iOS

Alphabear – not quite an obsession

For what looks at first glance like a simple word game with cute bears, Alphabear is surprisingly complex. They had me at cute bears though, especially as they’re reminiscent of the chaps from Triple Town – which is because the game is from the same chaps, Spry Fox....

Dragon Coins – Review

Coin pushers: gateway gambling machine, disappointing old-fashioned seaside arcade amusement, or terribly modern entertainment sensation? It’s looking bizarrely like the last of those. There’s daytime ITV1 quiz show Tipping Point, in which Ben Shephard has an only slightly easier job than Noel Edmonds on Deal Or No Deal...

Dsmvwld – Review

The obvious thing would be to write about Dsmvwld in the manner of its puzzles, omitting the vowels. On the plus side, that would end up looking a tiny bit like something uttered by Zombie Dave. But it would also be unhelpful to the point of perversion. Your...

Tengami – Review

Have you seen just how many Flappy Bird clones there are on the App Store now? You don’t need to, because Stuart Dredge has been keeping a slightly obsessive eye on it for The Guardian. In short: lots. If Nyamyam had been so inclined, they might have renamed...

Dungeon Keeper – Review

Back in the ‘90s, Bullfrog was one of the biggest names in PC gaming. Theme Park, Theme Hospital, Magic Carpet, Syndicate and Populous became instant classics overnight, but it was Dungeon Keeper that turned the fantasy genre upside, making the player the bad guy instead of the hero....

Fist of Awesome – Review

Fist of Awesome has been one huge charm offensive: from the early animated GIF screenshots, through the doubling-its-target Kickstarter, to designer Nicoll Hunt’s beard. It’s been either: (a) a cleverly orchestrated PR campaign; (b) a demonstration of the benefits as an indie developer of being a bit different;...

Garfield’s Wild Ride – Review

You know when you’ve been playing a game of an evening, and you can still see it in your mind’s eye when you go to sleep? Match-three puzzlers have a habit of doing it to me. Well, Garfield isn’t an obvious choice for an endless runner, so Namco-Bandai...

Scurvy Scallywags – Review

I bloody love a match-three puzzler, and the tile-swapping variety is that rarest of things: a game mechanic born on a controller that actually benefits from a touch screen. Certainly that’s one reason there are so many on iOS. And very nice they are too. Increasingly though games...

Dumb Ways to Die – Review

You’d have to be either very dumb or incredibly naive to deny that Dumb Ways to Die is a blatant clone of Nintendo’s Wario Ware. Unlike many of the App Store’s copycats though, it’s very easy to look past the plagiarism on the account that it has clearly...
The Great Brain Experiment

Donate your brain to scientific research – the easy way

They might have peaked in about 2009, but there’s still a healthy market for games with the word ‘brain’ in the title – certainly on mobile. But rather than playing another clone of Nintendo and Dr Kawashima’s 2006 effort, why not contribute to medical science? Well, there’s an...
Ridiculous Fishing

Ridiculous Fishing – Review

There are a lot of ‘angles’ on Ridiculous Fishing: the tortured development; the indie supergroup that eventually finished it; the chart success since last week’s launch, despite having been preceded by a blatant clone; the active eschewing of IAPs in favour of a £1.99 upfront price tag. And...