Mobile

Garfield has eaten too much - as always - and has decided that he needs to take a nap - as always. He's not likely to get an easy sleep, however, because as soon as his head hits the pillow, he's transported to a mysterious dream world where he can fly by flapping his arms, collect flying lasagne, dodge UFOs and pay exuberant prices for costumes that don't actually matter. Welcome to Garfield's Wild Ride.

It would be hard to argue that Magic: the Gathering was not the most popular CCG on the planet. It's been going strong for 20 years now because of the excellent tactical gameplay. While many card games end up being pay-to-win affairs, Magic is balanced in such a way that a good player will nearly always beat a player who has simply spent more money on good cards.

Never a fan of torturous hardcore platformers, Ravenous Games' League of Evil stole my heart in 2011 with its magnificent controls and pixelated graphic style. Not only did it kick off the well-loved (and hated) "retro" trend that captured the App Store for the next year or so, but it also showed that iOS was a serious gaming platform, one capable of precise controls and infectious, original ideas. After ditching the pixel art style and dialing down the difficulty with last year's League of Evil 2, Ravenous returns to the well once again with League of Evil ...

Poor design choices and a fundamentally broken experience leave a queasiness-inducing taste, making this a game should have been tested behind closed doors and never released to the public.

The most common complaint leveled against mobile gaming is the seeming lack of "console-quality experiences" - which, despite being a bit of a moot point (it's a tablet, not a console, correct?), is grounded in some real complaints. There are too many money-hungry free-to-play games, and way too many physics puzzlers and endless runners in the App Store - so when Firaxis and 2K announced a fully-featured handheld port of the award-winning XCOM: Enemy Unknown, it presented an opportunity for the platform to show off its skills beyond forgettable $1 titles.

Shelter is a zombie-themed card game for mobile devices. Card games seem to be really hot now and zombies are never not the flavour of the week, so the combination of the two is something I'm amazed hasn't happened on this scale before. Shelter takes both ideas and pushes them to their max, mixing deep card mechanics with a Walking Dead inspired graphic novel style of storytelling. As an idea, and in many parts of the gameplay as well, Shelter is just as exciting as it should be. Occasional issues and a repetitive nature, however, may be too much for more ...

Not long after the release of Kingdom Rush on iOS in 2011, Ironhide Studios announced a sequel for the game - and save for a few screenshots released during the holiday season, they kept a pretty tight lid on development of their next tower defense title, which finally hit the App Store last week. I don't know if I'd call it a true 'sequel' - but as a version 1.5 of sorts, Frontiers brings the same fantastic gameplay as the original, with enough tweaks and additions to keep the experience fresh.

For the most part, iOS and Android ports of board games are pretty straightforward, relying on the convenience of having classic tabletop titles without all the plastic pieces, dies, and paper objects needed for the physical product. Warhammer Quest is a different kind of digital interpretation, taking the multiplayer board game and transforming it into a enjoyable, but familiar-feeling tactical dungeon crawler.

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic is one of the touchstone RPG's of my life. It's the first BioWare game I had ever played, having missed the large majority of them as a person who spent most of my time on consoles as opposed to PC. Thinking back, it might even be the first proper western RPG I played as I spent most of my RPG hours playing games like Final Fantasy and Dragon Warrior. Who'd have guessed at the time that a game with the Star Wars license would be so essential to the hobby?

Designing an endless runner game that catches the attention of the public must be a challenge. The App store is flooded with them, because they are great for quick gaming sessions and they don't typically require complex inputs from the player. How does Dead Ahead set itself apart from the pack?