Mobile

NarcoGuerra is the latest in a series of 'Game the News' games. The idea is to take a real world issue, in this case the ongoing battle between Mexican police forces and drug cartels, and make it a little easier to understand how complicated the situation truly is. But is NarcoGuerra a good game, or just a fancy news piece?

The original ports of the classic Sonic franchise to iOS were not so well-received: running on a terrible, cheap-looking emulator, the various Sega classics (be it Sonic, Streets of Rage, or others) just looked and played like crap. Enter Christian Whitehead, who Sega brought in to develop ports of Sonic games using his engine. The first result of this, 2011's Sonic CD for iOS was such a success, it only made sense for them to go back and tackle some of their other blue hedgehog-starring releases - this continued last week, when the 2.0 update to Sonic the ...

Grey-bearded old gamers love to spin tales of the glorious days back when playing a game meant running text adventures on a university mainframe. Good times indeed, grandpa, but there’s a slightly less-grizzled generation of gamers who are too young to remember sneaking in a game of Zork between computer science classes. This generation can still recall the many attempts to simulate computer adventure games, but without actually using a computer. These often took the form of “Gamebooks” which used printed books to ape the basic mechanics of an interactive ...

Star Command is easily some of the most fun I have ever had on iOS and is a game that you almost have to have if you play on your phone or tablet. If you've heard of Star Command at all, you will likely understand the appeal straight away. Take a starship and build all the rooms inside, then hire a bunch of crew members and take to the stars while looking at some interesting planets (always from a distance, unfortunately) and destroying strange and hostile aliens.

In general terms, if you've played one LEGO title, you've played 'em all. Though each series features different, property-specific mechanics (like the spells in the Harry Potter titles), the concept never changes. Watch a cut scene, enter a room, smash and bash everything in sight, solve a puzzle, repeat. There's certainly nothing wrong with this; when it comes to simplistic third-person platformers, LEGO's created a specific niche that only collecting golden nuts and bolts can fill.

Have you ever been tempted to knock over a few mailboxes? How about whilst driving a tank and whilst dressed as Kim Jong Un? Mobile games need to be easy to pick up, easy to play, humorous (or at least accessible) and playable in short snippets over a long time. Mailboxing is all of those things. It's such an ideal mobile game, in fact, that it may just end up being the new must-play on the App Store.

The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles have had a rough run the last two decades; what began as a mid-80s comic book grew into a cultural phenomenon in the early 1990s. Most kids I grew up with had the TMNT lunch box, the action figures, we watched the cartoons... and then over time, with a few bad studio film sequels and a failed live-action TV show, the pizza-loving turtles slowly disappeared from the public eye, save for a few attempted reboots (including a well-received cartoon series, and the recently announced Michael Bay film) over the past fifteen years. So ...

Asphalt 6: Adrenaline continues the Asphalt series with new cars, new tracks, and more intense racing action on mobile devices. Visually, this game is as close to Triple-A as it gets on Android and iOS, but the title reveals the design challenges inherent in creating a racing game for mobile devices. Asphalt 6 is fun and compelling enough to have kept me interested all the way through, but there are a few blatant and nagging drawbacks that keep the experience from being as polished as it could be. Despite its weaknesses, this game is definitely worth a try ...

The story behind Vlambeer's Ridiculous Fishing is almost as interesting as the game itself - a frustrating, occasionally inspirational story about an indie developer fighting a 'clone war' against another title that essentially stole the heart of their fishing game. But after three years in development, the Dutch developers finally released their arcade fisher to the App Store, where praise was rightfully heaped upon it: Ridiculous Fishing is the best iOS game to release so far in 2013.

Every so often, I find myself browsing through the catalog of games available on the iOS App Store. Most of the time I find nothing that particularly catches my eye, and I move on to other things. Other times, there's Tekken Card Tournament. Now for most people, it's the "Tekken" part that catches the eye. Not so in my case. As you may be aware, I'm frequently suckered in by the addition of cards to any type of game. Often recasting a popular franchise with a whole new set of mechanics turns it into a bewildering mess, but Tekken Card Tournament ...