iOS Reviews

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?

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.