.
That's about it, but the real joy lies in using this tiny ruleset to work out tactics and strategies, and therefore climb the global leaderboards. Clearly, we're not going to tell you our own methods at this point, but you'll find us up near the very top. And yeah, we ARE looking for a fight, actually.
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Stoopid Sandwich
(still free)
Ingenious take on tower-building physics, where you draw your own blocks and have no excuses.
Stoopid Sandwich plays very similarly to games like Topple, where your objective is to build a tall column of something (in this case, a sandwich Scooby Doo would be proud of) before gravity inevitably asserts its authority and brings it crashing to the ground. The twist here is that while the fillings are dealt out at random (although you do get to see what's coming next), every second item in the sandwich is a piece of bread and you draw those yourself, enabling you in theory at least to compensate for any wobbles or lean in your tower by adding exactly the right-shaped object to get it back in balance and provide a stable platform for lots more tasty fillings.
(You don't even have to draw all four sides if you want a wedge-shaped piece, say, just draw two of the edges and the game will connect the corners for you automatically.)
There's no time limit as such on drawing your slice (except that sometimes you'll have to rush to drop it as the tower sways alarmingly to one side) and you can make it as big or small as you like, but the game is deceptively tough even before it starts dropping awkwardly-shaped objects like chicken legs or mushrooms, and you'll be startled how quickly you keep losing.
The cartoon graphics are full of character and you're accompanied by a never-ending cheesy song ('Yummy yummy in your tummy') which helps the atmosphere no end, although on the downside it may cause you to have a nervous breakdown when you can't stop singing it on the bus, at a job interview or during a romantic dinner with your significant other.
An update has added two new shorter-play modes since we first wrote about SS, and if you were smart enough to download the game when we originally featured it then you get them for free. Latecomers can pick them up via a low-priced in-app purchase.
A Game Center leaderboard guarantees lively competition, but the physics in Stoopid Sandwich are what'll keep you coming back to it.
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Strimko Gold
Probably our favourite iOS logic puzzle game ever, seen here in its super-deluxe version with over 300 levels. Strimko is a completely original type of puzzle, which is like Sudoku in so much as you have to arrange numbers in a grid so that each number only appears once in each line, but unlike Sudoku in the sense that it's hugely enjoyable rather than hideously dull and awful.
Levels range in size from 4Χ4 to 7Χ7, and you have to arrange the numbers by horizontal and vertical lines, but also by irregular-shaped ones (known as 'streams') that snake through the grids and must also only contain one of each number. And those are literally all of the rules.
The interface is simple and intuitive, allowing you to indicate either 'definite' numbers or multiple 'maybes', and you can select from three different colour themes or let the game pick one at random. The puzzles themselves are the stars here, and they're perfectly judged, starting off with easy ones that you should be able to knock off in under a minute and leading you up a gentle but tangible difficulty curve into a world of mental torment.
There are 329 puzzles in all arranged into various groups and 309 of them are unlocked from the start, with the other 20 requiring you clear all 100 of the 'Core Pack' to access them. (Those 120 are in fact the contents of normal Strimko, with the other 189 being made up of its three IAP packs plus the 9 levels from the Lite version.)
It's hard to convey exactly what separates run-of-the-mill logic puzzles from great ones (because it basically comes down to the kind of thinking you have to employ, and that's something that's not easy to explain), but take it from us Strimko is a game that absolutely belongs in the latter camp, and Strimko Gold is about as good a Strimko app as you could hope to find. A nailed-on must-have.
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Super Marble Roll
There are surprisingly few Marble Madness (or for younger viewers, Super Monkey Ball) clones on the App Store, perhaps because this one's so good. That was all we said about SMR when we first featured it, and we're tempted to stand by it. You know what Marble Madness is about, you can see what the graphics look like, and it's free, so what are you waiting for?
But such a superficial summary would be doing the game something of a disservice. Super Marble Roll plays beautifully, with smooth movement and configurable tilt control, and it's pure arcade highscore gaming you get three lives and then it's back to the start (or continue, but with all your points lost). There are three difficulty levels unlocked in sequence each of which has the same 14 courses but with increasingly tricky object placement and tighter time limits, offset by higher scoring. (There's a single leaderboard covering all three difficulties.)
We like the way you're tempted to lunge at the screen to destroy passing UFOs for extra points (inevitably losing your balance and plunging to a shattery death as you do so), and that while speeding to the end of a level is relatively achievable, you don't feel you've beaten it properly unless you've collected all the bonus gems, something so hard to do inside the time limit that you may very well cry.
The stages are terrifically well designed, with lots of varied and inventive features and laid out in such a way that if you're really good you can pull off all sorts of impressive shortcuts. The presentation is minimal but elegant, with the sound as good as the crisp, evocative visuals, and every facet of the game (except the unfortunate absence of online leaderboards) is of the highest quality.
Far better than the official Super Monkey Ball titles for iOS, this is tilt-based gaming at its very best.
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Super Mega Worm
By far the least boring of the games in which a gigantic worm eats devours trucks, cows and babies in prams. (And we know in theory it shouldn't be possible to make that boring, but you'd be surprised.)
Part game, part low-cost distraction therapy for the sociopathic, Super Mega Worm gives you control of some kind of hideous monstrous annelid probably created by radiation or pollution or something (sorry, we always skip intros), afflicted with a ravenous and insatiable hunger. Much as you'd like to make friends and live in some sort of symbiotic eco-harmony with the citizens walking around on the surface, you have to eat them instead. That's just the way it is.
The developers of SMW have gotten almost everything right. There are control options to suit pretty much everyone, the retro graphics and sound are perfectly pitched, and the screams of your victims add lots of character to a game that already has an abundance it. (Our favourite is the heart-rending 'Please! I just got my nails done!')
It's a hugely fun game to play, but Super Mega Worm's only failing is that it's a bit easy. It's a cinch to just skim the surface gobbling up a string of stupid humans, so even your constantly-emptying stomach takes a long time to become a problem, particularly as you automatically evolve new attacks as the game progresses. Eight or nine levels in it does start to put up a bit of a fight, and you'll need to master trickier stuff like combos if you want to challenge the stratospheric high scores on the Game Center leaderboard, but if you're used to your iThing gaming coming in 60-second bursts you're going to be a bit thrown by SMW's altogether more traditional pacing.
(In fairness there's a two-minute Time Attack mode too, which cranks the difficulty up to the max straight away, but even then you can pick up frequent 15-second extra-time icons and a game can still last a long time.)
Mostly, though, you'll just want to keep playing to see what's coming next. The game throws new stuff at you thick and fast, whether it's hazards, powers or food, which is one of the reasons it never gets dull like certain giant-worm games we could mention. Super Mega Worm is an endlessly enjoyable diversion, plus it keeps you off the streets, you psycho.
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Super Stickman Golf
A golf game crossed with Angry Birds and a 2D platformer, but much better than that sounds or has any right to be.
Super Stickman Golf has been one of our favourite iOS sports games for a long time, and the screenshot should tell you almost all you need to know about how it works. There are 29 nine-hole courses divided into three groups, and you have to beat the first course in each group to unlock the second and so on. You can play them on your own for the lowest number of strokes, or against up to three human opponents either online or via Bluetooth for a race to the pin regardless of shot count.
In essence it's more of a puzzle game with aiming and timing elements than a sports one, but you could say that about most golf sims if you think about it. The courses are many and varied, there are various powerups to earn both during play and by achieving particular tasks (eg beating two courses under par), and there's always plenty of replay value thanks to the online leaderboards.
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Supremacy Wars
Insanely large and in-depth castle-attack that's the grandest we've seen of the genre.
The best-known examples in the App Store so far are probably still Galcon and Galcon Labs, which set the basic template for a game type that can be fairly well summed up as 'Risk in real time', but Supremacy Wars puts some serious meat on the bones of the style, with a range of power-ups which can be extended and upgraded as you progress through the dozens of levels (spread over three campaigns) and numerous unlockable modes.
It's got an excellent interface whereby you can send troops out from multiple fortresses at once, and also adds a little dash of tower-defence to the mix with different kinds of dedicated installations that serve specific purposes (like acting as gun towers or resource mines), but it never overcomplicates matters, with the gameplay core always the same simple line-drawing mechanism.
If you get a kicking on a map you can go back and reallocate all your skill points and try some different strategies, and there are vast numbers of permutations of both abilities and other game variables. You're looking at hundreds of hours of content, which probably explains the enormous file size as well as the fact that we can't do Supremacy Wars justice in this small review space.
This is a 'proper' game that would be at home on any platform.
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The Creeps
The iThings aren't exactly short of tower-defence games, but The Creeps! is one of our favourites. As well as having a cuter premise than most (keep monsters from waking up your sleeping form by zapping them with torches and toy guns and the like) and high production values, it does a few interesting things with the genre's gameplay too.
As well as the usual finite-waves and endless modes you get the novel 'Door Busta' game, in which you have to attack as well as defend, making your way across the landscape to blast the door through which the monsters are entering.
And that landscape is the other novel thing. In all modes, the ground starts off with only a few clear spaces for you to place your turrets on the rest is cluttered with obstacles that you have to blast away in between fighting off the monsters. Clearing obstacles generates extra cash and also gives you more room to put turrets down. Particularly in Door Busta mode, this feature adds a whole extra level of strategic depth to the game, and ensures you're never short of something to do.
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The Deep Pinball
The very best of the three individual pinball tables making up the 'Pinball HD' compilation. The Deep offers a table design that's basic but well-balanced, with the ball spending the minimum of time either ricocheting around uncontrollably or drifting across empty space.
Like all the games in the series it's extremely smooth, slick and polished, with proprietary online leaderboards to rank your skill against. You can play in a fullscreen portrait mode showing the whole table at once or a zoomed-in version showcasing the 3D construction of the tables, but sadly the fullscreen landscape option present in Pinball HD isn't available, so if you've got great big paws for hands you might find things getting a little cramped.
For the dainty of appendage, though, this is some of the App Store's best pinball. (It got the nod over the superb Pinball Dreams also a former freebie purely for being an iOS original, and was narrowly preferred to Pinball Ride Free for some small interface niggles with the latter.)
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Time Geeks
(still free)
A very pretty object-spotting game with lovely neo-retro eBoy-style graphics for you to swoon theatrically over.
Lots of modes and minigames cater for fast high-intensity arcade-reaction thrills or gentle, thoughtful scrutinising alike, and scrolling around the beautiful pixel landscapes just admiring the art is a joy in its own right. There's even a construction kit to build your own 8-bit scenes with. (Though sadly you can't make playable levels.)
The king of the iOS object-spotting genre.
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Top Gear Stunt School
TV spinoff that's a sort of cross between Hard Drivin', Track And Field and Jackass. And being at school.
The game comprises 60 stunt challenges divided into various categories, but always involving doing something stupid with some kind of vehicle. You might have to repeatedly drive it around a loop-the-loop, or navigate an obstacle course without setting off the explosives on the roof, or stick a javelin on the front and leap off a ramp to land nose-first in a giant dartboard. You get the tone.
Each stage is very short, but offers four levels of difficulty to unlock, each with high scores and medals to be won by picking them up along the way, and there's lots of other content that we don't have time to go into here. The show's famous presenters don't make an appearance with the exception of The Stig, who you can send round the Top Gear test track in a customised car of your own design and then race against his ghost but for many people that'll be a bonus.
There are adjustable touch and tilt control options, it looks great and you can smash into caravans. What more do you want?
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Touch Racing Nitro
(still free)
Fast, cute and original circuit racer that's the Ivan 'Ironman' Stewart's Off Road of this generation. Which, as long-standing WoS readers will know, is about as high as praise can get around these parts.
Touch Racing Nitro caused quite a big stir on its release, not least on account of its inventive and clever control system you touch on the screen where you want your car to go, and it does its best to head there in a straight line, at a speed determined by how close to it your finger is. (Further away = faster. If you want a feel for how it works, imagine that you're dragging the car round on the end of a quite short piece of elastic.)
It's a method that takes a few laps to get the hang of, particularly if you want to master two-thumb control to avoid ever having your car hidden under your hands, but once you do you can't conceive why anyone would ever have wanted to steer a car around a track any other way.
This is particularly true when you make the slightly counter-intuitive realisation that you don't NEED to actually see your car drive well and you can just trust it to follow your finger faithfully around the course, whether it's under your thumb or hidden by a tunnel or bridge or whatever.
(In any event, the 1.3 update added an alternative and more traditional joypad-and-buttons control option, although we're sticking with the responsive and highly satisfying touch style.)
There are 18 different tracks spread across three tournaments (at each of three difficulty settings, making 54 races in all), and the course design is brilliant imaginative, varied and memorable. A single lap will be enough to imprint most layouts on your brain, with or without the lovely pre-race 3D flypast, and you'll soon be zooming around like an expert.
Beginner level is pleasingly easy, the other two offer a much more serious level of CPU opposition, and it'll take you many hours of play to ace all nine Gold trophies in this lightning-quick, super-smooth and all-round gorgeous racer.
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Tower Runner
Aw, we love this. It's an ingenious hybrid of Lode Runner and Nebulus wrapped up in a beautifully-polished package. (If you don't know what Lode Runner and Nebulous are, you're probably not going to be interested. Move on, please.)
The idea, then, is to negotiate your way safely to the top of a rotating tower while collecting all the gold bricks and dodging some of those ever-pesky enemy chasers. There are 40 levels, and you can either play them against the clock in any order (all levels are available from the start in timed mode) or in a more traditional five-lives arcade style where you tackle them in sequence.
Previous attempts at doing Lode Runner on the iThings have foundered on the control issue thanks to the usual problems with virtual pads, but Tower Runner handles the matter so brilliantly it should be teaching the subject in college or something.
There are three variants but all are swipe-based, and we recommend 'Swipe Pro', where you swipe directions to move and tap anywhere either side of your character to make him stop and dig a hole on that side. It's context-sensitive too, so swiping up when you're not on a ladder makes you stop, and tapping stops you if you are.
It feels absolutely fantastic, and you'll be zipping around the levels in no time (we'd recommend choosing at least the middle of the three speed settings, but you can switch them in play as the circumstances dictate) admiring the lovely tower rotation and experimenting with the five levels of view zoom available. You get plenty of opportunity to take in the scenery, because colliding with the chasers doesn't kill you outright, it just knocks you down a few levels (to the nearest monkey-bar, in fact), and you only die if you fall off the bottom of the tower or get stuck in a pit.
(If you've managed to box yourself into a corner, you can still escape by tapping the 'fall' button, which has the same effect as hitting an enemy.)
Perhaps most impressively, you can edit any of the 40 levels into a new one (either by tweaking the existing layout or just blanking it and starting from scratch) and share with other players by the fantastically clever method of simply cutting and pasting it as ASCII data and emailing it or posting it to message boards and the like.
This is an absolutely gorgeous game, a (fairly) conventional platformer where the touch controls actually feel like an improvement on a physical d-pad. It's ideally suited to both long and short play sessions (multitasking is supported), inviting you to either take on a Score Mode marathon or knock off a quick timed stage, and the level editor is the icing on the cake. If you have any self-respect as a gamer whatsoever, don't miss it.
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Truckers Delight
Brilliant old-school race'n'chase capers that we still can't quite believe got past Apple's censors. Maybe somebody knows where some bodies are buried. It's basically Taito's classic Chase HQ with gratuitous naked ladies and a bird-flipping trucker with an implausibly long tongue, but those are just for decoration.
The game itself is a straightforward against-the-clock pursuit where you have to catch up to and repeatedly ram a sports car full of red-hot babes (because hot babes love that trust us, give it a try!), while dodging other traffic and avoiding the cops who for some reason have taken a dim view of your activities.
It's pure 16-bit arcade fun that looks great, controls immaculately (via perfectly-calibrated tilt) and has regular and varied payoffs to keep you smiling all the way. Global leaderboards round off the package, making Truckers Delight one of the most fun racing games in the App Store.
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Veggie Samurai
Astoundingly shameless Fruit Ninja clone with vegetables, but also a bunch of new ideas of its own. The main mode is identical to Fruit Ninja except that you get extra points for slicing the veg into four pieces, and occasional giant 'Mega Veggies' that you have to slice multiple times for monster bonuses.
You also get the time-attack Harmony mode and super-intense Chaos mode, but it's the last two game types that set Veggie Samurai apart as a bit more than a high-quality professional knockoff job.
The first is Sort mode, where you have to load a cart with one specific type of veg while hacking down anything else that gets thrown onto the screen. It's a fun variant, but it's really just the main game without bombs and with one type of veg you should avoid chopping.
The last and most interesting game, though, is Match mode (pictured below), which combines Fruit Ninja with a touch of Bejeweled, by having a grid of various-coloured peppers tumble down the screen at uniform pace and demanding that you slash groups of three or more same-colour ones for points. The key to big scoring is to rack up combo chains, but with only 90 seconds you can't afford to wait for easy matches.
Given how amazingly similar they are in most ways, it's surprising how different Veggie Samurai and Fruit Ninja actually feel in play. It's definitely worth having them both, but when one of them is free the decision is a lot easier.
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Virtual Table Tennis Pro
(still free)
A pretty traditional table tennis sim, except with added sex, gruesome violence and laser explosions. Okay, so we're lying about the sex and explosions. And about the gruesome violence too. It's just table tennis. But it's really GOOD table tennis.
We used to feature the excellent Lite version of VTT, and as we never usually include Lite versions that's already an indication of how good it was. But now it's been withdrawn and replaced by this, which is the full game with menu-screen and pause-screen banner ads (but none during play).
There are three difficulty levels, each with an Arcade mode (a single match against one of 20 opponents) and two knockout Tournaments (eight players or 16). The physics are superb, the CPU players put up a good fight, and there's even some 1980s-style electro-disco music to enjoy while you play. (You can switch it off if you like.)
There are multiple tables just to keep the visuals interesting, and for our (no) money this is as good a table-tennis game as any videogames console handheld or otherwise has ever seen. (Only the mighty Balls Of Fury on the DS runs it close.)
You can disable the ads via in-app purchase if you like, but we don't really care what happens on menu screens as long as the actual game stays clean, which makes Virtual Table Tennis Pro a necessity on any self-respecting iThing.
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Westbang
If you have fond memories of Bank Panic (arcade or Sega Master System) or West Bank (Spectrum) which probably depends on which side of the Atlantic you grew up on get ready to be happy.
Westbang is a brilliant tap-to-shoot implementation of the classic coin-op, where you're a trigger-happy security guard charged with shooting down would-be bankrobbers without causing carnage among your honest customers. All manner of complications arise as over 20 different characters appear behind the bank's doors, and you'll need to hone your wits to razor-sharpness to get through the later levels.
Don't (bank) panic if you're ham-fisted and short-sighted, though there are difficulty settings ranging from 'small child wearing boxing gloves' to 'can complete Ikaruga on one credit while controlling two ships and once and reading a newspaper, also while wearing boxing gloves.
This one's been on our personal front app pages forever. Unlike the shady hoodlums trying to rob your bank, it's unmissable.
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World Series Of Poker Hold'Em Legend
(still free)
Far and away the finest poker game on the App Store in fact, one of the best on ANY format. WSOP Hold'Em Legend does away with all the tedious hanging around waiting for CPU players to play their hands you can watch them if you like, but you can also tap past almost anything so that the game moves at blitzkrieg pace and you can whizz through a whole tournament in about four minutes.
Legend is absolutely packed with content in Career mode there are 30 tournaments to play across eight venues from a pub backroom to the Rio in Las Vegas, or you can play cash tables to try to boost your bankroll at your own pace, at buyins ranging from $100 to $2.5m. (If you're lazy or just really bad, you can also many add thousands of chips to your stack by downloading and running other Glu games.)
There are also extensive multiplayer options, both via Bluetooth and through Game Center, which also provides achievements and leaderboards. It's hard to imagine a poker game slicker or more comprehensive than WSOP Legend, and the CPU players are far more skilled than you'll be expecting if you've ever played console poker before.
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Yahtzee Adventures
Yahtzee, but featuring exciting international adventures. We're not absolutely sure we accept the core premise of this game, to be honest.
In addition to the basic solo dice game, Yahtzee Adventures includes a story mode in which you travel the world meeting a variety of people who are implausibly obsessed with Yahtzee and itching to challenge you to a game. As travelogues go it's not a page-turner, but it does serve as a sneaky tutorial to the numerous variants that Yahtzee Adventures offers.
As well as a Classic head-to-head for 1-4 players you can play Battle, in which you use dice rolls to attack your opponents' health or restore your own. It's a great mode if you're playing against human friends, with lots of alliances and backstabbing, but rather less interesting against the CPU.
More intriguing for a game against your iThing is Duplicate, in which you both get the exact same dice rolls and where you can see where the AI's strategy differs from yours. And finally there's Rainbow, a simple and clever tweak to the formula in which the dice come in three colours and you can have 'flushes' as well as the usual straights and sets, completing the range of Yahtzee hands analogous to poker ones.
The game records your high scores in each mode as well as win-lose stats and Yahtzee counts, and generally does everything you could hope for from a Yahtzee game, most importantly including the ability to turn off the godawful jazz music on the menu screen.
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Zen Bound
One of the App Store's famously celebrated art games, and definitely not at all sinister or creepy in any way whatsoever.
We're not quite sure how Zen Bound's authors came up with 'wrapping stuff up in rope so that every inch of it is completely covered' as a game idea, and we're pretty certain we don't want to know. -
DiamondIce 1,185 posts
Seen 5 years ago
Registered 14 years agoZomoniac wrote:
DiamondIce wrote:
"A full-featured rendition of the world's dullest sport that somehow makes for a fun iThing game."
You are definitely the idiot.
But that's just about the only vaguely accurate statement in the whole article.
Except the Slingo Supreme writeup, which sums up my thoughts exactly.
American Football. That answers that.
Curling has more excitement. -
Tonka 31,980 posts
Seen 17 hours ago
Registered 18 years agoI wish I could share that enthusiasm for iOS gaming. But with games like this
http://armorgames.com/play/12141/kingdom-rush
available for free for anyone with a Flashplayer it's really hard. Kingdom Rush pisses on anything I've played on the iPac -
StolenGlory 318 posts
Seen 9 years ago
Registered 11 years agoCompletely disregarding the cuntbaiting title, it's actually quite an informative read, especially for someone such as myself who is always looking for something different to play on my iOS device of choice. -
RedPanda87 2,169 posts
Seen 14 hours ago
Registered 14 years agoTonka wrote:
I wish I could share that enthusiasm for iOS gaming. But with games like this
http://armorgames.com/play/12141/kingdom-rush
available for free for anyone with a Flashplayer it's really hard. Kingdom Rush pisses on anything I've played on the iPac
Was going to try that, but then I realised it's tower defence, so didn't.
Also there's no way that pisses on Broken Sword (available for other platforms sure, but has been free on iJank), Rimelands, The Quest, Galaxy on Fire 2 etc.
There's a lot of shit on idevices (most of it in fact), but there are some genuinely great games as well. -
roz123 7,104 posts
Seen 4 years ago
Registered 13 years agoIts good that Stu has the time to go through loads of shit iPhone games and make a list of the ones he thinks are best. Problem is I can't respect his opinion when he acts like such a cunt. -
DiamondIce 1,185 posts
Seen 5 years ago
Registered 14 years agoThe title has changed in the blink of an eye. I enjoyed it when I was being 'insulted'. -
I've changed the thread title to something more appropriate.
The EG forum guidelines clearly state:
i. Craft your subject line - Be descriptive, but be brief. [If your thread subject gives no clue to it's contents, it will be renamed]
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Rev.StuartCampbell 367 posts
Seen 8 years ago
Registered 17 years agoRaining_Upwards wrote:
I personally love how Spanky has completely copied over the contents of Stu's post, so that we don't have to give that waste of skin any additional hits on his site.
I too admire his heroic dedication to the pursuit of utter futility. The tiny frothing band of nutjobs on here would never have clicked the link anyway, and all the normal readers of the forum who aren't shrieking, obsessive stalkers click it and read it properly before getting to the standard hysterical response of the hatemob. (Hits directly from here are already comfortably into three figures, in barely 10 minutes.)
But hey, anything that keeps the silly little twat busy for five minutes is a public service in my book, so by all means carry on. And that goes for you too - every post of weepy-faced crying you make bumps the thread back up to the top of the page so more people can see it. Thanks! -
For what it's worth, I also think it's a worthwhile article but Stu could have clearly presented it in a much-less-inflammatory way. -
CosmicFuzz 32,632 posts
Seen 3 hours ago
Registered 15 years agoWhat was the original title? 
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DiamondIce 1,185 posts
Seen 5 years ago
Registered 14 years agoWhy we are probably idiots. -
Rev.StuartCampbell 367 posts
Seen 8 years ago
Registered 17 years agoHairyArse wrote:
For what it's worth, I also think it's a worthwhile article but Stu could have clearly presented it in a much-less-inflammatory way.
I presented it in a less inflammatory way elsewhere, but you know perfectly well it wouldn't have made the slightest difference to the response it got here. -
shamblemonkee 17,967 posts
Seen 2 days ago
Registered 17 years agoI made a shortlist of 6 games from Stu's list to check out. Wasn't actually a bad article. O_o -
I don't doubt that, but I'm sure you knew full well you'd only further stoke the fires. -
nickthegun 87,711 posts
Seen 7 hours ago
Registered 16 years agoIt probably would have were you not an attention vampire. -
nickthegun wrote:
It probably would have were you not an attention vampire.
Good point. After all, I've plugged nearly 0.8% of WoSland articles on here.
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