Mobile Categories

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.

Digital Chocolate, the company behind Kings and Warlords(the producer of which we interviewed at the beginning of this month), launched a new game this week. Blackjack! Buzz, with its slightly quicker edge, is a more social game than the Blackjack you know and love. Taking a cue from the likes of Draw Something, Blackjack! Buzz pairs you against strangers who you must out-score. The higher the cards in your hand are worth, the higher your score when you decide to…

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?

For some baseball fans, the Out of the Park Baseball series appears too dense and text-based to be enjoyed. At first, it can be – managing an entire baseball organization from top to bottom is no easy task. But the beauty of the series is how user-friendly it is, allowing players to sculpt their own experience, allowing both hardcore stat heads and casual GM-wannabes to enjoy the game in their own way. The mobile little brother to the desktop version, the iOOTP series has always been a great showcase for this versatility in gameplay, scaling the experience ...

Badland might be crammed into the category of an “Autorunner”, the genre of gaming where characters zoom along the screen and players just need to hit a jump button at the right moment. But the character in Badland doesn’t actually run; it’s a weird furball that flies, and players have to tap the screen of the iPhone to flap its wings and keep it afloat. It’s an “Autoflapper” if you will, but that doesn’t even begin to describe this unusual and engrossing game from the two-man team of Frogmind Games.