iOS Reviews

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 ...

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 ...

There are thousands upon thousands of developers and publishers selling their games and apps in Apple's mobile marketplace - but there's only a few handful of those companies whose every release piques the interest of hardcore iOS-heads. Illusion Labs is definitely one of these companies, the minds behind App Store classics like Touchgrind (and Touchgrind BMX), Labryinth 2, the memorable puzzle-platformer Blast-a-Way - and their latest creation that quietly released earlier this month, an addictive little platformer called Mr. Crab.

Sand Slides has a very simple premise. Coloured sand will fall from the top of the screen, and you must make sure that that sand falls into the right coloured funnel. You do this by creating slides, using the touch screen to direct the grains as they drop. This starts off fairly easy - some of the sand drops right down into the right funnel - but it's not long before you're having to crisscross slides and collect sand in "buckets." It's both ingeniously simple and utterly frustrating.

You've proably heard of Rogue-likes, but have you ever heard of a Snake-like? Unlikely. Obviously someone played a lot of Snake a child and thought 'You know what would make this better? If it had some light RPG elements!' And so it was that Nimble Quest was born.

At first glance, Warner Bros.'s Injustice: Gods Among Us seems thoroughly unappealing: it is a watered-down version of its console counterpart, with simplified controls and repetitive gameplay design, topped off by the ever-damning price tag of 'free', never a promising sign for a licensed App Store game. Despite all this working against it, the mobile version of Injustice: Gods Among Us is actually quite a bit of fun to play, a simple but action-packed fighter perfectly designed for mobile screens.

If you had the opportunity to look one year into your future would you do it? Would you want to see if a new business venture paid off, or if a lost love might return to your life? Perhaps you'd see something terrible; would you be able to avert disaster?