At $9.99/£9.99/AU$11.99 each month we wouldn’t exactly call Apple Music expensive, given that it provides unlimited access to millions of songs. But it could be getting significantly cheaper, with a price drop of up to 20% possibly in the works.

That’s according to Digital Music News, which claims to have heard it from “a pair of sources working closely with the streaming service.”

The site only talks about Apple Music’s US pricing, so it’s not clear if this would apply to the rest of the world, but supposedly the single person rate could drop to $7.99 (presumably £7.99/AU$9.59), while family packages could drop from $14.99/£14.99/AU$17.99 to $12.99 (likely £12.99/AU$15.59). Student memberships would supposedly remain at $4.99/£4.99/AU$5.99.

The new rate could apparently start as a promotional discount over Christmas, but those subscribing at the new rate are likely to hold onto it permanently, while existing users may also be transitioned to the new rate.

Thank Amazon

The move is supposedly motivated by steep competition from Amazon Music Unlimited, which offers US Prime members a $7.99 (around £6.50/AU$10) monthly membership, which drops to just $3.99 (roughly £3.50/AU$5) if you only stream to an Amazon Echo.

Amazon Music Unlimited is currently US-only, but it’s expanding to the UK and elsewhere before the end of the year, which suggests Apple’s own price drop won’t be limited to the US either.

That is, if it happens at all. Digital Music News doesn’t have a flawless track record with Apple leaks and its sources aren’t inside Apple, the site also notes that the changes are still under discussion.

Record labels also surely aren’t going to want to lose income as a result of the change, so Apple could have to cover the difference itself, potentially losing money in the short term. 

So with all that in mind we’re not convinced that it will happen, but if it does it could give Apple Music the lift it needs to become the dominant force in streaming audio.

• For now, Spotify is still king

via Click on the link for the full article

While the ‘free-to-play’ market has taken a bit of a beating of late due to gamers falling out of love with the use of in-app payments, the world of mobile gaming is still an exciting one.

Whether you want games that will just last the length of a commute, or want to be lost in a port of GTA where you spend hours mowing down pedestrians and making money out of murder, there is a game on here for you.

This constantly updated list is a mixture of free and paid for games, and also that one in between – some in-app payments honestly aren’t really that bad. If by the end you think we have missed something special off of the list, let us know and we will see if it is worthy of inclusion further down the line.

Of course we properly play each game we test – so you can have confidence in our selection.

There are varied mobile takes on limbless wonder Rayman’s platform gaming exploits. The 1995 original exists on Android in largely faithful form, but feels ill-suited to touchscreens; and Rayman Adventures dabbles in freemium to the point it leaves a bad taste.

But Rayman Jungle Run and Rayman Fiesta Run get things right.

They rethink console-oriented platformers as auto-runners – which might sound reductive. However, this is more about distillation and focus than outright simplification.

Tight level design and an emphasis on timing regarding when to jump, rebound and attack forces you to learn layouts and the perfect moment to trigger actions, in order to get the in-game bling you need to progress.

Both titles are sublime, but Fiesta Run is marginally the better of the two – a clever take on platforming that fizzes with energy, looks fantastic, and feels like it was made for Android rather than a 20-year-old console.

A decidedly dizzying take on platform games, Circa Infinity exists in a sparse world of concentric circles. Your little stick man scoots around the edge of the largest, and a prod of the action button when he’s atop a pizza-slice cut-out flips him inside the disc.

He can then make a leap for the bobbing circle within, at which point the process repeats.

Only the next disc may be patrolled by any number of critters intent on ejecting the stick man from their particular circle.

The net result is an odd-looking, disorienting arcade title that proves fresh and exhilarating. With 50 levels and five boss fights, making it to the end of Circa Infinity is a stern challenge; getting there quickly should test even the most hardened mobile gamer.

A few levels in and you might wonder whether klocki has taken the notion of a relaxing puzzle game a bit too far.

It’s easy almost to the point of being a sedative, merely having you swap tiles on a flat plane, in order to fashion complete pathways. But klocki is a smart cookie, very gradually introducing new concepts so slowly you barely notice; but pretty soon you find yourself immersed in rich and complex tests.

Later levels have you battle three-dimensional shapes, switches, and tiles that rotate; and despite the minimal aesthetic and noodly audio, it never really gets old. The game is, however, quite short – a few hours and you’ll probably be done.

Still, the low price-tag ensures klocki remains great value, especially if you take the time to savour its charms rather than blazing through its challenges at breakneck speed.

The Room is a series about mysteries within mysteries. It begins with a box. Fiddling with dials and switches causes things to spring to life elsewhere, and you soon find boxes within the boxes, layers unravelling before you; it’s the videogame equivalent of Russian dolls meets carpentry, as breathed into life by a crazed inventor.

The Room’s curious narrative and fragments of horror coalesce in follow-up The Room Two, which expands the ‘boxes’ into more varied environments – a séance room; a pirate ship. Movement remains restricted and on rails, but you’re afforded a touch more freedom as you navigate your way through a strange clockwork world.

The Room Three is the most expansive of them all, featuring intricate, clever puzzles, as you attempt to free yourself from The Craftsman and his island of deranged traps and trials.

Get all three games, and play them through in order, preferably in a dark room when rain’s pouring down outside for best effect. It’s a terrifying and – ultimately – infuriating experience that will have you toying with the idea of having to go online for walkthroughs until you finally crack the mystery.

There are some clues, but generally these are very gentle hints at best.

You might moan about trains when you’re again waiting for a late arrival during your daily commute, but think yourself lucky reality doesn’t match Train Conductor World. Here, trains rocket along, often towards nasty head-on collisions. It’s your job to drag out temporary bridges to avoid calamity while simultaneously sending each train to its proper destination.

From the off, Train Conductor World is demanding, and before long a kind of ‘blink and everything will be smashed to bits’ mentality pervades. For a path-finding action-puzzler – Flight Control on tracks, if you will – it’s an engaging and exciting experience.

The developers of Osmos HD call it an ‘ambient arcade game’. It’s a strange description, but apt, since Osmos is often about patience and subtlety. You guide a ‘mote’, which moves by expelling tiny pieces of itself. Seemingly floating in microscopic goop, it aims to munch motes smaller than itself, expand, and reign supreme.

This is easy enough when other motes don’t fight back, but soon enough you’re immersed in a kind of petri dish warfare, desperately trying to survive as various motes tear whatever amounts to each-other’s faces off.

And then occasionally Osmos throws a further curveball, pitting you against the opposite extreme in scale, dealing with gravity and orbits as planet-like motes speed their way around deadly floating ‘stars’.

In Her Story, you find yourself facing a creaky computer terminal with software designed by a sadist. It soon becomes clear the so-called L.O.G.I.C. database houses police interviews of a woman charged with murder.

But the tape’s been hacked to bits and is accessible only by keywords; ‘helpfully’, the system only displays five search results at once.

Naturally, these contrivances exist to force you to play detective, eking out clues from video snippets to work out what to search for next, slowly piecing together the mystery in your brain.

A unique and captivating experience, Her Story will keep even the most remotely curious Android gamer gripped until the enigma is solved.

You probably need to be a bit of a masochist to get the most out of Snakebird, which is one of the most brain-smashingly devious puzzlers we’ve ever set eyes on. It doesn’t really look or sound the part, frankly – all vibrant colors and strange cartoon ‘snakebirds’ that make odd noises.

But the claustrophobic floating islands the birds must crawl through, supporting each other (often literally) in their quest for fruit, are designed very precisely to make you think you’ve got a way forward, only to thwart you time and time again.

The result is a surprisingly arduous game, but one that’s hugely rewarding when you crack a particularly tough level, at which point you’ll (probably rightly) consider yourself some kind of gaming genius.

There’s something of a children’s animation vibe about Warp Shift, with expressive Pixar-like protagonist Pi floating about brightly colored boxes, aiming to find an exit that will take her a step closer to home.

At first, it’s a bit too simple. You slide boxes, tap to make Pi scoot about, and sit there smugly, wrinkling your nose at how easy it all is.

But Warp Shift gradually starts clobbering you with additional tests: colored doors that must be lined up; a cuboid chum to rescue and lob at the exit; switches; move limits to attain enough stars to unlock subsequent stages.

The mix of enchanting visuals, familiar mechanics and gently stiffening challenges proves stimulating and captivating.

You initially get the feeling Rush Rally 2 is treading a fine line, unsure whether to steer towards being an arcade game or a simulator. It certainly lacks the demented rocket-like speeds of an Asphalt 8, but Rush Rally 2’s more measured gameplay nonetheless gradually reveals a sense of fun.

Sure, the standard rally mode can be sedate, although the game’s nonetheless happy to frequently catapult your car up a hillside when you mess up a turn. And then there are weird missions, such as dodging missiles as you negotiate hairpin bends (Colin McRae never had to deal with such things.)

But when belting along in Rally Cross mode, Rush Rally 2 suddenly clicks. You’ll use other cars as brakes and spin off into the gravel, before gunning the engine and blazing back into the thick of it. Even then, this racer’s a more challenging and thoughtful affair than most, but it’s just as gleefully exciting when you’re bombing down the final straight, and take the chequered flag by fractions of a second.

It’s always the way: you’re minding your own business when – BOOM! – you’re suddenly propelled into a gargantuan space maze. At least it’s the way if you’re Captain Cowboy. This smart arcade title comes across like seminal classic Boulder Dash in space. You dig through dirt, grab diamonds, and avoid being crushed by boulders within the asteroid.

There are also floaty space bits, nasty space laser turrets, space bus stops and a space disco. At least, we’re told that’s the case, because we’ve never found the last of those things; but we’ll keep trying, because Captain Cowboy is superb.

(The trailer is also one of the best we’ve seen, so watch it and then buy the game.)

One of the most gorgeous games around, FOTONICA at its core echoes one-thumb leapy game Canabalt. The difference is FOTONICA has you move through a surreal and delicate Rez-like 3D vector landscape, holding the screen to gain speed, and only soaring into the air when you lift a finger.

Smartly, FOTONICA offers eight very different and finite challenges, enabling you to learn their various multi-level pathways and seek out bonuses to ramp up your high scores. Get to grips with this dreamlike runner and you can then pit your wits (and thumbs) against three slowly mutating endless zones.

You might narrow your eyes at so-called ‘realism’ in mobile sports titles, given that this usually means ‘a game that looks a bit like when you watch telly’. But Touchgrind Skate 2 somehow manages to evoke the feel of skateboarding, your fingers becoming tiny legs that urge the board about the screen.

There’s a lot going on in Touchgrind Skate 2, and the control system is responsive and intricate, enabling you to perform all manner of tricks. It’s not the most immediate of titles – you really need to not only run through the tutorial but fully master and memorize each step before moving on.

Get to grips with your miniature skateboard and you’ll find one of the most fluid and rewarding experiences on mobile. Note that for free you get one park to scoot about in, but others are available via IAP.

The bar’s set so low in modern mobile gaming that the word ‘premium’ has become almost meaningless. But Leo’s Fortune bucks the trend, and truly deserves the term. It’s a somewhat old-school side-on platform game, featuring a gruff furball hunting down the thief who stole his gold (and then, as is always the way, dropped coins at precise, regular intervals along a lengthy, perilous pathway).

The game is visually stunning, from the protagonist’s animation through to the lush, varied backdrops. The game also frequently shakes things up, varying its pace from Sonic-style loops to precise pixel-perfect leaps.

It at times perhaps pushes you a bit too far — late on, we found some sections a bit too finicky and demanding. But you can have as many cracks at a section as you please, and if you master the entire thing, there’s a hardcore speedrun mode that challenges you to complete the entire journey without dying.

We’re not sure what’s going on in NO THING, but it doesn’t look good for anyone living in its strange world. Apparently set in both 1994 and the future, this ‘surreal arcade trip’ has you attempting to deliver an important message to the Queen of Ice.

Getting to her involves staying on pathways that weave their way through abstract and fragmented landscapes comprising office furniture, tower blocks and blank-faced people.

It’s all unsettling and the weirdness is matched by a kind of brutality rarely seen outside of the sharp lines of Super Hexagon.

Even early levels are merciless, punishing a single slip up, and forcing you back to the start. This can be hugely frustrating, but perseverance reaps rewards, not only in bludgeoning your way through NO THING’s ten levels, but also in finding out a little more about this fascinating digital dystopia.

Most online play pits you against other people, but Dreii is all about cooperation. The aim is to build structures from geometric shapes, having them reach a pre-defined point for a set period of time, whereupon you can move on to the next task.

That sounds deathly dull, but Dreii’s many quirks transform a basic building blocks game into a mesmerizing experience. First, your character is a strange patterned levitating creature, which grabs shapes with a fragile tether. On early levels, controlling everything is tough enough, but when you have to carefully stack shapes and battle gales and water, Dreii becomes a hugely challenging experience.

The online component is a slice of genius. Hang around a level for a short while and someone else will likely drop in to lend a hand. Communication is limited to just a few stock words, but you’ll soon form your own language with your temporary friends.

You can then wiggle your levitating beast to try and get across that you’re thrilled at completing a particularly fiendish task or frustrated that a sausage-fingered buffoon has just demolished a carefully constructed tower.

At its core, Forget-Me-Not is Pac-Man mixed with Rogue. You scoot about algorithmically generated single-screen mazes, gobbling down flowers, grabbing a key, and then making a break for the exit.

But what makes Forget-Me-Not essential is how alive its tiny dungeons feel. Your enemies don’t just gun for you, but are also out to obliterate each other and, frequently, the walls of the dungeon, reshaping it as you play.

There are tons of superb details to find buried within the game’s many modes, and cheapskates can even get on board with the free version, although that locks much of its content away until you’ve munched enough flowers.

If there was any justice, Forget-Me-Not would have a permanent place at the top of the Google Play charts. It is one of the finest arcade experiences around, not just on Android, but on any platform – old or new.

One thing we didn’t see coming was the resurgence of the text adventure on mobile devices. But Lifeline is even simpler than the likes of Infocom’s early 1980’s classic Zork, mechanically being little more than a branching Choose Your Own Adventure narrative.

But the way it’s executed propels it into must-have territory. Lifeline begins with a plea for help, and you’re soon drawn into a tale of desperate survival, with your choices dictating whether a stranded astronaut will live or die.

Great writing soon has you wrapped up in the story, and clever use of time makes everything feel all the more real. For example, you may leave your remote friend to trek across a massive crater. In a typical game, you’d immediately discover how they got on; here, they might respond hours later, or, more ominously, not at all.

Giving you a sense of the emptiness and vastness of space, and the risks in exploring the void, isn’t easy for a bite-sized survival game, but Last Horizon somehow succeeds.

The idea is to leave your broken world behind, roam the galaxy in your rocket, and ‘harvest’ living worlds. Doing so loads information into your terraforming kit, for when you reach your destination.

During your journey you battle massive suns, asteroids, black holes, alien lifeforms, and lots of gravity. This is simple fare – more Lunar Lander than EVE Online – but it has a great sense of atmosphere. And although repeating the first three flights can be a little tiresome if you keep dying (hint: be more patient), Flight X mode’s procedurally generated maps provide great replay value.

If you’re fed up with racing games paying more attention to whether the tarmac looks photorealistic rather than how much fun it should be to zoom along at insane speeds, check out Horizon Chase. This tribute to old-school arcade titles is all about the sheer joy of racing, rather than boring realism.

The visuals are vibrant, the soundtrack is jolly and cheesy, and the racing finds you constantly battling your way to the front of an aggressive pack.

If you fondly recall Lotus Turbo Esprit Challenge and Top Gear, don’t miss this one. (Note that Horizon Chase gives you five tracks for free. To unlock the rest, there’s a single £2.29/US$2.99 IAP.)

Old-school 8-bit platformers just don’t work on touchscreens, due to pixel-perfect gameplay that demands tight, tactile controls. I Am Level‘s genius is in fusing the core elements of such games (Spectrum-style graphics, single-screen puzzle-oriented challenges, and an explorable map) with modern mobile thinking.

Thus, each of your efforts builds on the previous one, and your rotund avatar gets about by you tilting your device or pinging him across the screen using springs and flippers. It’s essentially Jet Set Willy meets pinball and it’s fantastic.

Sadly, developer Stewart Hogarth passed away in 2015, at the far too young age of 34. So snap this one up before it vanishes forever, and play a few games in tribute of a talented games creator.

Apparently many millions of years before angry birds existed there were jovial Egz, emerging from Earth’s primordial soup and jumping about like idiots. Sadly for the Egz, everything else wants to smash them to bits. Cue a fast-paced platform game/fling ’em up where you guide your Egz from starting point to goal, trying to avoid getting cracked.

Egz has some great level design, and keeps adding new ideas as you progress, such as zip-lines to slide along, bubbles to float you into the air, and bouncy surfaces to hurl an Egz against.

An XP system used to power-up an Egz or bring back a dead one is a bit harsh, but forces you to take care and think about what you’re doing rather than just hurling Egz about without a care.

(A top tip: if you do find yourself needing to resurrect an Egz, hatch a new one and use the three built-in mini-games to relatively quickly get the XP required.)

Some games have a kind of razor-sharp focus, but Lost in Harmony is very much the other kind — a sort-of endearing mess that somehow comes together the more you play, to the point you won’t want to put it down.

Ambitiously (and perhaps foolishly), it attempts to marry endless runners and Ouendan-style rhythm action, often at the same time. Underpinning everything is a heartfelt story about two friends, and their journeys through some eye-popping dream-like environments.

As the skateboarding hero zooms into the screen, friend clinging to his back, the scenery periodically warps and folds, revealing all manner of craziness, from futuristic Manga-style cities to Tetris blocks whizzing by. It might feel disjointed at times, but stick with Lost in Harmony and you’ll be rewarded.

(Note: this game is a free download, with a £2.99/$3.99 IAP then required to access the full storyline.)

The shard’s of Jennifer’s memories are scattered about the world of Lost Journey, and it’s up to you to collect them, largely by bounding about platforms in small puzzle-oriented levels that are not that much bigger than the screen. The twist — or, more accurately, flip — is that you can invert the level at any point. On doing so, pits become hills, giving you the means to reach previously inaccessible places.

Anyone looking for speedy Mario-style larks might find Lost Journey’s take on platforming rather sedate. But if you’re keen on more thoughtful platform fare, it’s a very good buy; and the atmospherics and visuals certainly make for an aesthetically pleasurable time as you try to help Jennifer find her lost self.

There’s a great sense of freedom from the second you immerse yourself in the strange and futuristic world of Power Hover. The robot protagonist has been charged with pursuing a thief who’s stolen batteries that power the city.

The droid therefore grabs a hoverboard and scythes across gorgeous minimal landscapes, such as deserts filled with colossal marching automatons, glittering blue oceans, and a dead grey human city.

In lesser hands, Power Hover could have been utterly forgettable. After all, you’re basically tapping left and right to change the direction of a hoverboard, in order to collect batteries and avoid obstacles. But the production values here are stunning.

Power Hover is a visual treat, boasts a fantastic soundtrack, and gives mere hints of a story, enabling your imagination to run wild. Best of all, the floaty controls are perfect; you might fight them at first, but once they click, Power Hover becomes a hugely rewarding experience.

(On Android, Power Hover is a free download; to play beyond the first eight levels requires a single £2.29/$2.99 IAP.)

It turns out what makes a good snowman is three very precisely rolled balls of snow stacked on top of each other. And that’s the core of this adorable puzzle game, which has more than a few hints of Towers of Hanoi and Sokoban about it as your little monster goes about building icy friends to hug.

What sets A Good Snowman apart from its many puzzle-game contemporaries on Android is a truly premium nature. You feel that the developer went to great efforts to polish every aspect of the production, from the wonderful animation to puzzles that grow in complexity and deviousness, without you really noticing — until you get stuck on a particularly ferocious one several hours in.

This one’s all about the bling – and also the not being crushed to death by falling rocks and dirt. Doug Dug riffs off of Mr Driller, Boulder Dash and Dig Dug, the dwarf protagonist digging deep under the earth on an endless quest for shimmering gems. Cave-ins aren’t the only threat, though – the bowels of the earth happen to be home to a surprising array of deadly monsters.

Some can be squashed and smacked with Doug’s spade (goodbye, creepy spider!), but others are made of sterner stuff (TROLL! RUN AWAY!). Endlessly replayable and full of character, Doug Dug’s also surprisingly relaxing – until the dwarf ends up under 150 tonnes of rubble.

There are plenty of great pinball games for Android, but Pinball Arcade is a bit different. Rather than reworking an old PC hit or going nuts with animatronics and effects that simply wouldn’t work in the real world, this app seeks to become a fully playable digital museum – essentially (legal) MAME for pinball.

You get Tales of the Arabian Nights for free, and one other table is regularly unlocked for unlimited play. They all look superb and work especially well on 7-inch tablets and above. Importantly, the tables also play like the real thing, whether you grab old-school classic Black Hole, the creepy and weird Bride of Pin•Bot, or more modern fare like The Addams Family.

If you ever thought a certain videogame plumber could do with a taste of his own medicine, Kill the Plumber should appeal. Across dozens of single-screen levels, you control knock-off Goombas, Thwomps and Boos, trying to stop fake-Mario reaching the flag. There’s a distinctly indie – sometimes slightly clunky – feel to proceedings, but Kill the Plumber pleasingly keeps things fresh throughout, regularly shaking up its puzzles and the wee critters you use to duff up the so-called hero.

Occasionally, things get a bit demanding from a precision standpoint, but it’s rewarding to crack a particularly tough level. Android owners also get one-up on iOS fans, with the proper characters as originally designed by the developer and not watered-down replacements to appease Cupertino-based censors.

This is one of those ‘rub your stomach, pat your head’ titles that has you play two games at once. At the top of the screen, it’s an endless runner, with your little bloke battling all manner of monsters, and pilfering loot. The rest of the display houses what’s essentially a Bejeweled-style gem-swapper. The key is in matching items so that the running bit goes well – like five swords when you want to get all stabby.

Also, there’s the building a boat bit. Once a run ends, you return to your watery home, which gradually acquires new rooms and residents. Some merely power up your next sprint, but others help you amass powerful weaponry. Resolutely indie and hugely compelling, You Must Build a Boat will keep you busily swiping for hours.

Poor Hendrik: an ill wind blew away his brand-new house and his hair, and the only thing he has left is a pair of teleporting shoes. You must find the scattered remains of his home, along with uncovering the mystery of the wind. This means using the power of a single digit to teleport your way through 120 levels set across four different worlds.

Yes, we’re in one-thumb platform-game territory again, but Blown Away‘s elegant teleport mechanic (essentially, tap where you want to go) feels fresh and exciting. Each level is a carefully crafted puzzle to solve, requiring precision movement and timing as you teleport about and quickly recharge your shoes’ batteries by marching along for a bit. Note that you get 30 stages for free, and can buy the rest of the game with a single $2.49/£2.14 IAP.

If you’re having a bad day at the office, spare a thought for the CEO in The Executive. He’s just watched his employees transform into werewolves, and now it’s his job to save the world from their dastardly schemes.

Having apparently been to CEO Fight Club, he’s fortunately well-versed in beating up scary creatures, and so he zooms about 120 quickfire levels, kicking werewolves in the face, leaping from floor to floor, and pausing only to invest in a mining company that over time rewards the world’s most punchy businessman with new skills. It’s all utterly ludicrous, but loads of fun.

If you’re of a certain age, the words ‘Pro Pinball‘ will bring a huge grin to your face. In the 1990s, it was the pinball simulation series for your PC, featuring amazing physics, great table designs, and stunning visuals.

Pro Pinball for Android is a remastered take on Timeshock!, bringing the original table bang up to date with high-quality graphics and lighting, touchscreen controls, and a top-notch soundtrack. It still plays wonderfully, and we can only hope loads of people buy it, enabling the developer to bring other Pro Pinball tables to mobile.

The term ‘masterpiece’ is perhaps bandied about too often in gaming circles, but Limbo undoubtedly deserves such high praise. It features a boy picking his way through a creepy monochrome world, looking for his sister. At its core, Limbo is a fairly simple platform game with a smattering of puzzles, but its stark visuals, eerie ambience, and superb level design transforms it into something else entirely.

You’ll get a chill the first time a chittering figure sneaks off in the distance, and your heart will pump when being chased by a giant arachnid, intent on spearing your tiny frame with one of its colossal spiked legs. That death is never the end — each scene can be played unlimited times until you progress — only adds to Limbo’s disturbing nature.

People who today play mobile classic Canabalt and consider it lacking due to its simplicity don’t understand what the game is trying to do. Canabalt is all about speed — the thrill of being barely in control, and of affording the player only the simplest controls for survival. ALONE… takes that basic premise and straps a rocket booster to it.

Instead of leaping between buildings, you’re flying through deadly caverns, a single digit nudging your tiny craft up and down. Occasional moments of generosity — warnings about incoming projectiles; your ship surviving minor collisions and slowly regenerating — are offset by the relentlessly demanding pressure of simply staying alive and not slamming into a wall. It’s an intoxicating combination, and one that, unlike most games in this genre, matches Canabalt in being genuinely exciting to play.

From a gaming perspective, the most important aspect of touchscreen devices is that they give you new ways to play, but relatively few developers take full advantage, instead choosing to ape traditional controls. Framed is an exception, flinging you headlong into an animated comic of sorts. Your aim is to improve the fortunes of a spy, fleeing from the cops — and worse.

Panels are dragged about and rotated, and new ideas regularly appear, including you having to carefully shift scenes on the page at exactly the right moment. This is a stylish and finite affair that ends before it gets old, leaving you satisfied but nonetheless hoping for more.

Developer Rovio has done quite a lot of aggressive whoring of the Angry Birds franchise, but this space-based fork of the simplistic physics game series is really worth a try.

For one, it introduces some new play concepts, with the planet-based levels requiring different tactics, plus the puzzles generally need a bit more of a thoughtful approach than the chuck-it-and-see of the originals.

Has a bit of an ‘indie’ vibe about it this one, with Badland offering a weird, dark and gloomy world, in which you fly about in control of a… blob thing.

Your blob gets bigger and smaller, splits into loads of mini clones, and generally baffles you about what might lie around the next corner. We like a bit of a surprise, and this is full of them.

It’s not often you see a game about the “joy of cultivation”, and Prune is unlike anything you’ve ever played before. Apparently evolving from an experimental tree-generation script, the game has you swipe to shape and grow a plant towards sunlight by tactically cutting off specific branches.

That sounds easy, but the trees, shrubs and weeds in Prune don’t hang around. When they’re growing at speed and you find yourself faced with poisonous red orbs to avoid, or structures that damage fragile branches, you’ll be swiping in a frantic race towards sunlight.

And all it takes is one dodgy swipe from a sausage finger to see your carefully managed plant very suddenly find itself being sliced in two.

A very, very pretty game, this. Monument Valley is based around the weird sort of impossible geometric shapes popularised by artist M. C. Escher, with its colourful maps bending and rotating in ways that appear to defy the laws of nature. You walk on walls, flip them, turn them into floors, avoid crows and marvel at how beautiful it all looks.

It’s a short journey, but a joyful one. If you hanker for more when protagonist Ida’s quest is complete, further adventures are available via IAP.

The developer calls this a “multidirectional shoot ’em up” presumably because describing it as a “Geometry Wars clone” might have got him in a bit of legal trouble.

Regardless of its origin, it’s a superb shooter with some bizarre game modes and controls that work exceptionally well on touch devices.

We get moaned at a lot for putting too many silly, quirky little games about shapes and animals and organising letters of the alphabet in this list. So here’s one about men with guns shooting each other in 3D.

Modern Combat 5, the latest in Gameloft’s mobile homage to grown-up home console FPS franchises, in which you gun about the place alone or in online multiplayer matches.

If you’re not already familiar with Blizzard’s Hearthstone then consider this a warning: it gets very, very addictive. A card game from the makers of World of Warcraft, Hearthstone sees you building decks from won or purchased cards to then battle against friends and strangers.

It’s a surprisingly complex game that demands meticulous strategy. You can play and enjoy without paying a penny, but there are options to buy booster packs and add-on quests should you want to.

No one dies of disease in Whale Trail. It’s a sweet flying sim, which sees you float about in the clouds having a lovely time, collecting things, boosting and generally being quite happy about it. The cheery vibe is broken a bit when adverts and in-app purchase requests pop up, but it’s happy enough before the money men turn up.

One of the PC “indie” world’s big name smashes has arrived on Android, with the existential platform game yours to… enjoy. Or at least attempt to understand. You could call Thomas Was Alone a “platform game” if you wanted to be mean and disrespectful, but it’s more about offering an atmospheric and thoughtful journey through an abstract world.

A bit like a piece of art, but let’s not get into that debate here. I’m not being paid by the word.

Angry Birds maker Rovio proves it’s not a one-trick bird-pony with this, a bizarre and quirky physics game. You have a toolbox at your disposal, used to build a flying and/or driving machine, which then has to trundle its way through a level. It’s silly, but at least attempts to shove out some new ideas rather than just flinging birds around.

This is the good stuff. So many mobile games make the claim of being console-quality, but Geometry Wars 3: Dimensions is a rare title that fully delivers. Like its predecessors, this is a twin-stick shooter, a fight for survival against waves of deadly neon foes.

But as its name alludes to, Dimensions dispenses with flat arenas, instead wrapping play areas around geometric shapes. It’s disorienting as a cube in space you’re traversing lurches about, and exhilarating as you barely avoid the legions of ships lurking beyond an edge.

With 15 grids and 12 modes, along with an extensive single-player quest, Dimensions easily manages to be the finest game of its kind on mobile.

The tower defense genre is heaving on Android, thanks to the poke and press play mechanics being ideally suited to touchscreen play. Radiant Defense is a great example of the simplified strategy concept, presenting its war action in a futuristic neon style that looks awesome on any phone with the grunt to do it justice.

Kariosoft’s made a big thing for itself by using its management style of game across various scenarios, with this sporting event being one of the best. You take control of a club, then stress about signings, money, tactics and more.

It’s slightly robbed of some fun via a desire to use in-app purchases to squeeze money out of players, ironically mirroring the state of the game it takes inspiration from.

Of all the attempts to play with the conventions of novels and story-led gaming on mobile, 80 Days is the most fun. It takes place in an 1872 with a decidedly steampunk twist, but where Phileas Fogg remains the same old braggart. As his trusty valet, you must help Fogg make good on a wager to circumnavigate the globe in 80 days. This involves managing/trading belongings and carefully selecting routes.

Mostly, though, interaction comes by way of a pacey, frequently exciting branched narrative, like a Choose Your Own Adventure book on fast-forward.

A late-2015 content update added 150,000 words, two new plots and 30 cities to an adventure that already boasted plenty of replay value — not least when you’ve experienced the joys of underwater trains and colossal mechanical elephants in India, and wonder what other marvels await discovery in this world of wonders.

As accessible as it is charming, Tiny Thief is a perfect fit for mobile, with a simple tap used to both move and interact with objects as you navigate increasingly intricate levels trying to complete objectives (which as the name suggests usually involve stealing things), while staying hidden and solving puzzles.

The gameplay might be simple but the humour and imagination should keep a smile on your face for the duration. Better yet, you can play half the game for free…though the remaining levels will cost you.

Lara Croft games have landed on Android to rather variable results. The original Tomb Raider just doesn’t work on touchscreens, and although Lara Croft: Relic Run is enjoyable enough, it’s essentially a reskinned Temple Run.

Lara Croft GO is far more ambitious and seriously impressive. It rethinks Tomb Raider in much the same way Hitman GO reimagined the Hitman series.

Croft’s adventures become turn-based puzzles, set in a world half-way between board game and gorgeous isometric minimalism. It shouldn’t really work, but somehow Lara Croft GO feels like a Tomb Raider game, not least because of the wonderful sense of atmosphere, regular moments of tension, and superb level design.

The weird little physics game is one of Android’s most popular franchises, with this update introducing a few new tricks and weapons. It’s the same sort of experience as its earlier chapters, though, with players swinging ropes to throw sweeties around its colourful screens. Masses of levels and a mid-to-high fun level.

Piloteer teaches you to be careful what you wish for. If you thought a cool future would be blasting about on a jetpack, be mindful of the heroine of this game, who spends most of her time crashing head-first into the scenery.

To be fair, her jetpack controls are more than a touch twitchy, which combined with the ragdoll physics may well make you want to send your device for a quick flying lesson itself. But perseverance reaps rewards as you gain at least some modicum of control. Seldom will you have been so excited about making a gaming character take off and successfully land a few steps to the right.

If you’ve played Laser Dog’s previous efforts, PUK and ALONE…, you’ll know what you’re in for with HoPiKo. This game takes no prisoners. If it did take them, it’d repeatedly punch them in the face before casually discarding them. HoPiKo, then, is not a game to be messed with. Instead, it feels more like a fight. In each of the dozens of hand-crafted tiny levels, you leap from platform to platform via deft drags and taps, attempting to avoid death.

Only, death is everywhere and very easy to meet. The five-stage level sets are designed to be completed in mere seconds, but also to break your brain and trouble your fingers. It’s just on the right side of hellishly frustrating, meaning you’ll stop short of flinging your device at the wall, emerging from your temporary red rage foolishly determined that you can in fact beat the game on your next go.

Old-ish people who played the original Re-Volt race series on the games hardware of yesteryear will be bang up for this, even though it looks a little rough around the edges. Re-Volt 2: Multiplayer is a refresh of the radio-controlled car racer, now updated with multiplayer options for the sociable modern player. Free to download and get going, with only some unlockables masked by an in-app purchase requirement.

This is bonkers. Spaceteam uses the Android hardware to the max to build a properly innovative multiplayer-only game, where between two and four players come together to shout exciting space terminology at each other while battling the control panel of an exploding ship. It’s very silly, like something that only came out on the Wii in Japan.

If it needs pigeon-holing, Toast Time is best described as a combat platform game. Thing is, you’re only a toaster, and your weapon is… toast. So it’s sort of a toast-based physics simulation as well, with the kickback from the toast knocking the toaster around the screen and requiring constant compensation. Because there’s a clock that needs protecting and… it’s best you play it. It’s good.

Quite possibly one of the best uses of the mobile phone accelerometer tech there’s ever been, this, with motion control sending your fishing line down to the depths of the sea while you avoid fish. Then, on the way up, it’s how you catch them. That’s when it goes ridiculous, as the fisherman chucks them up in the air – and you shoot them to bank the money. Silly, but a must play.

Another mobile classic. Super Hexagon has two controls — rotate left and rotate right. That’s all you need to navigate the endless maze that spins out of the screen, in one of the mobile world’s hardest, coolest, best-sounding and most moreish games. We order you to buy it. You literally have to.

The sort of silly maths game you might’ve played in your head before mobile phones emerged to absorb all our thought processes, Threes! really does take less than 30 seconds to learn.

You bash numbers about until they form multiples of three and disappear. That’s it. There are stacks of free clones available, but if you won’t spare the price of one massive bar of chocolate to pay for a lovely little game like this that’ll amuse you for week, you’re part of the problem and deserve to rot in a freemium hell where it costs 50p to do a wee.

The build ’em up phenomenon works brilliantly well on Android, thanks to the creator of the desktop original taking the time to do it justice.

It’s a slimmed down interface you see here with on-screen buttons, but the basics are all in and the Survival and Creative modes are ready for play — as is multiplayer mode over Wi-Fi.

The entire back catalogue of solo indie creator OrangePixel is worth exploring, but his latest is the best yet. It’s a stylish 2D dungeon explorer, with masses of quests, classes and secret areas to unlock. Plus it supports a wide range of Bluetooth controllers for easier play if you’ve got a compatible lump of buttoned plastic.

An exciting new genre all of its own when it appeared, Flight Control created the world of the top-down air traffic control simulator. Literally three million times more exciting than it sounds, it’s played by swiping 2D aeroplanes into runway landing slots, avoiding collisions and scoring for successful landings. Perfectly suited to touchscreen play.

Since Pac-Man graced arcades in the early 1980s, titles featuring the rotund dot-muncher have typically been split between careful iterations on the original, and mostly duff attempts to shoe-horn the character into other genres. CE DX is ostensibly the former, although the changes made from the original radically transform the game, making it easily the best Pac-Man to date.

Here, the maze is split in two. Eat all the dots from one half and a special object appears on the other; eat that and the original half’s dots are refilled in a new configuration.

All the while, dozing ghosts you brush past join a spectral conga that follows your every move. The result is an intoxicating speedrun take on a seminal arcade classic, combined with the even more ancient Snake; somehow, this combination ends up being fresh, exciting and essential.

The “Story” that started Kairosoft’s domination of the simplistic business world sim, Game Dev Story sees you take charge of a software house and attempt to create a smash game. The sweet pixel-art characters then battle with the complexities of design and the stresses of arbitrary internet reviews from people who haven’t even played it (ahem), in the pursuit of a money-making smash.

Quite possibly the greatest 2D shoot ’em up of all time, the Android conversion of Raiden is every bit as impressive as the original. A choice of control schemes, display and difficulty settings make it a little more manageable on touchscreens, plus, seeing as this is the Legacy edition, you get Raiden, Raiden Fighters, Raiden Fighters 2 and Raiden Fighters Jet.

After making a splash on iOS, Fallout Shelter is now available on Android for all you Wasteland nuts. Create a vault and fill it with post-nuclear-war survivors, expanding your underground property, levelling up your dwellers, and sending them out to explore the surface left behind.

The game that kickstarted the endless runner genre on mobile, Canabalt is far simpler than many of its contemporaries, but therein lies its genius. Canabalt is refined and focused: it’s all about running, jumping and surviving — at speed. And that last bit’s what few people realise — Canabalt has always been about flying along at breakneck pace, getting through scrapes by the skin of your teeth, adrenaline pumping all the while.

The classic 2D puzzle platformer that wowed the simpler folk of the 1990s with the very occasional bit of 3D, has arrived in perfect form on Android. This 20th anniversary edition has the original graphics plus the option of an HD refresh, but what’s really about is getting to play one of gaming’s most loved classics. On your phone. For a few quid. Madness.

Seem to remember people thought this was quite good. For the price of a drink you can own one of the largest and most highly-rated video games of all time, to pop in and out of on your mobile phone. On-screen controls are never going to suit a game like this, but they are at least fully customisable – so you can get it how you like it.

Sort of a Minecraft… platform… puzzle ’em up, Terraria players dig and mine and fight their way through randomly generated worlds. Resources make weapons and houses, weapons and houses mean you stay alive, plus there’s Wi-Fi multiplayer support that has it nearing parity with the version sold on desktops.

Not the easiest thing to play using on-screen buttons, but the fact this exists at all is a marvel. It’s also a glorious conversion, with Sega finally taking the time to do the best Sonic justice.

It’s been remastered into widescreen and supports a wide range of Bluetooth controllers so, even if you don’t yet own one, you’ll be able to enjoy it fully when you eventually do.

The 3DS game made its way to mobile some time ago with Scribblenauts Remix, and was later joined by Scribblenauts Unlimited. Remix, however, comes at a lower price, making it a perfect entry point for newcomers. The premise is this: think of something, type it into the text editor, and there’s a good chance it will appear.

Scribbnauts is half platformer, half dictionary, and it’s up to your imagination to solve a series of puzzles.

Cars. Cars going round corners and sometimes down straight bits. That’s what you get here, in this nice looking recreation of the old PlayStation race favourite. On Android, Colin McRae lets users race four cars including Colin’s classic Ford Focus, cars you get to smash around 30 separate race stages. Based on the beloved Colin McRae Rally 2.0 from the PS2, you really can’t go wrong.

This cult classic from an earlier wave of the big home consoles has been converted beautifully to Android, capturing the slightly odd and amusing adventure perfectly – and with an interface that really works on today’s touchscreens. It’s an “indie” game from before there were indie games, silly and with some excellent and challenging puzzles.

Very old and very good, the Worms series led the way when it came to making strategy games fun. The comedy combat action is turn-based, with players alternating at having pop shots at each other with their weaponry. This slower pace means it’s ideal for online and local multiplayer, as the odd glitch doesn’t ruin the experience.

The strategy titan has a hefty price tag attached to it on Android, but that’s OK as the immense challenge it contains is likely to burn for longer than the sun.

The first Baldur’s game, this faithful reworking of the 1998 classic also includes several of the PC game’s post-release expansion packs, just in case the standard 60-hour marathon quest isn’t hardcore enough for you.

Telltale has made a name for itself with story-driven episodic games and The Wolf Among Us is one of its best. Essentially a hard boiled fairy tale, you control the big bad wolf as he hunts a murderer through the mean streets of Fabletown.

Don’t let the fairy tale setting fool you, this is a violent, mature game and it’s one where your decisions have consequences, impacting not only what the other characters think of you but also who lives and who dies. Episode One is free but the remaining four will set you back a steep £9.59 / $14.99 / around AU$18. Trust us though, you’ll want to see how this story ends.

Large, deep games are still relatively rare on Android, but you can add one more to the list with The Banner Saga. This Viking-inspired tactical RPG gives you control of over 25 different characters across 7 different classes as you battle your way through beautiful hand drawn environments and make decisions both in and out of combat which affect the story.

There’s a lot to it, but its turn-based nature means controls are never a problem and you can take it at your own pace.

via Click on the link for the full article

So you’ve got an iPad, but have come to the dawning realisation that you’ve got no cash left to buy any games for it.

Have no fear, because the App Store offers plenty of iPad gaming goodness for the (unintentional or otherwise) skinflint.

• Haven’t bought an iPad yet and not sure which is best? We’ve got them listed on our best iPad ranking – or you can check out the best tablets list to see the full range available now.

Our updated pick of the best free iPad games are listed right here.

There’s not a lot of originality in King Rabbit, but it’s one of those simple and endearing puzzle games that sucks you in and refuses to let go until you’ve worked your way through the entire thing.

The premise is hackneyed — bunnies have been kidnapped, and a sole hero must save them. And the gameplay is familiar too, where you leap about a grid-like landscape, manipulating objects, avoiding hazards, finding keys, unlocking doors, and reaching a goal.

But the execution is such that King Rabbit is immediately engaging, while new ideas keep coming as you work through the dozens of puzzles. Pleasingly, the game also increases the challenge so subtly that you barely notice — until you realise you’ve been figuring out a royal bunny’s next moves into the wee small hours.

From the off, it’s obvious Ollie Cats isn’t taking itself seriously. The aim is to ‘ollie’ (jump) an endless number of cats heading in your rad skateboarder’s direction. You can perform all manner of tricks (including grinding along fences when loads of cats suddenly appear), but the game in miserly fashion only bestows a single point per cat cleared, regardless of your amazing skills.

However, you can also be the cat. That’s right – it’s possible to play the game as a black moggie on a board, aiming to become the coolest feline around. There are fewer stunts in this mode, but it’s so ridiculous that the cat version of the game fast became our favorite.

There’s very much an old-school vibe about Sports Hero, and it’s not just the pixelated graphics, with characters so jagged you might cut yourself on their kneecaps.

There’s also the control method, which has you hammer virtual buttons to make the retro athletes sprint, swim or lift weights. You’ll look faintly ridiculous bashing away at your iPad’s display, but there’s something satisfying about such a simple, exhausting control scheme.

Sports Hero trips over the odd hurdle in its quest for a medal with its grindy nature. It very clearly wants you to grab an all-disciplines IAP, and so slowly drips XP your way for unlocks. But even with only a few events available, this is an entertaining title for armchair Olympians who fancy working up a sweat. 

In a marked departure from the impressive Phoenix HD and its procedurally generated bullet hell,Phoenix II shoves you through set-piece vertically scrolling shoot ’em up grinders. Every 24 hours, a new challenge appears, tasking you with surviving a number of waves comprising massive metal space invaders belching hundreds of deadly bullets your way.

A single hit to your craft’s core (a small spot at its center) brings destruction, forcing you to memorize attack and bullet patterns and make use of shields and deflectors if you’ve any hope of survival. You do sometimes slam into a brick wall, convinced a later wave is impossible to beat.

To lessen the frustration, there’s always the knowledge you’ll get another crack at smashing new invaders the following day. Regardless, this is a compelling, dazzling and engaging shooter for iPad.

Sharing DNA with Super Hexagon and ALONE…, Barrier X is the kind of game that merrily smacks you in the face for having the audacity to blink.

Hurling you at insane speeds along minimal 3D tracks that some idiot’s peppered with walls, all you have to do is head left and right to avoid crashing. But this isn’t so simple when blazing along at about a million miles per hour.

Comically, Barrier X speeds up every 15 seconds; and if you survive long enough further challenges are unlocked. Suddenly, you’re told to travel through (rather than avoid) certain barriers, and to shoot rivals, all while attempting to not become so much space dust.

Minimal visuals and a thumping soundtrack further add to Barrier X’s brutal charms – it’s an exhilarating, exciting title among the very best of its kind.

If you’ve experienced Colin Lane’s deranged take on wrestling (the decidedly oddball Wrassling), you probably know what you’re in for with Dunkers. In theory, this is side-on one-on-one basketball, but Dunkers is knowingly mad.

You only get two buttons, one of which dodders your player back towards their own basket, while the other lurches them into the air and in the opposite direction. All the while, their arms whirl like a hysterical clock.

You battle as best you can, grabbing the ball from your berserk opponent, fighting your way to the basket, and slam dunking victoriously. The entire thing is ridiculous, almost the antithesis of photo-realistic fare like NBA 2K; but we’d also argue that it’s a lot more fun.

An excellent example in how iteration can improve a game, The Little Fox was almost impossible upon release. But a reduction in speed and some restart points proved transformative, enabling you to immerse yourself in a sweet-natured, great-looking pathfinding arcade outing.

The titular fox is on a quest that takes the bounding carnivore through 13 varied lands. Pathways comprise hexagons littered with collectables and hazards, and at any moment you can only turn left or right or continue straight on.

At the original breakneck pace (still available as an in-game option), this all feels too much. But when slowed down, The Little Fox reveals itself to be a clever, imaginative, fun title, with surprises to be found on every planet the furry critter visits.

It’s hard to imagine a less efficient way of building and maintaining a zoo than what you see in Rodeo Stampede. Armed with a lasso, you foolishly venture into a stampede and leap from animal to animal, attempting to win their hearts by virtue of not being flung to the ground.

You then whisk beaten animals away to a zoo in a massive sky-based craft – the kind of place where you imagine the Avengers might hang out if they gave up crime-fighting and decided to start jailing animals rather than villains.

Despite overly familiar chunky visuals (Crossy Road has a lot to answer for), this fast-paced, breezy game is a lot of fun, with you dragging left and right to avoid blundering into rocks, and lifting your finger to soar into the air, aiming to catch another rampaging beast.

Much like previous entries in the series, Super Stickman Golf 3 finds a tiny golfer dumped in fantastical surroundings. So rather than thwacking a ball about carefully tended fairways and greens, there are castles full of teleporters and a moon base bereft of gravity. The Ryder Cup, this is not.

New to the series is a spin mechanic, for flipping impossible shots off of ceilings and nudging fluffed efforts holewards on the greens. You also get turn-by-turn battles against Game Centre chums and a frenetic multiplayer race mode.

The spendthrift release is limited, though, restricting how many two-player battles you have on the go, locking away downloadable courses beyond the 20 initially built-in, and peppering the game with ads. Even so, you get a lot for nothing, should you be after new side-on golfing larks but not want to pay for the privilege.

Apparently the national sport of Slamdovia, a country where blocky people look like they just stepped out of a Commodore 64, Wrassling is like wrestling combined with a dollop of sheer stupid.

You’re dropped into the ring and must fling your opponents into the inky gloom before they do the same to you. Ridiculous controls (spin your arms with all your might!) and absurdly bouncy physics add to the game’s oddball nature, which will put a smile on your face before it’s promptly smashed into the canvas and then rudely hurled into the air.

With more than a hint of Fruit Ninja about it, Bushido Bear finds a sword-wielding teddy defending the forest against endless waves of evil demons. You get a brief warning about where your assailants will appear, and must quickly drag paths to move your bear about; it’ll then get suitably slashy and stabby, hopefully not blundering into an enemy in the meantime.

It’s a fast-paced affair, and you’ll need swift reactions to survive. Over time, you unlock additional frenzied furry animals, each with their own particular skills. And, amusingly, when a bear is killed, its colleague can be thrown into the fray, ready for some angry ninja bear vengeance!

If you like the idea of golf, but not traipsing around greens in the drizzle, WGT: World Tour Golf is the closest you’ll get to the real thing on your iPad. Courses have been meticulously rebuilt in virtual form, based on thousands of photographs, and WGT’s control scheme is accessible yet also quite punishing.

There’s no mucking about spinning balls in mid-air to alter your shot here – mess up and you’ll know about it, with a score card massively over par. But this is a game that rewards mastery and perseverance, and you feel like a boss once you crack how to land near-perfect shots.

WGT is, mind, a touch ad-heavy at times, but this is countered by there being loads to do, including head-to-head online multiplayer and a range of tournaments to try your hand at.

In Clash Royale, two players battle online, sending out troops to obliterate their opponent’s three towers, while simultaneously protecting their own. It comes across a bit like animated chess, if chess pieces were armed to the teeth and ranged from a giant robot with a huge scythe to an army of skittering skeletons.

The troops you have available come by way of cards you collect, from which you select a deck of eight. In matches, elixir gradually tops up, which can be ‘spent’ deploying said troops, forcing you to manage resources and spot when your opponent might be dry.

Clash Royale is very much a freemium game. You can spend a ton of real-world cash on virtual coins to buy and upgrade cards. However, doing so isn’t really necessary, and we’ve heard of people getting to the very highest levels in the game without spending a penny. But even if you find yourself scrapping in the lower leagues, Clash Royale is loads of fun.

Following in the footsteps of Tomb Raider and Hitman, Uncharted: Fortune Hunter has been squirted into your iPad in puzzle-game form. Hero of the hour Nathan Drake must nab loot by working out how to not-horribly die across dozens of grid-based puzzles. Fortune Hunter lacks the polish and atmosphere of Lara Croft GO and Hitman GO, but it’s still worth grabbing.

The puzzles are smartly designed, and ideal for mobile play, taking only a few minutes each to solve. And if you own the latest PS4 Uncharted, some of the iPad achievements can benefit Drake on your console (even if said benefits might only be a natty new hat).

Tie-ins between indie game companies and major movie houses often end badly, but Disney Crossy Road bucks the trend. It starts off like the original Crossy Road — an endless take on Frogger. Only here, Mickey Mouse picks his way across motorways, train lines and rivers, trying to avoid death by drowning or being splattered across a windscreen.

But unlock new characters (you’ll have several for free within a few games) and you open up further Disney worlds, each with unique visuals and challenges.

In Toy Story, Woody and Buzz dodge tumbling building blocks, whereas the inhabitants of Haunted Mansion are tasked with keeping the lights on and avoiding a decidedly violent suit of armour.

Elsewhere, Inside Out has you dart about collecting memories, which are sucked up for bonus points. And on the iPad, the gorgeous chunky visuals of these worlds really get a chance to shine.

Forget-Me-Not is a distillation of the very best classic arcade games. A little square mooches about procedurally generated mazes, munching flowers, and shooting anything that gets in its way. When the flowers are gone, you grab the key and make for the exit.

It’s a simple concept (as are all the best arcade games), but what makes Forget-Me-Not memorable is how alive everything feels. Varied maze inhabitants regularly beam in, some doddering about while others wage all-out war, with the demented vigour of the most psychotic videogame characters.

The net result is a frenetic neon mash-up of Pac-Man, Rogue, Wizard of Wor and a half-dozen other 1980s classics, but one that manages to match or surpass all of them. That it’s entirely free (of price tag and IAP) makes it iPad gaming’s biggest bargain.

This smashy endless arcade sports title has more than a hint of air hockey about it, but PKTBALL is also infused with the breakneck madness associated with Laser Dog’s brutal iOS games.

It takes place on a tiny cartoon tennis court, with you swiping across the ball to send it back to your opponent. But this game is *really* fast, meaning that although you’ll clock how to play PKTBALL almost immediately, mastering it takes time.

In solo mode, the computer AI offers plenty of challenge, but it’s in multiplayer matches that PKTBALL serves an ace. Two to four people duke it out, swiping like lunatics (and hopefully not hurling the iPad away in a huff, like a modern-day McEnroe, when things go bad).

As ever, there are new characters to unlock, each of which boasts its own court and background music. Our current favourite: a little Game Boy, whose court has a certain famous blocky puzzle game playing in the background.

At first glance, Looty Dungeon comes across like a Crossy Road wannabe. But you soon realise it’s actually a very smartly designed endless dungeon crawler that just happens to pilfer Crossy Road’s control method, chunky visual style, and sense of urgency.

You begin as a tiny stabby knight, scooting through algorithmically generated isometric rooms. You must avoid spikes and chopping axes, outrun a collapsing floor, and dispatch monsters. The action is fast-paced, lots of fun, and challenges your dexterity and ability to think on the move.

As is seemingly law in today’s mobile gaming landscape, Looty Dungeon also nags at the collector in you, offering characters to unlock. But these aren’t just decorative in nature — they have unique weapons, which alter how you play. For example, an archer has better range than the knight, but no defensive shield when up against an angry witch or ravenous zombie.

It’s not every day you get to become a robot superhero, protecting the public in the retro-futuristic Helsinki. But future Finns should be thrilled Byteman is about, because their capital city appears to be chock full of burning buildings, robbers, and villains escaping in helicopters.

Your task is to fly about, using your radar to swoop in and be all heroic, without slamming into a building while doing so. The controls are straightforward (move with your left thumb and ‘speed boost’ with your right), and there’s a handy radar to figure out which cases to prioritise.

It all comes across a bit like a robot superhero Crazy Taxi, albeit one where the valiant android must occasionally head above the clouds to recharge its solar panels. (We bet Captain Marvel never had that problem.)

In the tiny isometric world of Traffic Rush 2, traffic lights are seemingly anathema to the general public. Instead, dangerous crossings are manned by the kind of people who need the steely nerve of an air-traffic controller. Cars rush in, and each can be temporarily stopped with a tap or given a boost with a swipe. Your job is to keep the traffic flowing and avoid a hideous pile-up.

Of course, a hideous pile-up is inevitable, not least when you’re dealing with an increasing number of cars coming from all directions, driven by people who we’re pretty sure have never taken a driving test in their lives.

Fortunately, wreckage is instantly cleared with the tap of a button, enabling you to have another go. Additionally, as is seemingly law these days, Traffic Rush 2 has you collect coins, receive ‘rewards’, and grab prizes from a machine. These enhance the game, adding new vehicles to the mix, and making the crashes a bit more colourful.

Endless 3D avoid ’em ups have been a mainstay on the App Store ever since Cube Runner arrived way back in 2008. Geometry Race, like the older title, is keen on you learning a fixed course over repeat attempts, rather than battling your way through semi-randomised landscapes. Unlike Cube Runner, though, Geometry Race is a visual treat.

For reasons unknown, your spaceship finds itself zooming through worlds packed full of geometric obstacles, such as huge toppling letters and marching cubes. Beyond not colliding with anything, you must grab fuel to recharge your ship and coins that can be used to unlock better spaceships and additional worlds.

The lack of variety may eventually dent the game’s own long-term survival on your device, but for a while Geometry Race is bright and breezy fun.

Although Hectic Space 2 looks like it’s been wrenched kicking and screaming from a 1980’s 8-bit console, this is a thoroughly modern bullet-hell shooter. You slide your finger vertically on the left side of the screen to move your ship and the sole aim is survival, which involves avoiding projectiles while your ship’s automatic weapon blasts anything in your path.

The gaudy graphics oddly prove beneficial, making it easy to spot enemy fire (red — so much red), and are occasionally dazzling when facing off against inventively designed bosses.

You know you’re not sitting in front of an old Atari when a giant skull bounces around the screen, or a bunch of Space Invaders changes formation, becoming a massive gun that fires countless bullets your way.

The original iSlash came across a bit like a thinking man’s Fruit Ninja combined with arcade classic Qix. Each challenge involved slicing off bits of a wooden box, carefully avoiding the shuriken bouncing about within.

iSlash Heroes is more of the same in freemium form, albeit with revamped graphics, a load of new levels, bosses that muck about with the board as you play, and some infrequent irritating social gubbins that occasionally blocks your way for a bit.

Despite some niggles, it remains a smart, engaging arcade effort, which works especially well on the iPad, given that the large screen enables you to be a bit more precise when slicing off those final slivers of wood required to meet your target.

There’s a bold bluntness about Rocket Ski Racing that actually makes it rather endearing. Unlike most iOS freebie racers, it doesn’t muck about with freemium coins, timers, IAP, nor even, frankly, a difficulty curve.

Instead, you’re dumped into a tough competition across 24 icy courses, pitting your wits against ten computer controlled opponents.

The main aim in every battle is to keep to the racing line and not crash. That’s easier said than done, because Rocket Ski Racing is fast, and the tracks rapidly ramp up in difficulty, introducing loops, inconvenient walls of ice, and moving gates you must pass through.

On your first go, you’ll probably languish at the foot of the league table, but perseverance reaps rewards.

This block-merging puzzle game is based on dominoes, where you place pieces on the board, and when three or more identical tiles sit next to each other they’re sucked into a single piece with a larger number.

Should three or more sixes merge, they create an M. Merge three of those and they obliterate a three-by-three section of the board, giving you temporary breathing space.

The claustrophobic nature of Merged! means you must think carefully when placing every piece, and try to create cascades that will quickly increment tile values. It’s a bit too random at times, and has some distasteful freemium trappings, but otherwise this is a fine puzzler for your iPad.

Here’s another great example of how plenty of polish can transform even the simplest iOS game into a classic. Dashy Crashy pits you against an endless challenge, where you swipe to change lanes and increase your score as you overtake cars all heading in the same direction on a suspiciously straight road.

We’ve seen it all before, but not quite like this. Dashy Crashy’s visuals are dazzling — cartoonish vehicles, a stunning day/night cycle, and colourful, varied backdrops.

But it’s the game’s sense of humor that cements a recommendation, with emoji speech balloons appearing above cars you overtake, and high-score attempts being derailed due to police chases and alien invasions scattering traffic across your intended path.

At some point, developers will run out of new ways to present endless runners, but that moment hasn’t yet arrived. Surfingers tries something a bit different, marrying the genre with a kind of stripped-back breakneck match puzzler. You must line up the blocky wave you’re currently on to match whatever’s coming next, lest your surfer abruptly wipe-out.

At first, this is leisurely and simple, with you swiping up and down, avoiding maniacs in low-flying hot-air balloons, and collecting stars. But before long, you’re two-finger swiping to get past massive rocks and buried spaceships, surfing across snowy mountains and sand dunes, and thinking a dip in the shallows might have been a smarter move. And it turns out even being an ice-cool crocodile riding a rubber duck won’t save you if those shapes don’t line up.

Touchscreens have opened up many new ways to play games, but scribbling with a finger is perhaps the most natural. And that’s essentially all you do in Magic Touch, which sounds pretty reductive – right up until you start playing.

The premise is that you’re a wizard, fending off invading nasties who all oddly use balloons to parachute towards their prize. Match the symbol on any balloon and it pops, potentially causing a hapless intruder to meet the ground rather more rapidly than intended. Initially, this is all very simple, but when dozens of balloons fill your field of vision, you’ll be scrawling like crazy, desperately fending off the invasion to keep the wizard gainfully employed.

The first thing that strikes you about Into the Dim is that it transforms your iPad into a giant Game Boy – at least from a visual standpoint. Its chunky yellowed graphics hark back to handheld gaming’s past; but to some extent, this is also true of Into the Dim’s mechanics.

It’s a turn-based RPG, featuring a boy and his dog exploring dungeons, outwitting enemies, and uncovering a mystery. But whereas most modern mobile fare offers procedurally generated levels, Into the Dim’s dungeons have all been carefully individually designed. It rewards planning, strategic thinking, and patience; and although the game’s finite nature means it can be beaten, doing so will make you feel like a boss, rather than a player being put through the ‘random mill’ time and time again.

Taking the most famous video game character of all and shoving him into an endless freemium title could have ended disastrously. Fortunately, Pac-Man 256 is by the people behind Crossy Road – and it’s just as compelling.

In Pac-Man 256, our rotund hero finds himself beyond the infamous level 256 glitch, which has become an all-consuming swarm of broken code that must be outrun. Pac-Man must therefore speed through the endless maze, munching dots, avoiding ghosts, and making use of power-ups dotted about the place.

And there aren’t just power pellets this time round – Pac-Man can fry ghosts with lasers, or implement stealth technology to move through his spectral foes as if they weren’t even there.

Routing cabling in the real world is a source of fury, and so it might not be the smartest procedure to make into a game played on a device with a glass screen. But Aux B turns out to be a lot of fun, routing INs and OUTs, across increasingly large and complex patch boards, striving to make music blare forth.

There are 80 levels, although towards the end, you wonder whether someone should have a quiet word with the gig organiser and suggest a set-up that’s a wee bit simpler. (And once you’re done with the 80, the game continues randomising levels forever, placing you in a weirdly entertaining mixing desk ‘purgatory’.)

Very occasionally, free games appear that are so generous you wonder what the catch is. Cally’s Caves 3 is rather Metroid, except the hero of the hour is a little girl who has pigtails, stupid parents who keep getting kidnapped, and a surprisingly large arsenal of deadly weapons. She leaps about, blasting enemies, and conquering bosses. Weapons are levelled up simply by shooting things with them, and the eight zones take some serious beating — although not as much as the legions of grunts you’re shooting at.

It’s always the way — you’re looking for work, armed with your useless degree, and all that’s available is a job in a sweltering chocolate factory, under the watchful eye of an angry penguin overseer. At least that’s the story in Coolson’s Artisanal Chocolate Alphabet, which hangs an absurdly addictive word game on this premise. Sort chocolate letters from a conveyor belt into boxes with slots, creating words while doing so; make your boss slightly less angry by spelling out seafood whenever possible; and don’t let too much chocolate fall into the trash!

The notion of a freemium on-rails Crazy Taxi must seem like sacrilege to Dreamcast fans. And yet although a serviceable port of the original arcade game exists, it feels a bit awkward on a touchscreen device. Surprisingly, Crazy Taxi City Rush manages to capture some of the original’s spirit and madness.

You belt along city streets, picking up fares and dropping them off within tight time limits, all while cheesy rock music is hammered into your ears. There’s more than a whiff of freemium, but if you’re prepared to grind a bit and spend wisely on upgrades, you won’t have to dig into your real-world wallet.

In a world of exploitative freemium gaming, Crossy Road shows an entire industry how things could be done. The basic gameplay is endless Frogger — avoid traffic, navigate rivers by way of floating logs, and try to not get splattered across the front of a speeding train. But the genius is in triggering people’s collector mentality. During the game, you pick up coins, which can be pumped into a one-armed bandit that dispenses new characters. These often dramatically change how the game looks and plays. You’ll want to collect them all. You can of course buy them outright, but Crossy Road is generous in flinging coins your way. Nice.

Time travel weirdness meets the morning rush hour in Does Not Commute. You get a short story about a character, and guide their car to the right road. Easy! Only the next character’s car must be dealt with while avoiding the previous one. And the next. Before long, you’re a dozen cars in and weaving about like a lunatic, desperately trying to avoid a pile-up. For free, you get the entire game, but with the snag that you must always start from scratch, rather than being able to use checkpoints that appear after each zone. (You can unlock these for a one-off payment of $2.99/£2.29.)

For a game that started as a joke, Flappy Golf has a lot going for it. A combination of Flappy Bird and Super Stickman Golf 2, it merges the controls of the former (although you can flap right and left) with the courses of the latter, challenging you to reach the hole using the fewest flaps. It’s ridiculous, enjoyable, and a great means of experiencing the courses in a new way. There’s also madcap online multiplayer, which has you speed-run to each hole.

With its numbered sliding squares and soaring scores, there’s more than a hint of Threes! about Imago. In truth, Threes! remains the better game, on the basis that it’s more focussed, but Imago has plenty going for it. The idea is to merge pieces of the same size and colour, which when they get too big explode into smaller pieces that can be reused.

The clever bit is each of these smaller pieces retains the score of the larger block. This means that with smart thinking, you can amass colossal scores that head into the billions. The game also includes daily challenges with different success criteria, to keep you on your toes.

Pool for massive show-offs, with the table’s pockets removed, Magnetic Billiards is all about smacking balls about in a strategic manner. Those that are the same colour stick together; the aim is to connect them all, preferably into a bonus shape, whereupon they vanish. Balls of different colours must not collide, but can ‘buzz’ each other for bonus points; further points come from cushion bounces. For free, you get the ‘classic’ level set, with 20 tables. If you want more, a $1.99/£1.49 ‘skeleton key’ IAP unlocks everything else in the game.

With iPads lacking tactile controls, they should be rubbish for platform games. But savvy developers have stripped back the genre, creating hybrid one-thumb auto-runner/platformers. These are entirely reliant on careful timing, the key element of more traditional fare.

Mr. Crab further complicates matters by wrapping its levels around a pole. The titular crustacean ambles back and forth, scooping up baby crabs, and avoiding the many enemies lurking about the place. The end result is familiar and yet fresh. You get a selection of diverse levels for free, and additional packs are available via IAP.

Having played Planet Quest, we imagine whoever was on naming duties didn’t speak to the programmer. If they had, the game would be called Awesome Madcap Beam-Up One-Thumb Rhythm Action Insanity — or possibly something a bit shorter. Anyway, you’re in a spaceship, prodding the screen to repeat beats you’ve just heard. Doing so beams up dancers on the planet’s surface; get your timing a bit wrong and you merely beam-up their outfits; miss by a lot and you lose a life. To say this one’s offbeat would be a terrible pun, but entirely accurate; it’d also be true to say this is the most fun rhythm action game on iPad — and it doesn’t cost a penny.

The poor polar bear in Roller Polar is atop a massive snowball rolling down the mountain, and he can’t stop. Actually, that’s not entirely true: he can stop when something painfully wallops him off of said snowball.

Your aim is to stave off the inevitable for as long as possible, by helping the bear leap into the air to avoid rocks, trees, moose, and anything else the giant ball of snow scoops up along the way. It’s simple and not terribly original, but the game’s character and excellent graphics make it well worth a download.

A blocky take on classic vertically scrolling shoot ’em ups, Shooty Skies has flying-ace animals in biplanes battling endless squadrons of internet memes, flying robots, and deranged bosses. The controls are simple, but infuse the entire game with a sense of risk-versus-reward: drag to shoot, but stay still (and therefore instantly become extremely vulnerable) to charge a mega weapon. Fortunately, you can also grab gift boxes to gain a temporary wingman, which is essential when battling giant bosses like an ink-spewing headphone-wearing octopus, or an American Eagle that spits out nuclear missiles and ‘patriotism’ like they’re going out of fashion.

The sausage dog in Silly Sausage in Meatland appears to have fallen into the same radioactive sludge as a bunch of Marvel superheroes. He can stretch, seemingly forever, and stick to walks. This stands him in good stead for navigating horizontally scrolling landscapes full of spiky doom. Come a cropper and you go back to the start, unless you unlock restart points by using gems collected along the way. The game will also let you watch an ad, if you’re running low on bling, which seems fair enough. (We’ve seen people grumbling you’re later ‘forced’ to watch ads, because there aren’t enough gems. That misses the point: Silly Sausage is about risk versus reward — not unlocking every restart point — and occasionally a dog sniffing its own behind.)

We imagine the creators of Smash Hit really hate glass. Look at it, sitting there with its stupid, smug transparency, letting people see what’s on the other side of it. Bah! Smash it all! Preferably with ball-bearings while flying along corridors! And that’s Smash Hit — fly along, flinging ball-bearings, don’t hit any glass face-on, and survive for as long as possible. There are 50 rooms in all, but cheapskates start from scratch each time; pay $1.99/£1.49 for the premium unlock and you get checkpoints, stats, iCloud sync, and alternative game modes.

The iPad has plenty of fast, playable racing games, but it took an awfully long time for a decent kart racer to appear on the platform. That was Sega’s Sonic & SEGA All-Stars Racing, and follow-up Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed is even better. You race across land, sea and air, tracks dynamically shifting after each lap. It looks great, handles almost perfectly, and gives you loads to do. IAP does stink up the place a bit, notably if you want to quickly buy characters or burn through the game, but otherwise this is the best free racer this side of Asphalt 8.

One of the most innovative multiplayer titles we’ve ever played, Spaceteam has you and a bunch of friends in a room, each staring at a rickety and oddball spaceship control panel on your device’s display. Instructions appear, which need a fast response if your ship is to avoid being swallowed up by an exploding star. But what you see might not relate to your screen and controls. Spaceteam therefore rapidly descends into a cacophony of barked demands and frantic searches across control panels (which helpfully start falling to bits), in a last-ditch attempt to ‘set the Copernicus Crane to 6’ or ‘activate the Twinmill’ and avoid fiery death.

Another one-thumb high-score chaser, Splish Splash Pong is worth a look because it’s more devious than it initially appears. You bounce between two gates, collecting square coins. This would be easy if the water between them wasn’t infested with killer whales. All you can do to avoid pointy teeth of doom is prod the screen to change direction. Naturally, the game’s pace means you’ll just as often instead tap the screen, and emit a yelp as you watch your little duck head in precisely the wrong direction and become a tasty snack — just like dozens before it.

A somewhat chessish two-player effort, Outwitters finds teams of angry sea creatures battling to the death, first helpfully arming them with surprisingly dangerous weapons. (It turns out crabs eschew claws when they’ve a mortar cannon to hand.)

Despite the cartoonish visuals, this is a deep and immersive strategy experience. Games are further complicated by a ‘fog of war’, which means units cannot see any further than they can move. This makes Outwitters tough to master but more rewarding on doing so and chalking up your first victories.

Golf is dull — it’s pretty much people hitting a ball with a stick. But imagine if golf was played in massive castles. Or on the moon. Or inside a giant ice palace. And everyone wore strange hats that gave them magical powers.

Well, wonder no more, because that’s Super Stickman Golf 2 in a nutshell, and it’s a blast, whether you’re playing solo, chipping away at your best scores, or delve into multiplayer. There, you can pit you skills against a friend in asynchronous two-player battles, or thwack away at breakneck pace in a demented online race mode.

The best puzzle game on mobile, Threes! has you slide cards about a grid, merging pairs to create ever higher numbers. The catch is all cards slide as one, unless they cannot move; additionally, each turn leads to a new card in a random empty slot on the edge you swiped away from. It’s all about careful management of a tiny space.

On launch, Threes! was mercilessly cloned, with dozens of alternatives flooding iTunes, but 2048 and its ilk lack the charm and fine details that made Threes! so great in the first place. And now there’s Threes! Free, where you watch ads to top up a ‘free goes’ bin, there’s no excuse for going with inferior pretenders.

“Expect retro graphics and megatons of enemies,” says the developer about this twin-stick shooter, adding: “Don’t expect a story”. With its vector graphics and Robotronish air, PewPew brings to mind Geometry Wars and Infinity Field, but without a price tag.

Despite being free, PewPew nonetheless boasts five modes of shooty goodness. These range from the aptly named ‘Pandemonium’, where enemies spin around the screen on dying, to the more thoughtful (but still manic) ‘Chromatic Conflict’, where you can only shoot foes whose colour matches your ship.

It turns out if you’re a sheep that thinks the grass is greener, you should check out the other side of the fence first. In Flockwork, wooly heroes make a break for freedom, but end up immersed in a kind of ruminant hell. Your task: help the sheep escape.

The tiny snag is that all the sheep move as one, meaning you must use a combination of quick thinking, finger gymnastics and fast reactions to ensure they don’t drown, get eaten by clockwork wolves, or end up getting stuck behind walls like wooly idiots.

At some point, a total buffoon decreed that racing games should be dull and grey, on grey tracks, with grey controls. Gameloft’s Asphalt series dispenses with such foolish notions, along with quite a bit of reality.

Here, in Asphalt 8, you zoom along at ludicrous speeds, drifting for miles through exciting city courses, occasionally being hurled into the air to perform stunts that absolutely aren’t acceptable according to the car manufacturer’s warranty. It’s admittedly a bit grindy, but if you tire of zooming about the tracks in this game, there’s no hope for you.

Myriad physics puzzlers exist for iOS, but most are twitch-oriented games where you fling objects around, and repeat with slight variation until you succeed. TinkerBox is different, because it demands you carefully consider the task at hand and then construct machines and tools using engineering concepts. It’s great for educating kids and also perfect for anyone who used to love the likes of Meccano.

QatQi starts off a bit like Scrabble in the dark, until you figure out that you’re really immersed in a kind of Roguelike mash-up. So although the aim is to make crosswords from a selection of letters, you’re also tasked with exploring dungeons to find score-boosting stars and special tiles.

This results in QatQi being a bit like a puzzler on top of a puzzler. You must balance the best works with the ability to move on, trying hard to not get backed into a corner. Undos soften the blow if you mess up, although you’ll need IAP to buy more.

Tiny people in a tiny skyscraper need you to feed then tiny sushi and do other tiny tasks. Things can, inevitably, be sped up by not-so-tiny IAP cash infusions, but if you’re a patient sort, and keen on micromanagement games, Tiny Tower is a charming, enjoyable title that will eat many tiny moments out of your day.

This turn-based strategy game comes complete with an engaging story and a healthy dollop of yo-ho-ho. You command pirate ships, setting their courses and then watching the action unfold. Crimson: Steam Pirates gives you eight free voyages and further adventures can be bought via IAP.

The basic aim of Tilt to Live is simple: avoid the red dots, either by cunning dodging and weaving or by triggering explosive devices in the arena. At the time, this wasn’t especially innovative, and Tilt to Live has itself since spawned two (paid) sequels.

Even so, the game manages to appeal, largely due to its polish and sense of humour — the latter of which is especially handy when you miss your high score by moments during a particularly gruelling game and fancy flinging your device out of the window. You get the basic mode for free, and others can be unlocked by in-app purchase.

It’s a case of timey-wimey-puzzley-wuzzley as Doctor Who: Legacy aims to show you that your iPad is bigger on the inside, able to house intergalactic warfare. The game itself is a gem-swapper not a million miles away from Puzzle Quest, but all the Doctor Who trappings will make it a must for fans of the show – or Daleks fine-tuning their tactics regarding how to finally beat their nemesis, mostly via the use of strategically placed coloured orbs.

10 Pin Shuffle Pro Bowling smashes together ten-pin bowling and shuffleboard. Rather than hurling a heavy ball down an alley, you slide a massive puck towards the pins. Of that paid title’s three modes, the best is 10 Pin Poker, which adds poker to the mix.

Get a spare or strike and, respectively, you’re awarded one or two cards. At the end of the tenth frame, whoever of the two players has the best hand wins. And rather generously, this mode is given away entirely for free in 10 Pin Shuffle Bowling. Strike!

Fans of the ancient Pitfall series on the Atari might feel a bit short-changed, given that this comeback in the shape of a Temple Run clone diverges wildly from the platforming action of the originals. However, it’s one of the best-looking endless runners on iOS, and if you persevere there are exciting mine-cart and motorbike sections to master.

The only snag is the usual freemium trappings, notably having to fling virtual cash at the game to pick up where you left off.

There’s a touch of Angry Birds about To-Fu 2, at least if the birds were covered in something yucky that glued them to any walls they collided with. Said stickiness is the name of the game here, getting the squidgy hero to level’s end rather than impaling him on the literally strewn spikes.

Much of the game’s smarts comes from clever level design, which will challenge and frustrate in equal measure. You could say the game’s quite sticky.

It’s not the most interesting-looking game in the world, but luckily the magic of Choice of the Dragon is in its witty prose. Playing as a multiple-choice text adventure, akin to an extremely stripped-back RPG, this game is an amusing romp. It also, through a combination of stats and branching pathways with more than two options, boasts more depth than many more recent stabs at text-based iOS adventuring.

When we think of extreme sports, jogging isn’t the first that comes to mind, although it might be now we’ve experienced Grim Joggers Freestyle. The game’s essentially Canabalt, but instead of one guy leaping across grey rooftops, you get a string of joggers trying desperately to survive in a surreal alien world.

Just that change from a single leaper to a string of nutters changes the game immensely. Not only is it tougher keeping multiple runners alive, but the more that survive to a checkpoint, the higher your score will be.

With Tiny Wings having spent a large amount of time troubling the App Store charts, we’re surprised it took so long to make it to the iPad. All along, Pilot Winds was the next best thing, and it’s free.

Instead of a fat bird sliding down hills, you’re a daredevil penguin skier, and while the game’s inspiration is clear, it has plenty of tricks of its own, such as alternate pilots to play as, and a time-attack mode that rewards combos.

A veteran of the iOS puzzle scene, Drop7 remains one of the best of its kind on the platform. It’s based around dropping numbered discs into a grid. If a disc’s number matches that of any discs within its column or row, those discs all explode. Grey discs are dealt with by twice removing discs next to them, finally revealing their numbers.

Three varied modes are on offer, each of which demands a different strategy, although success always requires serious brainpower and making the most of every drop.

It’s hard not to love Frotz when you see its App Store description ‘warn’ that it involves “reading, thinking, and typing” and that if you “just want to blow stuff up”, it’s not the app for you. And that’s very true, given that this is an interactive fiction player.

You load titles written for the Z-Machine format (such as the famous Zork trilogy), and explore virtual worlds by typing in commands such as ‘go north’ and ‘put the long dangly bit into the Tea Substitute’. As you might expect, Frotz works particularly well on an iPad (rather than the smaller screen of an iPhone), and it adds a menu for common commands to speed you along a bit.

Trainyard Express is a puzzle game which tasks you with getting trains between stations of the same colour, by laying track. It starts simply, with you dragging a track between two stations only a few grid spaces apart. But the puzzles rapidly increase in complexity, adding colour mixing and obstacles that require you to fashion brain-bendingly complex snaking tracks.

In all, you get over 60 puzzles, and there’s not even overlap with the game’s commercial sibling Trainyard.

As the saying goes, there are few American sports that can’t be improved by the impending threat of a banana, and that’s X-Baseball. Hit balls! Hit bananas thrown by fans! Also, hit annoying birds flying overhead! Just don’t ‘not hit’, otherwise your game will soon be over. It’s just like the real thing! Well, if the real thing involved tapping a glass screen to time a shot, and lots of bananas.

The love-child of Pong and a drug-fuelled hallucination, BIT.TRIP Beat Blitz has you deflecting hundreds of balls, in time to crunchy industrial-style dance beats. This is dazzling and pure but demanding arcade gaming, with long, tough levels. Miss too many beats and you’re plunged into Nether, a soulless black-and-white realm where you must chain multiple beats to escape from.

For free, you get a taste of the full game; and if you enjoy having your eyes punched into your skull, you can unlock the full 24 stages with a single IAP.

In Triple Town, you have to think many moves ahead to succeed. It’s a match game where trios of things combine to make other things, thereby giving you more space on the board to evolve your town. For example, three bushes become a tree, and three trees become a hut.

All the while, roaming bears and ninjas complicate matters, blocking squares on the board. At times surreal, Triple Town is also brain-bending and thoroughly addictive. Free moves slowly replenish, but you can also unlock unlimited moves via IAP.

If you’re a fan of spanging a metal ball about, Gameprom’s iPad pinball tables are as good as they come. Pinball HD Collection is the freemium incarnation of the company’s output, giving you the option of demoing and later purchasing any one of the ten included tables.

However, entirely for free you get the simple but playable Wild West, a fast-paced old-school table built for immediacy and racking up high-scores. Yee-haw!

There are many endless running games for the iPad, but in Temple Run you’re being chased by deadly evil demon monkeys! It’s your own fault really, what with nicking that priceless trinket from a temple.

The tilty swipey gameplay’s been much copied since this game first appeared, but the original’s simplicity shines through against more modern rivals that try to do too much. And while Temple Run is perhaps a tad tiring after a while of holding up an iPad, it’s great in short bursts on the larger screen.

The clue’s in the title — there’s a quest, and it involves quite a lot of punching. There’s hidden depth, though — the game might look like a screen-masher, but Punch Quest is all about mastering combos, perfecting your timing, and making good use of special abilities.

The game looks superb, too, marrying old-school pixel art with lashings of character. The in-game currency’s also very generous, so if you like the game reward the dev by grabbing some IAP.

Bejeweled Blitz is the online incarnation of PopCap’s hugely popular gem-swap game, and it looks fab on the iPad’s screen. As a freemium title, there’s a whiff of IAP (either grind or buy coins to unlock power-ups, or you’ve no chance of topping the high-score tables), but you’ll still be addicted all the same.

“Use the magnet to attract the razor to shave the face!” explains Magnetic Shaving Derby, presumably having first hidden any safety instructions from view. And that’s precisely what you do. Drag the magnet around, and the razor follows. The aim is to shave fast-growing hair and avoid slicing open anything that really shouldn’t be sliced open.

The result is an experience best described as completely bonkers, with a side order of “don’t try this at home, kids, unless you enjoy the sight of blood”.

Fairway Solitaire is a perfect example of what happens when you marry simple gameplay with a bit of character. On its own, the basic card system would be fine: unlock face-down cards by selecting those one higher or lower than the current one in the draw pile. But the addition of golf scoring and a crazed gopher out for blood turns this into a surprisingly enjoyable and original title.

X-Motorcycle happily offers two video game cliches for the price of none: the speeding hero (this time on a motorbike), who cannot slow down, and inexplicably giant fruit that appears to be an immensely important currency. All you need to do is help the hapless rider change lanes to avoid crashy disaster.

The result is a fast, playable game reminiscent of old-school thrills filtered down to their essence and squirted into your iPad.

Pinball games tend to be divided into two camps. One aims for a kind of realism, aping real-world tables. The other takes a more arcade-oriented approach. Zen Pinball is somewhere in-between, marrying realistic physics with tables that come to life with animated 3D figures.

Loads of tables are available via IAP, including some excellent Star Wars and Marvel efforts. But for free you get access to the bright and breezy Sorcerer’s Lair, which, aside from some dodgy voice acting, is a hugely compelling and fast-paced table with plenty of missions and challenges to discover.

With a game called Word Solitaire, you might expect a kind of solitaire game that has you form words rather than use standard cards. And that’s exactly what you get here – sorry, anyone waiting for a huge surprise. However, this is not a bad thing, because Word Solitaire HD is a relaxing, entertaining title.

The basic campaign mode has a huge 250 levels to try, and you can also compete against other players worldwide in a daily puzzle, or configure one-off solo sessions in Quick Play mode.

In Royal Revolt the king is dead and his siblings have stolen his kingdom while the prince was at school. Unfortunately for them, he was studying magic and is now out for revenge. The game itself is a real-time-strategy effort with some seriously cute and well-animated graphics.

There is, admittedly, some grinding if you want to reach later levels. But we found with some careful upgrading of your troops, you needn’t dip into your wallet. (Do, though, avoid the not-great sequel.)

Who knew you could have such fun with a five-by-five grid of letters? In Letterpress, you play friends via Game Center, making words to colour lettered squares. Surround any and they’re out of reach from your friend’s tally. Cue: word-tug-o’-war, last-minute reversals of fortune, and arguments about whether ‘qat’ is a real word or not. (It is.)

This one had a dubious start, initially named Smuggle Truck and featuring immigrants being smuggled across the US border. One swift rejection by Apple later and the game swapped immigrants for cuddly toys, which is significantly funnier anyway.

The game itself is a side-on Trials-oriented title, with you traversing increasingly tricky terrain, trying to keep your cuddly toys from spilling out of the truck and getting lost forever. It’s very silly and lots of fun.

With almost limitless possibilities in videogames, it’s amazing how many are drab grey and brown affairs. Frisbee Forever 2 (like its similarly impressive forerunner) is therefore a breath of fresh air with its almost eye-searing vibrance.

There’s a kind of Nintendo vibe – a sense of fun that continues through to the gameplay, which is all about steering a frisbee left and right, collecting stars strewn along winding paths. And these are a world away from the parks you’d usually fling plastic discs about in – here, you’re hurled along roller-coaster journeys through ancient ruins and gorgeous snowy hillsides.

There’s a point in chess where you sometimes wish your knight would just give your opponent’s bishop a thoroughly good trampling. Sadly, few chess games do such things (the ancient Battlechess being an exception), but Hero Academy takes the idea and runs with it. It’s primarily a turn-based two-player effort, where you wipe out your opponent’s tiny army or smash their crystals to bits.

There’s plenty of depth, due to the varied boards and teams that find wizards attacking knights, and demons defending their turf against samurais. And for solo play, the game bundles a bunch of puzzles to try your wits at.

Proving that great ideas never die, Shadow Era brings trading cards to life on the iPad. What you lose in not being able to smell the ink and manually shuffle the deck, you gain in not being able to lose the cards or have them eaten by the dog. It’s all very swords-and-fantasy oriented, and just like in real life you can also buy extra cards if you feel the need.

A game about blending colours, which doesn’t feature an Old English Sheepdog barely avoiding tipping paint everywhere? Missed opportunity! Still, what you’re left with in Blendoku is a beautifully minimal game that tasks you with putting coloured squares in order. It starts off simple, but the level design will soon have you sobbing into your crayons.

You know, if infinite zombies were running towards us, we’d leg it in the opposite direction. Not so in Into the Dead, where you battle on until your inevitable and bloody demise.

The game’s oddly dream-like (well, nightmare-like), given that you meander left and right, almost floating through the hellish landscape. Still, perseverance at least rewards you with new weapons, such as a noisy chainsaw. VVRRRMMM! (Splutch!)

Score! takes the basic premise of a million path-drawing games and wraps it around classic footie goals. The combination works really well, with you attempting to recreate the ball’s path in the best goals the world’s ever seen. Failure results in a baying crowd and, frequently, improbable goalkeeping heroics.

The game’s since had a sequel, but we prefer the original, which is less aggressive in its freemium model.

“You are standing in an open field west of a white house.” If you’re of a certain age, you’re already downloading Lost Treasures of Infocom, which gives you classic text adventure Zork entirely for free. IAP enables you to buy further titles by Infocom, the masters of interactive fiction, and they all work wonderfully on the iPad.

The original Monsters Ate My Condo was like Jenga and a match-three game shoved into a blender with a massive dollop of crazy. Super Monsters Ate My Condo is a semi-sequel which takes a time-attack approach, shoe-horning the bizarre tower-building/floor-matching/monster-feeding into a tiny amount of time, breaking your brain in the process.

Essentially, you aim to manage like-colored apartments in a single-column tower, flinging unwanted floors into the maws of flanking beasts. Lob gems their way and they’ll power-up in a suitably odd manner. Give them the wrong colour, and they’ll have a massive tantrum, potentially destroying all your hard work.

Argh! That’s pretty much what you’ll be yelling on a regular basis on playing this endless racer. Cubed Rally Redline shouldn’t be difficult. You can go left or right on five clearly defined lanes, and there’s a ‘time brake’ for going all slow-motion, Matrix-style, to weave through tricky gaps; but you’ll still be smashing into cows, dinosaurs and bridges before you know it.

You’ll persevere if you’re particularly bloody minded, or just to see what other visual treats the developer’s created for hardcore players.

Flow Free‘s quite sneaky. It looks simple enough, tasking you with connecting like-colored blobs via pathways that cannot cross. And indeed it is at first, despite you also having to fill the entire board to proceed. But once you’re on larger grids, trying to figure out snaking pathways, your ears will be shooting steam.

Color Zen appears to be noodly central – a game where you match coloured shapes while pleasant sounds massage your ears. But there’s a devious puzzler lurking underneath, with later levels being tricky to solve. There’s no timer, though, and so it’s the kind of game you can put down and return to at any point, rather than wanting to hurl your iPad out of the window in frustration.

Nyeeeeooowww! Daggadaggadaggadagga! It’s biplane o’ clock in Sid Meier’s Ace Patrol – a Civ-like take on World War I dogfighting. You and the bally enemy take it in turns to climb, dive, roll and shoot, as you aim to turn the tide of the war and ensure it’ll all be over by Christmas. The game is also one of the few we’ve seen that understands the concept of micro-transactions, for example enabling you to spring POWs for 69p/$0.99 a pop.

The Tiny Tower devs take to the air in game form, with Pocket Planes. In this management sim, you take command of a fleet of planes, aiming to not entirely annoy people as you ferry them around the world. Like Tiny Tower, this one’s a touch grindy, but it’s a similarly amusing time-waster.

At first, Letris looks like yet another bog-standard word game, albeit one that’s rather visually swish, but it regularly tries new things. The game’s based around creating words from falling tiles, but it keeps things fresh by adding hazards, such as debris, ice and various creatures lurking in the letter pile. If you’re feeling particularly brainy, you can even play in two languages at once.

Dots looks and feels like the sort of thing Jony Ive might play on his downtime. A stark regimented set of coloured dots awaits, and like-coloured ones can be joined, whereupon they disappear, enabling more to fall into the square well. The aim: clear as many as possible – with the largest combos you can muster – in 60 seconds.

Plenty of additional modes and themes are on offer if you want to buy some IAP. Avoid sequel Two Dots, though, which doubles down on freemium to an irksome degree.

In Smash Cops, you got to be the good guy, bringing down perps, mostly by ramming them into oblivion. Now in Smash Bandits it’s your chance to be a dangerous crim, hopping between vehicles and leaving a trail of destruction in your wake. Smartly, this can all be done with a single finger, which is all you need to steer, drive and smash.

The game also amusingly includes the A-Team van and a gadget known only as the Jibba Jabba. We love it when a plan comes together!

If you liked this, then make sure you check out our best free iPad apps roundup!

via Click on the link for the full article

Prices have been coming down for a while now on the LG G4 and with Black Friday just around the corner this month, they could go even lower!

On this page you’ll find a run down of all the best LG G4 deals on networks still stocking the handset. 

Despite being a little bit older now that the G5 is out, it’s still a great phone with features like a brilliant camera, super sharp screen, and a genuinely different design that both sits nicely in the hand and, should you go for the leather variant, offers a real alternative from all the boring blocky designs on offer. 

On top of that, it’s one of the easier phones on the wallet too, as LG likes to try and undercut the competition where possible.

Techradar’s LG G4 review highlights:

The LG G4 is a phone that’s designed to keep building the head of steam LG’s creating in the smartphones space, building on the worldwide success of the LG G3 sales.

The brand should be applauded for trying something different with the design: the leather back and curved chassis are just the sort of thing that anyone looking to not be a ‘me-too’ brand should be doing.

There’s a lot going on with the LG G4, and for the most part it’s rather positive indeed.

We liked

The LG G4 has a large, expansive and rich screen – one of the best on the market, without doubt. I’m going to label it as a positive as while there’s not really enough content out there to make use of it (and therefore the battery sucking aspects are more annoying) the great colour reproduction and sharpness generally make everything look that much better.

The camera errs on the side of sharpness too much for our liking, and LG has repeated its usual trick of mudding the edges of some darker snaps, but overall we got great pictures time and again – the low light capabilities are exquisite at times.

The curved chassis might be thick, but that doesn’t mean it felt large in the hand, and we still believe the rear buttons make sense from an ergonomic point of view.

We disliked

The battery life is still too poor – what on Earth has Google done with Android to make Lollipop so thirsty on the power?

We never, ever got through a whole day on battery with the G4, no matter what we were doing, and quickly found ourselves topping up at 4PM just to make sure we could make it through the commute home. Not good enough, especially when a slower processor was chosen to help with battery drain.

The leather back just doesn’t work. Some out there will like the novelty, but it’s not even nice feeling leather. When you feel it for the first time it doesn’t feel like a quality leather wallet but more plastic leather – thin and grainy. Plus it’s leather on a phone – miles away from the premium feel of the HTC One M9 or iPhone 6.

The plastic options are just too cheap-feeling to be used on a flagship phone – and while this is still a better interface than Samsung’s TouchWiz, it’s still not as fast or fluid as we’d expect from a phone of this ilk.

It’s not the fastest out there among the flagships either. It’s not the slowest, but for general zipping about this is a middle-of-the-road phone.

Verdict

We know the number of LG fans is growing, and for good reason: the South Korean firm is working hard on bringing the best from its labs into a smartphone. The screen and camera on the LG G4 are really good additions and are genuine upgrades from last year’s G3.

However, the brand still hasn’t shown us it can make a truly market-leading smartphone. The decision to use leather and plastic is awful – LG needed a premium design and failed badly in trying to be a little different.

Those that value a removable battery need to realise that an all-in-one design comes at a price – so if you value the option of being able to swap out a power pack, you’ll have to accept a lowering of design prowess.

It feels slightly churlish criticising the G4 in some ways, as it’s a strong phone with a lovely screen and decent elements that people really want. The issues are around the ergonomics the larger phone brings, the poor choices in leather and plastic and the battery life – and although the new super-low price means the G4 is a better proposition with the power on offer.

The overall package is just slightly too rough around the edges to say this is a really brilliant phone, although with the new lower price it’s a much, much more attractive proposition – with the cuts, you should definitely consider this as your new phone if you want a flagship phone while paying a lot less.

First reviewed: April 2015

via Click on the link for the full article