The best iPhone games 2018

It would take approximately 34,506,455 years to play through every single iPhone game on the App Store.

Well.. that number might be fairly inexact, but such is the wealth of titles on the app portal, combined with the depth of some of those on offer, you could easily play happily on your phone for years without getting bored.

The App Store is crammed with gaming goodies to keep thumbs busy, but not all iPhone games are born equal - which is why we've done the difficult job of playing through as many games as humanly possible in order to tell you which are best.

A bit of advice: make sure you think about what kind of game you want, and appreciate that some of them are more 'session' titles and some are those that you'd like to pull out and play in an odd five minutes.

That's important as we're big advocates of people paying for games on the app portal - they help offset some of the free titles that are funded by in-app purchases.

So if you're going to pay £5 / $5 for a game, make sure you've got a daily commute or enough downtime to give it your attention. The beauty of being able to play an immersive game on the move - something that would have been console quality a few years ago - should never be under-appreciated.

Also think about a controller for some titles - while many games don't support an external device, those that do are often brilliant to play without needing to resort to a touchscreen for interaction.

And just to contradict ourselves: free games with in-app purchases are fine, and often give you a great experience without needing to pay up. However, when you get really good at them you'll find that you're constantly told when to stop, in order to regenerate something or get to the next level.

However, if you've decided that you love RPG, fighting and strategy games, and like both options that you can dip into and play for hours, we're here to help. After many trials and tribulations, we arrived at the list you're about to dive into: the best games you can enjoy on your iPhone today.

New: Golf Peaks (US$2.99/£2.99/AU$4.49)

Golf Peaks initially looks much like a mini-golf game – a genre that doesn’t typically fare well on iPhone, since it’s too fiddly to accurately aim. Fortunately, Golf Peaks only uses smacking a ball as a theme of sorts for some sporty turn-based puzzling.

Each single-screen challenge tasks you with getting the ball into the hole, but moves are dictated by a small number of cards (denoting moves and jumps) that can be played in any order. You therefore need to figure out which sequence combined with which directions will get you to your goal.

It’s all quite chilled out, but as courses grow in complexity, Golf Peaks becomes rather more of a cerebral test than the typical mini-golf course packed with plastic windmills.

Watch our overview of the iPhone X below.

Persephone is a puzzle game that asks you: what if death is not the end? Here, it’s instead a vital component of solving puzzles.

That might sound a bit confusing, but really Persephone is a quite conventional isometric puzzler. You need to reach an exit, and do so by getting past hazards. It just so happens that along with avoiding projectiles and shoving boxes around, you sometimes have to trample on the corpse of your previous incarnation, or shove your dead predecessors along to trigger a switch.

It’s comically dark stuff, but in a cartoonish way. And its mix of the macabre, clockwork movement, and twisty labyrinthine puzzles makes for a compelling and engaging combination.

Layton: Curious Village [USA] | [RoW] won an award for being the best handheld game of 2008. You might think it’s rocking up a bit late on iPhone over a decade later, but this game – first released for Nintendo DS – is something of a classic, having racked up over 17 million sales.

Whether it will do nearly as well on iPhone is anyone’s guess, but developer Level-5 is giving it a go. Recognizing that a modern iPhone’s display is rather different from a mid-2000s Nintendo console’s, all the visuals have been redone in HD.

The plentiful puzzles and riddles are the important bit, though, and they remain as devious as ever. Even early on, the game is pretty tricksy, and as you delve further into the quest, you’ll come to understand how this title grew to become a much-loved gaming series.

Euclidean Skies takes the framework behind iOS classic Euclidean Lands and stretches it to breaking point. Lands had you move in turn-based fashion on floating structures akin to Rubik’s Cubes, attacking nearby foes in chess-like fashion. Manipulating the landscape was as important as the direction of your next step. But in Skies, the land itself can be pulled to pieces.

This means the original’s quiet clockwork elegance has been replaced with a kind of brain-thumping chaos. You may be tasked with obliterating a giant monster’s spine by reworking the landscape, or figuring out how to simultaneously carve a pathway to a switch and some doors.

It’s hard work, but hugely rewarding; and even though the game’s a touch fiddly on the smaller screen, iCloud sync means you can always pick up from where you left off on your iPad.

Reigns: Game of Thrones slaps a famous license on now-familiar Tinder-meets-kingdom management larks from the original Reigns, and follow-up Reigns: Her Majesty. You tend to the needs and desires of your subjects and enemies, keeping the army, church, people and bank happy – but not to the point they’ll instigate your untimely demise.

Flick cards left or right and your approval ratings change accordingly – and sometimes unpredictably. Quests and themes run throughout, providing surprising depth, given the basic nature of your interactions.

The writing is great, although the game is more enjoyable if you’re a fan of the TV show on which it’s based. But even if you’re a newcomer, this Reigns is fun, with you seeing how far you can get into its complex narrative web before being brutally taken down by any number of foes.

ELOH is a really smartly conceived puzzle game. Although it’s extremely rigid in the nature of the solutions it demands, it’s pretty open-minded about how you get to them.

Each puzzle is a grid of loudspeakers, goals, and snoozing masks. Tap a loudspeaker and it regularly emits colored blobs that bounce off of objects at precise right-angles. If blobs hit a mask, they change color. The aim, of course, is to send strings of blobs to goals of identical colors.

Although you can try and figure everything out before tapping the loudspeakers, ELOH is more fun when tackled in an organic manner. Switching up your approach on-the-fly as a meditative beat thumps away in the background makes for a relaxing and engaging experience.

Sid Meier's Civilization VI is one of the PC’s finest 4X (eXplore; eXpand; eXploit; eXterminate) strategy titles. Its turn-based shenanigans have you explore a brand-new world, aiming to be the dominant civilization through conquering space, getting absurdly rich, or giving everyone else a kicking until your mob’s the only one left standing.

When the game arrived for iPad, that was an eye-opener, but now it’s on your iPhone. This isn’t a cut-back, cartoonish take either – it’s the full experience.

There are drawbacks beyond the high price – the game’s a touch fiddly on a phone, requires powerful hardware, and lacks cloud save sync. We’d love to play a few turns on the train and continue later on an iPad. Gripes aside, this game showcases the potential for immersive AAA experiences on iPhone like no other.

ATOMIK: RunGunJumpGun finds the hero of the hour belting along hazard-infested corridors, attempting to obliterate evil-doers in a world where the local sun is dying. Unfortunately, said hero forgot their jet-pack, and relies on shooting a massive gun at the ground in order to stay aloft.

This becomes problematic when huge saw blades and the like need blasting. Shoot ahead and you plunge towards the ground (often covered in deadly spikes). The game therefore plays out like a choreographed juggling act, as you balance flying and shooting in its brutal, bite-sized levels.

Given how intense the game is (although you do get a shield and unlimited rewinds), it’s perhaps a good thing levels are short. But if you somehow don’t think it’s challenging enough, try grabbing every collectible; you can then rightly lay claim to being the toughest iPhone gamer around.

Desert Golfing streamlines smacking a ball with a big stick as far as it’s possible to go. It begins with you being invited to drag an arrow to direct a shot towards a hole. The course you’re faced with is side-on, jagged, and – as you soon discover – composed entirely of unfriendly sand.

There are no do-overs, but there is a score. Yet that becomes almost meaningless as you find yourself dozens of holes into a seemingly endless bout of golfing, deep in a minimalist desert.

What’s surprising is Desert Golfing is so compelling. Gradually, the colors change and the challenges increase in complexity. But even though some holes frustrate, you realize they’re ultimately fleeting. It’s a Zen take on golf, then – and an experience that’s far more satisfying than its appearance in still imagery would suggest.

Hidden Folks is a hidden object game that shouldn’t work as well as it does on the iPhone. On iPad, it’s an obvious buy, with the hand-drawn illustrations shining on the larger screen. You have plenty of space in which to explore the varied, animated, interactive scenes, trying to track down the selection of people and objects that will complete the challenge.

On iPhone, everything’s much tinier, and yet it somehow still works. In part, that’s down to the game’s sheer charm, and subtle humor. But mostly it’s due to smart graphic and interface design, which makes the game a joy to play in any orientation, and at any zoom level.

Although probably avoid zooming out too much, unless you have the eyes of a bird of prey and can spot your target from the equivalent of half a mile in the air.

Evergarden is a gorgeous puzzler underpinned by an emotionally charged narrative adventure. The main game echoes Threes! and Triple Town, in being about merging elements on a board to boost your score. Only here, you’re combining plants into new forms, and having them strategically spit out seeds between rounds.

The game has a great sense of rhythm, and stunning visuals that make everything shine on the iPhone’s screen. It’s also layered, gradually revealing new ideas as you play. Early on, animal companion Fen will demand you match provided patterns to increase your score; within the adventure, you acquire new skills, and must strategically apply them within the main challenges.

In all, Evergarden is a distinctive, beautifully realized treat – even if you think you’ve already got quite enough mobile puzzlers installed on your device.

Donut County is a physics puzzler where you play as a hungry hole in the ground. The more the hole eats, the larger it grows. Initially you are only able to swallow a few blades of grass but as you crack the correct order of items to gulp down you’ll soon be downing cars, buildings and even hillsides.

Coupled with the satisfying gameplay, Donut County adds lovely visuals, inventive ideas, and a superb storyline. The imaginative conceit is that a local raccoon has been sending people down the hole when they order donuts, and now everyone’s deep underground recounting their stories and figuring out how to get back to the surface.

The challenge is slight and the journey short, but that also means Donut County wisely doesn’t outstay its welcome. Instead, it’s a beautifully crafted finite slice of engaging entertainment.

Supertype is a word game more concerned with the shape of letters than the words they might create. Each hand-designed level finds you staring at a setup of lines, dots, and empty spaces in which to type. Tap out some letters, press the tick mark, and everything starts to move.

The aim is to get the letters you type to the dots. In some cases, the solution may be fairly obvious – for example, placing a lowercase l on each ‘step’ towards an out-of-reach dot at the top of a staircase, then having a p at the start tip over to set everything in motion.

More often, you’ll be scratching your head, experimenting, trying new approaches, and then grinning from ear to ear on cracking a solution.

Motorsport Manager Mobile 3 is a racing management game without the boring bits. Rather than sitting you in front of a glorified spreadsheet, the game is a well-balanced mix of accessibility and depth, enabling you to delve into the nitty gritty of teams, sponsors, mechanics, and even livery.

When you’re all set, you get to watch surprisingly tense and exciting top-down racing (This being surprising because you’re largely watching numbered discs zoom around circuits.)

One-off races give you a feel for things, but the real meat is starting from the bottom of the pile in the career mode, with the ultimate aim of becoming a winner. It’s all streamlined, slick and mobile-friendly, and a big leap on from the relatively simplistic original Motorsport Manager Mobile.

One of the earliest 3D games was Battlezone, a tank warfare title at the time so realistic the US military commissioned a version from Atari to train gunners. iOS tribute Vector Tanks was subsequently gunned down by Atari lawyers, but its DNA survives in Tanks! - Seek & Destroy.

Like Battlezone, Tanks pits you against an endless number of vector tanks on a sparse battlefield, but this is a much faster, tougher game, with tilt-and-tap controls that put you more in mind of console racing games than a stodgy tank 'em up. The result is a relentlessly thrilling 3D shooter that marries the best of old-school smarts and modern mobile gaming.

Reckless Racing 3 is a top-down effort that features dilapidated cars and trucks battling it out across a surreal section of courses. Whereas the original in the series appropriately restricted itself to scrapyards and mall parking lots, Reckless Racing 3 features routes through a quaint European village, an airport, and a nuclear plant with a worrying amount of green goop sloshing about.

The handling feels a bit lightweight, but the races are amusingly smashy. And if you’re in the mood for something completely different, there’s a gymkhana mode for precision driving and drifting in your decrepit vehicle.

Suzy Cube is a platform game set in a world with a thing for straight edges. Assuming you’ve played a platformer before, you know the drill: explore; grab gold; unsportingly jump on the heads of enemies to obliterate them.

But Suzy Cube goes beyond the stripped-back 2D fare we often see on iOS for something akin to Super Mario 3D Land. This means you may find yourself quickly swapping between skidding down icy mountains in 3D, following Suzy Cube as she runs side-on around a tower, and then delicately leaping between floating platforms, as seen from above.

Bar some duff boss battles, it’s ambitious, entertaining fare, with tight touchscreen controls, and a great sense of pace and variety as you delve into the world and discover its many hidden secrets.

Oddmar is a platform game featuring the titular protagonist, a selfish Viking who suddenly has to become the hero when his village vanishes and evil critters take over the land. It is a stunning mobile production, awash with dazzling visuals, and wonderful set pieces, such as trying desperately to outrun a massive troll in a boss battle, or riding a pig like you’re starring in a medieval Metal Slug.

But even the more typical platforming bits are something special. Wonderful animation ensures the game is full of life, while carefully placed hazards and enemies cleverly shift and change the game’s tempo as you pick your way through each level.

On iPhone, there’s the slight niggle of thumbs getting in the way of the action. That said, the controls are among the best we’ve ever seen on a mobile platformer, as – to be frank – are all other aspects of the game.

Ovivo comes across as much like an art experiment as a platform game. It’s certainly rather more reflective than most running and jumping games.

Much of this is down to the environments, which are all stark monochrome – semi-abstract silhouettes that only occasionally offer a spark of familiarity. You tilt your device to move circular protagonist Ovo, and a tap of the screen switches Ovo from existing within the light to the dark.

By using gravity and flipping from black to white (and back) at opportune moments, you can scale hitherto unreached heights. And although there are objects to collect en route, your main aim is simply to reach a goal. Finish an entire world and the screen zooms out, giving you a slice of dazzling artwork to take in before immersing yourself in the next challenge.

Touchgrind BMX 2 invites you to coax a virtual BMX to the checkered flag in courses likely to usher in panic attacks and vertigo, while performing all kinds of stunts along the way. But unlike ostensibly similar fare on iPhone, there’s no rider on the bike – instead, you control it with two fingers.

You plant one finger on the saddle, and one on the handlebars, dragging left and right to steer. As you pick up speed and hurtle into the air on hitting a ramp, you perform stunts by flicking your fingers in various ways. Land safely and you get points.

Wonderfully tactile, and with superb track design, Touchgrind BMX 2 easily betters traditional BMX racing fare on iPhone. And although grabbing all the courses sets you back US$7.99/£7.99/AU$12.99, they’re worth the outlay.

Dig Dog features a dog that’s a big fan of digging. The pooch is after bones, but the snag is that this canine’s decided to search on fragile islands sitting atop deadly spikes, and peppered with roaming beasties.

You direct the hungry hound left and right, and tap a button to jump, at which point you can tap again to dig, tap fast to dig rapidly, or move horizontally to dash at speed.

Dig Dog’s claustrophobic nature and trap-laden levels create an experience that’s initially punishing. But put in the legwork and the game does open up. You’ll learn when to take risks, and how to obliterate multiple enemies in a series of bounds, to get extra coins you can spend on power-ups in a shop that infrequently appears.

Give this one time, then, and you’ll dig it.

Reed ^_^ is an entertainingly ridiculous high-speed platform game, featuring a hyperactive virtual kitten inside an old supercomputer. The computer’s on its last legs, and you need to find ‘cubes’ to save the world.

The tiny snag is that the inside of this machine is designed to kill. It’s littered with spikes and roaming monsters, and a single touch vaporizes Reed ^_^. Fortunately, due to our hero not being alive in any conventional sense, death is immediately followed by the chance to try again. And again. And again.

With such regular failure, this is the kind of game that could easily get trying, but Reed ^_^ gets the fun/frustration balance right. Levels are short, and you know when you end up dead yet again, your thumbs were ultimately to blame.

Meteorfall: Journey is a mobile-friendly adventuring game, but rather than your hero venturing forth into a grid-like take on a fantasy realm, everything here’s based around a deck of cards.

Decisions are made Tinder-style, with you swiping left or right. You might beat up a monster or save your strength for later, knowing in the back of your mind that growing more powerful only comes from battle victories. Or while on the road, you might face the choice between visiting a blacksmith for weapons upgrades or a temple to optimize the cards you hold.

This might sound complex, but it’s really not. Meteorfall: Journey is approachable and immediate, but with enough depth to keep you playing for many months due to its semi-random setups, multiple heroes and varied quests.

Dissembler is a match puzzler that seemingly has you methodically dismantle tiny geometric works of art. The mechanics will be familiar to anyone who’s played the likes of Bejeweled – flip two elements (flat colored tiles in this case) and try to make a match of three or more – only there’s no gravity in this game to fill blank spaces.

Instead, your matches vanish, and nothing else appears, which sometimes leaves single tiles isolated. At that point, you must undo moves and think again, figuring out the precise sequence needed to consign the entire artwork to oblivion.

It’s a deliciously captivating, tactile game, which also builds on its many dozens of hand-made puzzles with an intriguing endless mode, and extra daily free puzzles. In all, it’s flipping great.

Part Time UFO is the videogame equivalent of those claw crane games you find in arcades and want to smash because they keep dropping things. Only you won’t smash this one, because the claw extends from the bottom of an adorably cute UFO.

Said alien has crashed on Earth, and rather than humans spiriting it away to a top-secret location, they suggest it starts earning a living. So the little hovering critter ends up performing duties such as dropping goods in a van, repairing a broken art exhibit, and, erm, stacking cheerleaders.

The entire thing’s regularly frustrating yet spellbindingly charming. Just make sure you ditch the on-screen joystick for the thumbs-anywhere option, or you’ve no chance of success.

Alto’s Odyssey is a side-on endless sandboarding game. Alto zooms across windswept dunes, frequently hurling himself into the air to perform speed-boosting tricks that then enable him to leap across vast canyons.

In gameplay terms, it echoes Alto’s Adventure, and long-time players of that title might get a sense of deja vu. However, stick with Odyssey and you learn it’s more than just a reskin.

Complete achievements and new elements are slowly revealed: additional biomes to explore, and – more importantly – a rock-wall ride move that can have you reach greater heights than ever.

The main mission remains a curious combination of heart-poundingly exhilarating (when escaping a frenzied lemur, or completing a jump by a hair’s breadth) and relaxing; if you hanker after the latter, check out the Zen mode, which removes scores, coins and power-ups. At that point, it really is just you and the endless desert.

Reigns: Her Majesty is a kingdom management game smashed into Tinder. You must tend to the needs and desires of your subjects, ensuring the church, people, army and treasury are kept happy – but not powerful enough to instigate your untimely demise.

Actions happen by flicking cards left or right in response to requests and questions. Your approval rating with the aforementioned factions then changes – sometimes unpredictably. It’s a simple, fun system, but one with surprising depth.

This is partly down to a great script, but the balancing act is further complicated and augmented by challenges. When completed, these often unlock new cards and storylines. And should things go badly wrong, death is not the end – quests thread throughout the ages as you play on as the next in a seemingly endless line of queens.

Florence is really an interactive storybook, but there are game-like elements peppered throughout – and because it was created by the lead designer of Monument Valley, you know it’ll be full of heart.

It also features plenty of clever design elements. For example, you at one point create something as a child that later makes a reappearance in a box of mementos. After a crash, sliders are used to make the blurred vision of the protagonist coherent. And at one point you fashion speech balloons from puzzle pieces, which reduce in number as the people conversing with each other become more comfortable.

The downside is brevity – Florence is very short and lacks replay value. But it’s a heartwarming experience, and one that showcases the kind of innovation that occurs at the fringe of gaming.

PAKO 2 exists in a bizarre universe of constant, unending criminal shenanigans, and a police force whose sole response to getaway drivers is to hurl police cars at them with merry abandon – and then attempt to blow them away with a gunship when that approach fails.

This presents a tiny problem for you, given that you’re the getaway driver. Prodding left and right to direct your tiny car, you must zoom between pick-ups and drop-offs, gradually powering up your car as you do so, and trying to avoid taking a career-ending plummet into a ravine, or being atomized by psychotic law enforcement.

PAKO 2 is a shallow game, but also buckets of fun, and with several environments and a slew of vehicles to unlock, it should tempt you to unleash your inner criminal for many weeks to come.

Impossible Road is an endless survival game, starring a featureless sphere belting along a ribbon of road suspended in space. Gates are placed along the road at intervals, each of which bestows a single point when you blaze through it. As the road bucks and lurches, it’s all you can do to stop yourself plummeting into the abyss.

But Impossible Road is sneaky. It turns out that if you’re careful – or lucky – you can soar briefly into the air and return to the track, taking massive shortcuts that would perhaps be best referred to as ‘cheating’.

Amusingly, high scores are logged not only for the farthest gate reached, but also the most skipped. And although the App Store has freebie riffs on the Impossible Road theme, none have the class, style, polish and razor-sharp focus of this premium title – so stick to the original.

Layton’s Mystery Journey (non-US link) is a puzzle game masquerading as an adventure, and the latest entry in a series that’s highly regarded and much loved on the Nintendo DS. It features London-based aspiring detective Katrielle Layton, who explores landmarks and solves unlikely cases, all while trying to uncover a conspiracy.

The game switches between story, searching and puzzling at regular intervals. The puzzles are varied in nature, and even early on include some proper brain-teasers. The story bits could perhaps be more engaging, but at worst are pleasant and charming.

The series’ roots on the Nintendo DS are sometimes a rough edge – the split-screen nature of the interface and its occasional clunkiness can feel a bit off – but the rest of the game’s polish, and the many dozens of clever puzzles, ensure the latest Layton is good value for money.

AR Smash Tanks! is all about smashing tanks. Specifically, using yours to smash up your opponent’s.

Because this is an augmented reality game, you can project the rectangular arena onto anything from a table to a large garden – and then let battle commence. Whether using multiple devices or playing with pass-and-play, it’s great to be able to check out your next move from any angle.

Tanks are pinged around in slingshot fashion. If you’ve played Angry Birds, you’ll be right at home and, as with that title, the environments are destructible. That comes as a surprise first time round, when you knock a skyscraper on to your own tank. Later, you start trying for snooker-like trick shots, toppling towers, smashing up tanks, and escaping to safety.

In short, it’s tons of fun; an excellent example of the potential in AR gaming.

Food Pals is a platform game, featuring bipedal food – eggs, fruit and the odd burger – sprinting through hostile terrain full of electrified barriers, clockwork teeth, spikes and giant bugs. Your local supermarket, this is not.

Everything’s controlled by a single thumb. One prod of the screen sends your character into the air or ninja-jumps them off of a wall. Each level is hand-crafted, so the key is to learn every nook and cranny, then try your hand at the perfect run.

Reaching the end of Food Pals isn’t the most demanding of tasks, but there’s longevity for completists, with collectibles peppered throughout each level – often in hidden places. However you play, it’s a game that exudes fun and charm.

Canabalt popularized endless runners on the iPhone. Originally released in 2009, it strips back platform gaming to tapping the screen to make a little sprinting man leap over gaps rather than plummet to his doom.

You might wonder why such an ancient title is on this best-of list, but Canabalt is a classic that easily deserves a place. With a firm emphasis on speed, Canabalt’s breakneck pace makes it a pure adrenaline rush in a way that complex and slower rivals just can’t match.

The game hasn’t stood still for years, either. It’s optimized for modern iPhones and has eight variants on the basic theme. The aesthetics remain intriguing too – an ominous, urgent soundtrack accompanies a city’s destruction by massive machines, perhaps explaining why the leaping hero is so desperate to flee.

Far From Noise is as much an exercise in self-reflection as a game. It begins with a car balanced precariously on a cliff edge. With no means of escape, what remains is to make sense of it all – not easy when you start possibly hallucinating a conversation with a surprisingly philosophical deer.

Interaction comes by way of balloons, which you tap to confirm thoughts and actions. As you make decisions, the narrative branches, leading you to one of several endings. Oddly, we could have perhaps done with fewer choices, because many seemed almost inconsequential. Although perhaps that’s the point.

Despite the situation (car wobbling; imminent death), the pace is very restful and the experience is unique. We suspect Far From Noise will nonetheless prove divisive, but it’s great to see such artistic games on iPhone.

Sheep Goes Right is an auto-scrolling arcade game that features a sheep that goes right. And also up. But mostly right.

For reasons unknown, the heroic Sheepy has been challenged to pick his way through 100 levels of mayhem, packed with swirling maces and massive spiked balls. Hitting one is baa-d, sending you back to the start of the level, and wiping out one of your three gold stars. Fail too many times and the game assumes you’re rubbish and helpfully offers to let you skip the level, at which point you woolly feel like a failure.

The game looks crude, but proves compelling as you figure out which combination of rightward steps and upward jumps will get you to the end without being turned into a kebab.

Grid Autosport is a console-quality racer. That isn’t hyperbole; this is an accurate conversion of a game that has graced countless PCs and PlayStation 3s – all on your iPhone.

Naturally, not just any iPhone will do; you’ll need an iPhone SE or an iPhone 7 or newer, and at least 6GB(!) of storage space. But once the game’s installed, you can immerse yourself in by far the deepest racing experience mobile has to offer.

If you’re a simulation nut, turn off all driving aids, head into a full season and prepare to spend time spinning off into gravel traps. More cautious players can stick with quick races and rookie mode for a while, gradually learning car handling and tracks alike, and wondering why all mobile games can’t be made with such love.

Card Crawl is solitaire reimagined as a dungeon crawler – or perhaps the other way around. Regardless, it pits you against a grumpy ogre’s deck of 54 cards. During each round, he deals four cards, which may be a mix of weapons, potions, spells, and hideous enemies.

Your own four slots are for the adventurer, your two hands, and a backpack to stash items in for later. The adventurer’s health is diminished when fighting monsters (unless armed), but you can counter by getting stabby with swords (or hiding behind a shield, like a coward).

Games are brief – only a few minutes long – but Card Crawl manages to balance randomness and strategy. Over time, you can unlock new abilities and figure out strategies to boost your high scores. It’s a polished, entertaining and clever take on card games that’s ideal for iPhone.

Kick Ass Commandos is a top-down twin-stick shooter that begins in conventional fashion. But as you blast through the jungle, you quickly happen upon a prisoner. He then tags along, also shooting all and sundry. Save more and you amass a tiny army, which blows everyone in their path into chunks of meat.

This is a violent game, and also sometimes a stupid one. Despite the retro stylings, it can be a bit gross and occasionally tone-deaf; in one early scene, you mow down largely defenseless enemies in a shower block.

Fortunately, Kick Ass Commandos isn’t without brains. It demands you think tactically and safeguard health – particularly of characters who must survive to the level’s end. If you can deal with the odd icky moment, there’s hours of breezy action-packed high-octane retro shooting here, with an interesting twist.

jodeo asks how a 2D creature might interact with 3D objects. Each level is introduced as an ‘experiment’, and that feels entirely appropriate as a little jelly critter is dropped onto a vector shape that morphs and spins. Your aim: to paint every edge.

You start by tackling basic polygons, but the experiments become quite diverse, introducing a range of conditions. These include invisible shapes, objects that pelt the critter, and gravity unhelpfully being turned off.

It can all be a bit finicky and random – irritating, even, when you keep missing the last bit of painting, fall off the shape, and are sent back to the previous checkpoint. But there’s a lot to like in this unusual miniature adventure – not least the permanently surprised and distressed expression of the protagonist.

Million Onion Hotel is crazy. But if you want specifics, it mixes Whac-A-Mole-style screen prodding and a highly strategic match mechanic. The aim is to make solid lines by tapping onions that appear randomly on a five-by-five grid.

The simultaneous demand for speed and strategy clashes gloriously. Tap too slowly and you run out of time. Too fast and you secure only single lines, rather than the doubles you need to ramp up your score and bonuses.

And that’s before you take into account deranged boss battles, and an underlying story that encompasses onion soup, the mafia, quite a lot of hanky panky and an interdimensional wormhole.

Just know Million Onion Hotel is a relentless assault on the senses that’ll leave you exhausted – but eager to dive in for another go, in part to try and make sense of what’s happening.

Super Samurai Rampage seemingly depicts the stabby breakdown of a legendary warrior, “provoked into a relentless rampage”. Quite how he was provoked isn’t made clear, but there’s no shortage of bloodshed in this lightning-fast slash ’em up.

Swipe the screen and your samurai moves and attacks: up and he’ll leap; across, and he’ll slash his sword – not great for anyone in the vicinity at the time. The key is to chain kills to increase a multiplier that culminates in a brief period of murdery invulnerability.

One hit and you’re dead, and although you’re given fair warning when an enemy’s going to attack, keeping track of everything on the busy screen is tricky. Still, get into the zone, and Super Samurai Rampage is a rewarding way to unleash your frustrations on hordes of little computer guys who should really learn to run away.

Dark Echo is a weirdly creepy horror game that manages to make squiggly lines scary. As you stomp about in the dark, sound waves are represented as abstract lines that rebound off of objects you can’t otherwise see.

The soundtrack is all-important. Don a pair of headphones, and you can hear your footsteps, and the floor squelching beneath you. Flies buzz as you pass… well, it doesn’t bear thinking about. And then you hear things growling in the shadows, before one decides it fancies a snack.

Dark Echo will helpfully suggest RUN! as you bolt for an exit – or end up devoured in a dead end. It’s a great example of how the imagination can give you bigger scares than any rendered CGI beast on your iPhone’s screen. That and you’ll never look at red zig-zags in quite the same way again.

Max & the Magic Marker - Remastered is a spruced-up take on a much-loved platform puzzler that first appeared on iPhone way back in 2010. Despite its age, the game still feels fresh today, offering a breezily fun and entertaining mix of leaping about platforms, collecting objects, and being a massive cheat by way of the titular marker.

Actually, that’s not entirely fair on Max – it’s not like he can scribble a cheat code and skip to the end. But he can fashion shields to protect himself, slabs to drop on bounding monsters, and ad-hoc stairs to clamber up.

Neatly, you can pause the game while working on your temporary artistic masterpieces – and that’s just as well, because to get three stars at level’s end, you must beat a timer, along with collecting all the floating bling.

The Talos Principle brings a much-admired open-world PC puzzler to your iPhone. It begins with you awakening in a garden, fresh from a deep sleep. A brief look at your hands reveals you’re a robot – which may come as a bit of a surprise – before a booming voiceover reveals you’re in some kind of facility for testing your abilities.

Over the next 20 or so hours, you work your way through dozens of immersive puzzles, battling floating drones, and manipulating laser beams, all the while gradually finding the answers to your purpose, and what it means to be human.

There are niggles here and there with the controls, which don’t always click on the touchscreen. But the game otherwise gels nicely with iPhone, looking great on the smaller screen (compared to noticeably rough edges on iPad), and enabling you to tackle an epic quest in bite-sized chunks.

Mikey Hooks is a speed-run platform game that plays out a bit like a stripped-back Super Mario Bros. in fast-forward – if Mario happened to be armed with a grappling hook he could used to swing past enemies.

Each level is full of spikes, pits, monsters, and platforms, along with piles of gold coins to collect. You run left and right, and use virtual buttons to jump and slide through narrow gaps. The twist is the aforementioned ‘hooks’ bit, and it’s exhilarating to swing through the air, scooping up coins, missing a spike-headed roaming enemy by a whisker.

There are 36 levels and a bespoke ‘race’ mode to tackle; and to keep you coming back for more, you can race against ‘ghosts’ of your fastest times.

Beat Sneak Bandit is one of the most audacious genre mash-ups you’re likely to find on an iPhone. Despite each level taking place on a single screen, the game manages to combine platforming, pathfinding, rhythm action, turn-based puzzling, and stealth.

The premise is that the nefarious Duke Clockface has stolen all the clocks, throwing the world into disarray. Benevolent pilferer Beat Sneak Bandit vows to get them back.

Amazingly, everything is controlled using a single thumb, which propels Bandit onwards. He must move on the beat, and you make use of walls to turn around, ensuring the rhythmic hero’s not spotted by a guard or security camera.

The game’s full of character, along with devious level design that requires seriously twisty routes and deft timing to crack. Great stuff.

Super Crossfighter is a modern take on classic blasting action that harks back to Space Invaders. But instead of lobbing the occasional pot-shot at lumbering green beasts, Super Crossfighter is a neon-infused affair, with bullet hell aplenty, and a thumping techno soundtrack.

There’s also the ‘crossfighter’ bit, which alludes to the way you can leap back and forth between the top and bottom of the screen. This can be handy for grabbing power-ups, un-sportingly shooting an enemy in the back, or simply escaping certain death when facing a hail of projectiles.

The touchscreen controls work nicely, and there are over 150 waves and an upgrade system to sink your teeth into. The game’s perhaps a touch ‘relaxed’ in feel at times, rather than super-intense, but otherwise this is an excellent iPhone shoot ’em up.

Pigeon Wings is a deranged side-on racing game, featuring wide-eyed pigeons belting along in tiny planes. The backstory involves a rich nutcase aiming to destroy a city by way of a heavily-armed gigantic flying fortress; the birds race it out to decide who gets the chance to stop him.

The game switches things up between strings of races and occasional battles. In the former, you slipstream rivals, bob and weave through the air by tilting your iPhone, and power up your craft through trophies won in-game.

The shooty bits are brief and intense – a nice change of pace, despite the fact you’ll likely be blown to bits several times before claiming victory.

Should you hanker after something marrying the intensity of ALONE… and the frantic racing of Mario Kart, Pigeon Wings is a must – in fact, you’d be bird-brained to miss it.

Wonderputt is what might happen if Monty Python-era Terry Gilliam was hurled through time and charged with designing an iPhone minigolf game. The single 18-hole course is an exercise in surrealism and imagination from the moment tiny meteors smash into the ground to fashion the first hole.

Things then get weirder, with courses eaten into grass fields by cows (who are then whisked away by UFOs), and an impossible waterfall hole that looks like it’s escaped from a colored Escher print.

Fortunately, the game is more than a visual delight – it plays well too. Notably, a ‘smart zoom’ feature ensures you don’t need a magnifying glass to see what’s going on in the visually arresting miniature landscapes.

The only snag is there’s just that one course – but even if you only play it once, this game’s worth the outlay. And for perfectionists, there’s replay value in spotting visual details you may have missed, and getting all of the achievements.

Zen Bound 2 is a puzzle game of sorts, which has you wrap a length of rope around objects, in order to paint them.

That all probably sounds horribly dull, but it turns out Zen Bound 2 is an engaging, unique, and oddly tactile experience.

The blocky objects on the screen effortlessly shift and turn with a flick or drag, gradually acquiring color as the rope encases them, or blows up paint bombs. The rope obeys gravity, too, enabling you to twist your iPhone as you manipulate the challenge in front of you.

The meditative and somewhat noodly feel is further enhanced by a lengthy soundtrack, and the remastered take released in 2017 ensures the game looks pin-sharp on every size of iPhone. So although Zen Bound 2 might be a game that’s been knocking around for years, it manages to remain distinctive and thoroughly modern all the same.

Linelight is a serene, smartly designed puzzle game set in a universe of lines. It vaguely resembles a stripped-back take on Tron, or perhaps a circuit board diagram as reimagined by a graphic designer with taste. Your task is to help a white line find its way through dozens of pathfinding puzzles.

Movements are controlled by a virtual stick, which is one of the most effortless and elegant in any iOS game. The puzzles are similarly graceful and ingenious, gradually introducing new mechanics.

These include enemies that amusingly bob along to the chill-out soundtrack’s beat. Said foes are colored lines that kill with a single touch; but when carefully directed, they trigger switches to help you across otherwise impassable divides.

It might not be the longest experience on iOS, but Linelight deserves a place on your iPhone, due to being an engaging, beautiful experience, and a perfect example of how minimal design can have a soul.

Sidewords is a word game with a new twist. Each single-screen puzzle has a grid with words along the top and left-hand edges. You use letters from those (at least one from each edge) to create each new word.

On selecting a letter, a line shoots into the grid; where lines from the left and top edges collide you get solid blocks, which display the words you create. Blocks can at any time be tapped to remove them.

The aim is to fill the grid with these blocks – simple early on, but not when you’re staring at a seven-by-seven grid annoyingly full of gaps. At that point, the devious nature of Sidewords becomes apparent.

But this game’s nonetheless also forgiving and relaxing – there’s no time limit, and the vast majority of puzzles are unlocked from the start. There’s replay value here, too, despite the static set-ups, since for each puzzle you can save a solution, clear the grid, and try to solve it in a different way.

Mini Motor Racing is a top-down racer featuring tiny vehicles that blast about twisty-turny circuits. They auto-accelerate, so you’re left with steering, and periodic use of a turbo that rockets your vehicle forward a few car lengths, leaving you unable to steer in the meantime.

From the off, Mini Motor Racing is frenetic. The tracks are claustrophobic, and the cars respond (and even sound like) remote controlled vehicles – albeit ones seemingly driven by psychopaths. Once you’re a few dozen races into the game, it seems your opponents are keener on smashing into you than winning.

That grumble leaves Mini Motor Racing languishing in the slipstream of the best top-down effort on iPhone, Reckless Racing 3, but it still manages a podium finish. And that’s because it’s packed full of content, has a great multiplayer mode, and in its ‘remastered’ 2017 form looks stunning.

Idioctopus features brainless lovesick octopus couples desperate to be reunited. One lurks somewhere in a single-screen maze of walls and hazards. It’s your job to direct their other half in a manner that doesn’t turn them into a seafood snack for a lurking predator.

Your eight-legged lover ambles along automatically, and always turns right when possible. You can therefore to some extent predict their movements, and redirect them using draggable arrow tiles. With its bright colors and noodly guitar soundtrack, it’s all quite relaxing and sedate.

And then you notice the achievements, and the fast-forward button. These are an extra challenge for those who want higher-speed puzzling, having you remember your solution and play it out at speed in the fewest possible moves. It’s a clever and entirely optional twist, transforming Idioctopus into two games in one.

Yankai’s Peak is a minimal puzzle game based around pyramids that trundle about platforms comprising triangular grids.

The aim is to use your blue pyramid to nudge and spin colored pyramids to pre-defined resting places. It sounds simple. It really isn’t. Yankai’s Peak is like the crate-pushing classic Sokoban reimagined by a triangle fetishist who also happens to be a sadist.

Right from the start, you’ll need to rewire your brain to understand how wildly different movement is when spinning pinned pyramids about an axis, or using one to shove several others ahead.

Even early levels can baffle, and the later ones require serious planning and brainpower, even when taking into account the game’s unlimited undos button – which you’ll use often.

But this one’s worth sticking with. It’s elegant and clever, and you’ll feel like a genius when cracking a puzzle you’ve been stuck on for days.

VVVVVV is a love letter to classic games. Its visuals and soundtrack recall the Commodore 64, and its platforming action (each single-screen challenge also being amusingly named) echoes much-beloved 1980s fare, like Manic Miner and Bounty Bob.

However, VVVVVV’s speed and fluidity are thoroughly modern, as you zoom about a huge space station, trying to locate lost crew members. And unlike comparatively stodgy platformers of old, VVVVVV doesn’t have you leap over hazards – you instead invert gravity to flip between ceiling and floor in an excitingly disorienting manner.

The spike and alien-infested twisty corridors awaiting you require serious dexterity to conquer. Fortunately, death is not the end, because you get unlimited lives, and there are frequent checkpoints.

And in another nice nod to the old-school, even the 4:3 viewing area works in the game’s favor – you can control your character by swiping and tapping in black bars at the edges of your display, rather than covering up his on-screen exploits with your thumbs.

Coming across like an auto-scrolling stripped-back Lemmings, Micro Miners features a team of excitable, tiny miners that toddle along tunnels you dig with a finger. On encountering a deposit of gold, silver or coal, they’ll gleefully hack it to bits with their tiny pickaxes.

At first, this all feels noodly and simple, but Micro Miners soon bares its teeth. You must commit each level’s layout to memory, in order to navigate underground hazards, often splitting and rejoining your little auto-running-team.

Before long, you’re carving complex pathways through the dirt, so you can grab large deposits and huge gems, circumvent lava, and avoid ferocious giant worms that eat anyone daft enough to stray into their path. The result is a fun, sometimes chaotic, and unique iPhone gaming experience.

It might have a chill-out jazzy soundtrack and cute visuals, but Fish Fly Fever is a tough arcade game determined to make your thumbs – and by extension all your other parts – feel like gaming buffoons.

In its tiny single-screen universe, a little fish fly scoots about, emitting a trail. When its bubbles hit another creature, that creature is transformed into a gem. Grab those and your score goes up, periodically sending you into a ‘fever’ mode (bigger trail), or pitting you against a boss (which will almost certainly kill you).

It’s really tough. Despite the simplicity of what’s required and the controls (rotate left or right), you’ll initially die before you grab half a dozen gems. But persevere and, like the best arcade games of old, you’ll slowly master Fish Fly Fever. Over time, it may become a bit repetitive, but again like classic arcade titles, this one’s perfect for the occasional blast.

Games creator Zach Gage is seemingly on a mission to reimagine all those puzzle games that used to languish only in newspaper pages. With Typeshift, you get something that approximates anagrams smashed into a crossword.

But unlike on paper, the word grid here isn’t static – you drag columns to try and form words in the central row. When every letter has been used, the puzzle is complete.

For free, you get a smallish selection of puzzles, but many more are available via various IAP. If you’re at all into word games, you’re likely to devour them all.

The best of them roll another aspect of crosswords into the mix – cryptic clues. In these brain-benders, you can’t almost brute-force solutions by dragging the columns about and finding weird words – you must figure out what a clue means, eke it from the grid, and after a few of those probably go for a little lie down.

A friendly whale beckons a shipwrecked pirate to leap on its back. So begins their joint adventures, in Run-A-Whale, which is perhaps the iPhone’s most gorgeous endless runner.

Really, endless swimmer is more like it, seeing as you’re a massive aquatic mammal speeding through the sea. You hold the screen to dive and release your finger to surface and leap, grabbing coins in a manner akin to Jetpack Joyride in reverse.

But Jetpack Joyride was never this eye-dazzling, and Run-A-Whale is packed with wonderful moments, from soaring through the air after being blasted from a cannon, to zooming along as a volcano erupts in the distance.

Occasionally, the game irks with its demands – obstacles in succession you have little chance of avoiding, or unskippable tricky missions – but for the most part this is a gem that’s not to be missed.

This neon-infused one-thumb single-screen shooter has you fire orbs into the void. When an orb stops, it expands into available space and is given a number. Hit it with subsequent orbs and the number decreases until the orb explodes, sometimes starting a chain reaction that obliterates its neighbors.

Your main concern is an orb returning over the line of death above your cannon. Orbital  therefore rapidly becomes a tense battle of nerves, accurate aiming, and space management.

Whichever of its three varied modes you try, it’s a gripping game, and there’s also a same-device two-player mode that pits you against a friend.

Part game, part exploratory toy, Vignettes is all about the joy of discovery. It’s based around colorful objects suspended in the air, which you manipulate by way of a finger. Spin them through a flat edge and they instantly become something new.

This slice of magic initially mesmerizes, but the trick doesn’t wow for long. Fortunately, Vignettes is more than an interactive animation. Pathways between objects are more complex than they first appear, and hide all kinds of secrets.

During more contemplative moments, there’s plenty to discover, too – many objects respond to taps and swipes. Also, unlike ostensibly similar fare such as Shadowmatic, Vignettes seems ideally suited to the smaller screen of an iPhone rather than demanding the larger play surface of an iPad.

To differentiate itself from a slew of Boggle and Scrabble clones, word game AlphaPit tries something a bit different. Although the aim is, as ever, to clear a grid of letters, there’s more to AlphaPit than simply dragging lines through the grid, making words to remove tiles.

There are bonuses, which you can use strategically, to shuffle letters, or blow to pieces a tile that’s particularly annoying you. Spare letters also lurk, which can be swapped in at an opportune moment.

Perhaps most importantly, though, AlphaPit isn’t random – instead, you get 200 predefined levels to work through. This proves rewarding, transforming the experience into a set of puzzles you know you can beat – if only you can figure out the solutions.

In Edge, you control a cube that finds itself within a minimal geometric clockwork universe. As the cube trundles about, the blocky world frequently shifts and changes, often thwarting your attempts to find the goal. When you do finish a level, Edge dispassionately awards you a rating, which will probably be rubbish.

If you’ve got steely resolve, you’ll try again to see how rapidly you can speed through each isometric wonderland. If not, you’ll still have a great time exploring the dozens of varied worlds, regularly being surprised at how much imagination can be packed into landscapes comprising only cubes.

And if in either case, you exhaust Edge’s levels, you can start all over again in equally impressive sequel Edge Extended.

The thinking behind Stagehand is to flip platform games on their head. Instead of controlling the character, you control the stage. So as your little chap automatically ambles along, you drag chunks of landscape to give him a clear path, ensuring he doesn’t smack into a wall.

From a visual standpoint, Stagehand feels like the sort of thing Nintendo would be happy to call its own. There’s also a superb soundtrack that tinkles away as you grapple with the weird means of staving off the hero’s untimely demise.

If there’s any criticism, the controls can be a tad awkward, and Stagehand could have been improved with finite designed stages, rather than solely being an algorithmically generated endless runner.

Still, it’s a clever twist on the genre and there’s plenty of polish and entertainment here for anyone wanting to make the Earth move – by dragging it with a finger.

If you’re old or well-versed in classic games, Boulder Dash might be a favorite. The fast-paced 1980s arcade game has its protagonist zoom about 2D caves, digging through dirt, grabbing diamonds, manipulating rocks, smashing up enemies, and heading for an exit. Captain Cowboy uses the same mechanics, but reimagines everything as a giant puzzle adventure.

Instead of short, timed levels, Captain Cowboy offers a single massive maze in space. Although there are still moments of tension and excitement, this title’s more about the joy of exploration and discovery – finding your way blocked and figuring out a new route.

There are lovely touches throughout, such as the CRT-style visual filter and the soundtrack dulling when floating through space or underwater. But mostly, Captain Cowboy is a must-have for its mobile-friendly mix of adventuring and arcade action.

Although it resembles a dungeon crawler running on a Game Boy, Warlock’s Tower is a cunning turn-based puzzler that plays out across 100 meticulously designed rooms.

The backstory is the titular warlock is in a mood, thinks everyone’s shunned him, and has decided to obliterate the world. Enter Tim the mailman, carrying a letter saying everyone loves the warlock.

But the tower is filled with magic, robbing you of life for every step you take. You must chart a (frequently convoluted) path to each exit, grabbing life-replenishing gems along the way, along with outwitting zombies and flying eyes.

The retro aesthetic can be trying, as can the lack of an undo (mess up and you must start a stage from scratch); however, the puzzles are cleverly designed, often sending you down dead ends and making you properly think before you figure out a solution, leaving you suitably satisfied when you finally do.

Although Glitchskier is a fairly typical vertically scrolling shooter, it lives in its own strange little world that provides a unique sense of character.

The conceit is Glitchskier is all happening inside an ancient PC. It begins with a clacking keyboard, PC hum, and icons to click. The shooty bit involves your little ship blasting chunks of code and squadrons of letter Vs, all intent on your destruction.

A clever power-up system that restricts you to only holding the most recent two forces you to strategize. Power-ups also work as shields: get hit and you lose one, but the game world temporarily slows, Matrix-style, so you can get out of a scrape.

It’s all very smart – but over far too rapidly, when you best the last of four bosses. But then you can enter an endless world, which is far more ferocious.

Precision platformer Bean Dreams is more bouncing bean than jumping bean. The edible hero, decked out in a natty sombrero, bounds about colorful environments, aiming to grab fruit, free a hidden axolotl (a Mexican salamander, if you didn’t know), and reach the exit without getting impaled. Your part in all this: guiding the bean by prodding left or right on your iPhone.

Bean Dreams offers plenty of replay value – you can spend time learning each small level, but only on committing to memory every nook and cranny can you aim for the tiny number of bounces that unlocks a gold medal award.

And to succeed in grabbing the axolotl or getting all the fruit, you’ll often need to play again, shaking up your approach.

With plenty of variation in its stages, alternate beans with special powers, and devious puzzles lurking within, Bean Dreams is ample proof platform games can work on iPhone – when specifically designed for the system.

Mario on iPhone could have been a disaster – a lazy port of a DS title with virtual buttons. But that’s not very Nintendo. Instead, Super Mario Run rethinks Mario for touchscreen and mobile, in a manner that initially seems reductive – even regressive – but that in time reveals a clever game with surprising depth.

In essence, it’s an auto-runner, where you tap to jump. But this isn’t Canabalt in Mario’s dungarees. Clever level design forces you to master – and subvert – perceived limitations should you want to scoop up all of the coins.

This transforms each of Super Mario Run’s admittedly smallish number of stages into a compelling mix of puzzling, precision timing, and gradual mastery of the game’s tiny worlds.

Undoubtedly, traditionalists will grumble, cheapskates will baulk at the price, and gamers on the go will rightly gripe at Nintendo’s infuriating decision to require an internet connection to play.

But we nonetheless reckon Super Mario Run is a worthy addition to the Mario canon – and a polished, playable title for iPhone.

A criticism leveled at touchscreens since day one is how they robbed gamers of ‘proper’ controls. Touchgrind Skate 2 highlights how ridiculous such a statement can be, because rather than having you perform tricks on a little on-screen board by manipulating a gamepad, two of your fingers become legs that dictate how the board behaves.

This is not an pick-up-and-play game, though. You really need to work through the tutorials and fully master them, before you try your hand at competition and jam sessions where you’re punished for mistakes, but greatly rewarded for strings of amazing moves.

In a sense, it feels weirdly like the real thing in miniature – which is more than you can say when your hands are fashioned into claws, gripping a traditional console controller.

In our opinion, Threes! is the iPhone’s Tetris – that absurdly addictive puzzler that’s perfect for the hardware, with simple rules but enough depth that you can conceivably improve your skills over a period of years.

It takes place on a four-by-four grid, within which you manipulate tiled cards. The aim is to merge matching pairs, which increases their face value and leaves an extra space for subsequent cards to appear.

Subtleties in the rules keep Threes! head and shoulders above countless App Store pretenders, and it’s also infused with personality. Even when you’re in a fix, it’s hard to be mad at a game where all the cards on the board have cute faces and natter away to each other.

The original Eliss was an early App Store darling, defining the iPhone in terms of multi-touch gaming. Eliss Infinity takes the basic premise of the original and runs with it, cementing itself as a modern-day classic.

The basic aim is to control (move; tear apart; combine) colored planets in order to fit into them into wormholes that sporadically appear. Should planets of different colors collide, your energy reserves are depleted – only replenished by mopping up space dust that appears after successful planet dumpage.

Each of Odyssey mode’s 25 levels demands unique tactics to conquer. Best them all and there’s the manic Infinity mode, ready to tie your fingers in knots.

Although primarily a match-three game, Swap Sword adds a massive dollop of dungeon-roaming and turn-based strategy to the equation. The result is a fresh game that marries tension, planning and risk to great effect, adding energy and fizz to an otherwise tired genre.

The mechanics are similar to the likes of Bejeweled (swap two items, aiming to construct a row of three or more); but you must also keep the hero safe from roaming monsters, and collect enough keys to open an exit to the next stage.

At first, this is relatively simple, but later stages find you fending off insane numbers of foes, balancing power-ups, and figuring that colored gems have never had it this tough.

If you’re a massive basketball fan whose nose will be put out of joint when rosters aren’t entirely accurate, or the game you’re playing is a bit weird, skip this game description and head on to our next entry.

Otherwise, try NBA JAM.

This game’s an updated take on a mid-1990s arcade game, which features weird photorealistic characters playing two-on-two matches. Sportsmanlike behavior’s left in the dressing room, as they muscle each other off the ball, and a big-head version of the visuals is deeply unsettling yet oddly hypnotic.

The controls are a bit of a virtual-joystick-and-buttons nightmare at first, but simple enough to grasp without sliding your fingers all over the place. And before you know it, you’ll be BOOM SHAKALAKAing it with the best of them. (Or hiding from the freaky oversized heads.)

Cartoonish graphics. Simple controls. An emphasis on catching ramps, much like in Tiny Wings. You might look at Pumped BMX 3 and think: Pah! Easy! Casual gaming! At which point, the game hurls you rudely over the handlebars, leaving you a crumpled, tearful mess, with grazed knees and broken pride.

Pumped BMX 3, it turns out, is a deviously tricky but deliciously compulsive trials game, keen to punish any error, and yet reward those who take the time to master controls and courses alike.

Your best bet is to carefully learn every nook and cranny of each course. Only when you can easily make it to the end unscathed should you start getting clever with the odd stunt, before finally winning the shiniest of medals with the kind of routine that would make BMX aficionados the world over break out into a cold sweat.

Card games have come a long way since the days when you completed a round of solitaire on a PC and were rewarded with said cards bouncing around the screen a bit. In Solitairica, you’re instead immersed in a fantasy world, where, for some reason, all battles take place by way of card decks. And your reward here is to not get horribly killed by some monster or other.

The solitaire itself is ruthlessly simplified into a game of higher or lower, with you hoping for runs of cards in order to batter down your enemy’s defenses. Meanwhile, they’re lobbing all kinds of attacks at you, from pointy sticks to making cards grow beards that have to be hacked away.

Cards also have energies, which you can collect to enable hurling of spells at your opponent; these can be upgraded during campaigns via the in-game shop.

This all sounds terribly complicated, we’re sure, but really this is a gentle, amusing, entertaining card game with a fantasy twist. And cards with beards.

We’re very much in classic shooter territory with The Bug Butcher, which has your dinky soldier blasting away at all manner of squelchy foes. It’s a bit Space Invaders (death from above!), a little Pang or Asteroids (monsters inconveniently splitting apart when shot), and a touch Defender (with lurking idiots getting captured, and you having to rescue them).

The game’s controls perhaps betray its origins on platforms that don’t favor touchscreens, but they just about work on an iPhone, enabling you to dart left and right, blast enemies, and reach for a bonus weapon as necessary. (Avoid playing on iPad, however, unless you’ve got incredibly flexible thumbs.)

And although the gameplay might feel a little old-school, everything’s dressed up in smart, modern cartoon visuals, paired with some sassy scripting, as the hero berates the scientists who got everyone into this mess.

Based on the hit TV show, Mr. Robot (or Mr. Robot:1.51exfiltrati0n.ipa, to give it its full name), immerses you in a world of hacking as you accidentally become entwined with a shady group planning a mysterious world-changing event.

It begins with a smartphone you find and quickly pocket, shortly before it's hacked by its actual owner, the furious Darlene, who then press-gangs you into service. The game plays out by way of a messaging app, your replies selected from canned responses to progress you through the narrative.

This simple structure is similar to the Lifeline games, and there's a distinct feeling of being shoved along a particular story regardless of what you choose to say. However, it's exciting bouncing between different message threads, and smart writing throughout infuses the game with palpable tension.

The core of Riptide GP: Renegade feels like it's been wrenched wholesale from the unhinged water-based faction of 1990s arcade racers. Renegade, for the most part, matches their energy and spirit, as you barrel along splashy tracks atop a souped-up futuristic jet ski, performing death-defying stunts to accrue boost that catapults you along at even more breakneck speeds.

The game's packed full of content, from single races to a challenging career mode, and the premium price means you need skill rather than cash to succeed.

There are times you wish the game would let go a little – the colors are drab and it at times takes itself too seriously - but when it fully unleashes as you blaze through factories or get hurled into the air by the wake from a rocket launch, Renegade is glorious.

Madcap racer Drift 'n' Drive somehow appears to have arrived from a 1980s home computer and yet feels perfect for mobile play. It's an old-school overhead racer that pits you against a grid of crazed opponents, all fighting to get to the finish line first.

The game only scrolls vertically, and the controls are simple: steer by tapping near a screen edge or prod the centre for a temporary boost of extra speed. Tracks snake left and right within the screen's narrow confines, but sometimes do so abruptly, causing plenty of opportunity for massive pile-ups.

Manage to not crawl in last and you move up the grid next time round. Place better and you start getting cash to upgrade your car. Before long, you're laughing like an idiot while barreling along in a race of two-dozen tiny cars buzzing around the track like flies, boosting into walls, and occasionally wondering why modern racers are rarely this much giddy fun.

Slingshotting cartoon characters across your iPhone’s screen is a popular gaming pursuit. But if you’ve become bored rigid of catapulting miffed avians at kleptomaniac hogs (and, let’s face it, who hasn’t?), try Frutorious HD for something that’s somewhat familiar, but with far more spark and heart.

The story is that an evil skull’s turned all the protagonist’s friends into fruits, and so he must bound up vertically scrolling levels, making use of handy levitating platforms and cannons to collect fruit and avoid various nasties ambling about.

It’s a jolly, sweet-natured game with superb hand-made visuals that add plenty of character, and a slightly unhinged edge always lurking just beneath the surface.

Gamebook-style text adventures have had something of a renaissance on mobile, and the adaptations of Steve Jackson's Sorcery! series are among the very best. The fourth entry, suitably titled Sorcery! 4, again immerses you in a world of fantasy, with you attempting to ascend a mountain, infiltrate a fortress, and recover the Crown of Kings.

If you’ve played previous games in the series, you’ll find a familiar set-up akin to a single-player board game. You drag your character about, respond to scenarios, bash up monsters, and can (thankfully) flip back to save points should you mess up and get horribly killed.

But even for total newcomers, there’s a full standalone adventure here – one that perfectly marries and balances a book, interactive game, and touchscreen experience. (Note that should you fancy trying the rest of the series first, it’s available as a bargain-priced three-pack.)
 

Redbird, Greenbird and Bluebird aren't birds in the conventional sense. They're 'snakebirds' - grumpy worm-like feathered critters with a penchant for fruit. The tiny snag is they happen to live on tiny islands, and getting to the fruit (and then to the exits that propel them to the next fruity collection point) isn't exactly simple.

In fact, it's pretty clear the creators of Snakebird have tried their best to drive you to the brink of insanity with this game. Even the earliest levels are hard going, with you twisting and turning your grumpy snakebird, trying to figure out how to wind it around a floating rock, grab an apple, and not end up tumbling into the sea.

Eventually, you're faced with multiple snakebirds per level, and increasingly deviously designed puzzles involving movable objects, teleporters, and snakebird-impaling spikes. All the way through, Snakebird sits on the edge of sadism, but you'll feel like a genius when you crack one of its puzzles, only to realize there are dozens more waiting for your subsequent feeble efforts.

We should hate the game, but Snakebird is superb – a properly brain-mashing puzzler that drives you to despair, but keeps you coming back for more.

Mimpi is a little dog with a big imagination, and in Mimpi Dreams he becomes a canine superhero as he snoozes. Within various dreamtime worlds, Mimpi fends off dragons, leaps atop projectiles blasted between pirate ships, and deals with the dastardly goings on in an evil pollution-spewing factory.

This all plays out as a straightforward platform puzzler. The cheery pup pootles along and you prod and swipe at various contraptions to make them do things so Mimpi can continue. Most of the puzzles are gentle in nature, but hints are generously peppered about and give you an idea of how to proceed by way of comic-like speech balloons.

Much of the joy in Mimpi's Dreams, though, is immersing yourself in its sheer inventiveness. Only a few times does it slip, with the odd tedious maze to grind through; mostly, the game is a breezy, grin-inducing, vibrant romp through a charming cartoon world.

Warbits may look colorful and cute from the surface, but don't be fooled - this strategy game means serious business. Missions require you to control your tanks, infantry, and other units and make the right moves to ensure you have the advantage over your enemies.

You need to think carefully where to position your troops, as scenarios get more challenging as you play. It's a game that keeps on giving too, as its smooth multiplayer mode means you have reason to keep playing after your campaign is done.

Fast and colorful, Chameleon Run is an autorunner that is sure to sharpen your reflexes. You'll need to think fast and tap the screen to swap colors and match that of the platform you're about to jump on or else you're dead.

Increasingly difficult levels further challenge you to pick up various collectibles and complete them with certain restrictions. Collect them all and you'll unlock even more hidden trials - and we're really digging the impressive visuals on offer with this one.

Combine cats and explosion and you have yourself a card game that's quite the winner. Based on the physical card game, Exploding Kittens is a local multiplayer title that puts a feline twist on Russian Roulette. This means you don't want to be the player who draws the kitten or else you're done. Draw cards that help you avoid or move any possible explosions and figure out strategies to make sure you don't blow yourself up.

We've been after a decent futuristic racer on the iPhone for some time, but none of them really felt right. AG Drive bucks the trend, echoing Wipeout and F-Zero: breakneck speed is married with pitch-perfect tilt controls and suitably shiny graphics. Also, there's absolutely no IAP, so the only way you're going to win is with mastery and skill.

Single-screen platformer Drop Wizard is infused with the soul of classics such as Snow Bros. and Bubble Bobble, but it's also part auto-runner. You can only run left or right, and your wizard blasts magic on landing. Strategy, therefore, involves careful timing, to avoid and zap foes, and then kick them into a tumbling combo that will bounce about in a pleasingly destructive manner before turning into fruit. Because that's what vanquished platform-game enemies all did in the 1980s.

Square Enix would have been on a hiding to nothing converting its free-roaming 3D game to touchscreens, and so it's great to see the company do something entirely different with Hitman GO. Although still echoing the original series, this touchscreen title is presented as a board game of sorts, with turn-based actions against clockwork opposition. You must figure out your way to the prize, without getting knocked off (the board). It's an oddly adorable take on assassination, and one of the best iOS puzzlers.

Time was racing games were all about ludicrous speed, gorgeous graphics, and the sheer rush of weaving through a sea of cars to the finish line. Horizon Chase briefly reverses back to such halcyon days, grabs the best bits from the likes of Lotus and Top Gear, before zooming back to the present as a thoroughly modern arcade racer.

It looks gorgeous, with some stunning weather effects, and an odd but pleasing low-poly roadside-object style; it sounds great with veteran games musician Barry Leitch on soundtrack duties; but most importantly, it handles perfectly, and is a joy until the very last track.

Following in the footsteps of Hitman GO, which astonishingly managed to transform that series into an adorable board game, Lara Croft GO reworks the adventures of the world's most famous tomb raider. It's another turn-based affair, with lashings of atmosphere, finding Lara carefully working her way past traps crafted by an ancient civilisation with a penchant for blocky design and elaborate moving parts.

There are also lots of snakes and deadly lizards about, which she's quite keen on shooting in the head. The five chapters are quite brief, but savour the game rather than blazing through, and you'll find something that merges early Tomb Raider's sense of adventure and solitude, Monument Valley-level beauty, and bite-sized touchscreen gaming that's perfect for iPhone.

Leo's Fortune finds gruff hairball Leo in search of his gold, which has been dropped in a suspiciously trail-like manner across typically platform-game environments. As he scoops up coins, he finds himself whizzing round Sonic-style loops, solving puzzles by manipulating the environment, and negotiating increasingly complex and deadly pathways. It's a beautiful game, full of character, and well-suited to quick bursts on your iPhone.

Power Hover is an impressive action game that takes you through a beautiful world to recover a village's stolen power. Hover through deserts, oceans, and highways, and grind on rails as you make your way to the finish line, chase down baddies, or play through arcade-style boss runs and challenge your friends for the best score. Collect dropped batteries to unlock even more gorgeous and thrilling levels.

A game of exploration, mystery, and puzzles, Spider: Rite of the Shrouded Moon once again stars an intrepid eight-legged protagonist and lets you unravel a subtle story with each clue you find. Trap insects in your web as you explore the enormous Blackbird Estate, and solve some puzzles along the way too. What's more, the game uses your location, time, and local weather to add dynamic features to your experience each time you play.

Ah, Super Hexagon. We remember that punishing first game, which must have lasted all of three seconds. Much like the next - and the next. But then we recognised patterns in the walls that closed in on our tiny ship, and learned to react and dodge. Then you threw increasingly tough difficulty levels at us, and we've been smitten ever since.

Featuring more than just boxes to examine, The Room Three expands the format of the original just enough to create a uniquely tactile experience that definitely pulls you into the many nooks and crannies you'll be entering to solve. Gorgeous box puzzles still play an important role in the game, but many other clever logic games are sure to tickle your brain and condition you to look closely at everything that could turn out to be a puzzle. Three's a charm indeed.

It's always great when a savvy developer rethinks a genre and comes up with something that feels fresh. EightyEight Games welds auto-running to match-three in You Must Build A Boat.

Deft fingerwork must be married with careful timing, matching keys as the hero approaches locked chests, or swords at the moment an incoming enemy prepares to get all stabby. Get shoved off of the left-hand side of the screen and you're told YOU WIN!, because every step potentially adds to your coffers.

There are missions to complete, abilities to power-up, and a cheeky sense of humour that sets the title apart from its frequently comparatively po-faced contemporaries.

Posted in Uncategorised

The best free iPhone games on the planet

The days when you had to buy a dedicated gaming rig and spend a load of cash for a quality gaming experience are long gone. Thanks to the iPhone (and iPod touch) and the App Store, you can get an excellent mobile gaming experience for just a few bucks (or quid, for that matter), or even less.

In fact, a lot of the games out there are free. But can you get great games for nothing at all, or is the 'free' section of the App Store just a shoddy excuse to bombard you with in-app purchases?

The answer is, of course, both. The trick is finding the gems amongst the dross, and what follows are our picks of the bunch: our top free iPhone games, presented in no particular order, including both long-time classics and brilliant cutting-edge recent releases. We've even included a VR game for you... aren't you lucky?

New this week: King Crusher

King Crusher comes across like someone compressed an epic fantasy RPG and turn-based strategy into a shoebox and squirted the result into your iPhone. It has all the trappings of its more expansive cousins, but is perfectly streamlined for mobile play.

Your little band embarks on quests that mostly take the form of grid-based battles. As adversaries try to shoot, flatten or even eat the heroes, you must swipe them about, getting them into the best positions to mete out some punishment of their own.

With dozens of events and 12 character classes, there’s plenty to discover in King Crushe, but its bite-sized nature means it won’t rule over your day, instead filling odd moments with tiny procedurally-generated adventures fit for a king.

Want to learn more about the latest iPhone? Check out our overview of the iPhone X below!

Piffle is a shooter that has you blast away encroaching blocks, which are under the control of the nefarious Doc Block, and on landing will presumably do something terrible and evil. To keep them at bay, you lob strings of piffle balls – cat-like critters that bounce around while emitting endearingly cute meowing noises.

As the sort-of cats ricochet around, the numbers on the blocks drop until they’re finally destroyed. Rinse, repeat, and the world is saved. Only, things aren’t quite that simple due to tricky layouts that demand precision aiming, blocks that annoyingly duplicate or deflect your piffles in the wrong direction, and setups that demand you grab and master powerups to aid you in your task.

Fun stuff to dip into when you fancy some colorful, destructive action.

Unicycle Giraffe is a balancing game that features a unicycle and a giraffe. Unfortunately for the giraffe, it attempts to ride said unicycle – not a comfortable state of being for the typical ungulate. It’s all very comical, though, as your giraffe wobbles left and right, before seconds later inevitably crashing to the floor in a tangle of legs and neck.

Despite being a one-note game, Unicycle Giraffe rewards mastery with the sheer thrill of staying seated for a few precious extra seconds. Rescuing yourself from very nearly overbalancing is fun, and extra risk comes by way of coins and bombs to tap elsewhere on the screen.

There’s little longevity, of course (short of ‘upgrading’ the animal with new hats and skins), but this one’s endearing, and always good for a quick blast.

Transformers Bumblebee hurls you back to the halcyon days of the original Generation One Transformers, before Michael Bay got his hands on the franchise. Here, the boxy, heroic Autobots valiantly try to stop the evil Decepticons from taking over the world – mostly by driving around a lot and then blowing things up.

The entire game is controlled with a single finger, whether you’re zooming along freeways in car mode, engaged in a bout of vehicular combat against Decepticon enemies, or shooting at anything that moves (or doesn’t) in a Decepticon base.

Survive long enough and you get to battle one of the bad guys. These boss battles are varied and entertaining – and you must quickly figure out how they work, lest your ‘bot’s alternate mode ends up being a pile of smoldering scrap.

Don’t Trip has you direct stompy feet through increasingly surreal terrain. You start off in a kitchen that could do with a tidy-up. Last long enough and you find yourself avoiding crazed vacuum cleaners decked out with knives and axes. Eventually, you end up fleeing from lava, splashing in swimming pools and walking in space.

This all comes off as quite trippy, and that’s only exacerbated by the viewpoint and controls. Everything is zoomed in to the point you can barely see where to head, and the controls have you press the screen to plant a foot, and rotate your phone to find space for the next step. Don’t Trip! really is a game very much designed with mobile in mind – and it’s all the better for it.

Rowdy Wrestling is a sports game that doesn’t take itself remotely seriously – and that says a lot, given the spectacle it’s simulating. But all the weirdness of pro wrestling has nothing on this game, which features ludicrously bouncy physics and fighters whose arms whirl around in an entertainingly cartoonish manner.

There’s the feeling throughout that you’re only just in control, whether trying to dropkick an opponent in the face, or unceremoniously hurl them out of the ring. But when Rowdy Wrestling clicks, it grabs hold for good. Just as well, then, that you get a range of modes – Tag Team; a solo career; and the ‘last man standing’ Rumble – along with multiple fighters to unlock. 

Friday the 13th: Killer Puzzle is more or less classic sliding puzzler Sokoban infused with South Park-style humor, and dressed in the garb of a famous horror series.

As horror icon Jason Voorhees, you slide around each tiny scene to capture campers, cops, inmates, and more besides. On grabbing them, you’re greeted to a splattering of cartoon gore, while the levitating decapitated undead head of your mother offers sagely advice.

This could so easily have been a gimmicky release, but Friday the 13th: Killer Puzzle gets everything right. The puzzles are smartly designed, forcing you to find labyrinthine paths to targets; there’s a sense of progression as you unlock new worlds; and the dark sense of humor at the heart of the game gives it a real sense of character.

Super Fowlst is an arcade game featuring a flappy chicken out to stop angry red demons from taking over the world. This heroic fowl can flap left or right at the command of one of your thumbs, briefly flying in an arc – or plummeting to the ground when you don’t prod the screen again.

The aim throughout is to biff enemies (while avoiding the projectiles they spew), grab bling, and make for the exit. As you travel through the procedurally generated levels, you’ll discover secrets, weird bits of landscape, and ferocious bosses looking to turn you into a roast dinner. Fortunately, coins you collect can be traded for upgrades, including the ability to fire rockets from your behind. Clucking great? You betcha.

Slydris 2 whiffs a bit of Tetris. It has similar shapes that drop into a well, the aim being to form solid lines that vanish. Breach the top of the well and your game ends. Simple. Only Slydris 2 then performs a handbrake turn and gleefully speeds off in an entirely different direction.

For a start, it’s turn-based. Also, several shapes drop into the well each turn, and you can only move one (whether it’s ‘hanging’ or already in the well). This subverts the classic formula, transforming it into a smart, unique game of strategy.

Everything you thought you know goes out the window as you figure out how to shatter pieces, make use of power-ups and survive long enough to get a high score. Top stuff, then, and just as compelling as the game that inspired it.

PAKO Forever seemingly takes place in a world where law-enforcement really doesn’t want you mucking about in what appears to be the world’s largest parking lot. The second you move, police cars are on you like a shot, and if one smashes into you, that’s your lot.

Pretty quickly, you figure out that you need to drift and snake about to survive – and then you start seeing gigantic gift boxes bouncing along. Snag one of those and your car temporarily balloons to giant size, or acquires a handy ball and chain to smash the cops.

Visually, the game’s quite crude, and the staccato nature of missions can pall, but for a quick blast of breezy endless driving larks, it’s a decent install.

Candies ’n Curses is a single-screen platform game, featuring a protagonist who’s taken on the role of solo ghostbuster in a very haunted house. As you swipe, she zips back and forth, and jumps from platform to platform, zapping spooky critters with her weapons. On obliterating the requisite number of scary creatures, she gets to fight a boss, before moving on to the next room.

There are only six in all, but you’ll be hard-pressed to see more than a couple in your initial goes, because Candies ’n Curses has a ‘take no prisoners’ attitude to difficulty. But grind a bit, grab some upgrades, and you’ll find your more equipped heroine can make a bigger dent in the undead’s population. Just remember that “I ain’t afraid of no ghosts” isn’t a smart catchphrase here – if in doubt, run!

Pivotol is an endless puzzle game akin to Tetris and Columns, in that you drop shapes into a well and then eradicate them to create space for more shapes. In this case, you work with neon squares, which explode when six or more connect. Connections are made by pivoting four blocks about a central point, spinning them until you find the optimum position.

Since the game gradually ramps up how many blocks are dropped at any given moment, you must create combos, and cunningly use special blocks that blow up anything nearby.

Fortunately, Pivotol gives you time to think, because it’s turn-based rather than having pieces continually fall. That said, it will still keep you on edge, especially when the well starts to fill, and you can’t see an obvious path to clearing it.

Bacon reasons you should put bacon on everything, to make it taste better. You start by dropping a slice on to a sizzling pan. Another tap and it’s flipped on to a cheeseburger for an instant food hack. Next up: pancakes. Everyone knows pancakes taste better with bacon.

Next up, it’s, um, a piña colada, and then a map of the United States of America. You’re invited to create ‘Napoleon Baconaparte’, add bacon to the MSCI World Index, and make an iOS alert extra tasty by draping bacon on top of it.

Not the most sensible of games, then, but Bacon’s a great way to infuse tasty fun into the odd spare moment. The bacon physics is great, the objects you’re faced with are imaginative, and some of the levels are surprisingly challenging.

Train Party is an arcade-oriented puzzle game designed for multiple people to play together. Between two and 12 people on the same Wi-Fi network do their best to keep the train on time, largely by laying down tracks in front of it. In order to avoid disastrous derailment, you must also figure out how to deal with roaming wildlife and a renegade track bomber.

There are two ways to play: collaboratively and competitively. In the former case, the train always heads to the player with the most complete track, so you can keep going for as long as possible. In competition mode, though, the train goes around devices in order, and the winner is the last person not to turn the 9:45 to Washington Union Station into a crumpled heap of twisted metal.

Super Cat Tales 2 is a platform game that works brilliantly on your iPhone. That in itself is rare, but also this isn’t a stripped-back one-thumb leapy game. Instead, it’s a full-fledged 2D platforming experience reworked for the touchscreen.

The game features a group of cats, determined to save their world from a robot invasion. They sprint, jump, grab coins, and occasionally hop into tanks to eradicate the metal aggressors.

It’s a visual treat – all vibrant colors and chunky pixels. The controls are fab too – a two-thumb system that’s ideal for touchscreens, flexible enough to allow for a range of actions, and that transforms challenges into feats of choreography. In short, this is one of the very best platform games on mobile, and it would be an insult to the creator to not give it a try.

Golfing Around transports you to a simpler age of golf video games. You don’t get lush 3D visuals, enough club choices to give a pro caddie a nervous breakdown, or inch-perfect takes on real-life courses. Instead, you have basic controls, minimal top-down visuals, and a handful of holes dreamed up by the developer.

On iPhone, though, this works really well. The visuals provide clarity, and the straightforward controls afford Golfing Around immediacy. There’s some nuance too – push the power meter into the red and your aim wobbles about, your dream of extra distance at risk from potentially smacking the ball in the wrong direction.

All this ensures Golfing Around makes the cut, but it’s boosted up the leaderboard by a construction kit. Making and sharing your own courses is a cinch. Probably don’t spell out “I prefer soccer actually” using water traps, mind.

Bendy in Nightmare Run dumps you in a world of seriously messed up cartoons. Crackly audio and glitchy black-and-white visuals recall 1920s animation, but with content apparently ferried in from a nightmare dimension.

Each level has your hero run towards the screen, fleeing a pursuing horror and its legions of tiny – yet equally ferocious – minions. You swipe between three lanes and lob collected weapons behind you with a tap. Do this enough times and your aggressor finally gets the hint and slinks off.

In gameplay terms, there’s little here you’ve not seen before – Bendy is more or less Temple Run flipped 180 degrees – but the presentation alone makes the game worth an install. Just be aware this nightmare run has a difficulty level that, if not nightmarish, is at least very challenging.

A Way to Slay is a game of epic sword fights reimagined as time-attack turn-based puzzling. You begin each round surrounded by enemies eager to separate your head from your shoulders. A quick double-tap on any of them and you strike with a killing blow – but then your opponents get their chance to move, and if you’re too near one of them, your innards end up sprayed across the sparse landscape.

Assuming you don’t mind quite a lot of ‘red’ as you go about solving its challenges, A Way to Slay proves itself to be a novel take on turn-based puzzling. And even though your view’s more limited on an iPhone than an iPad, you can use gestures to pan and zoom the screen like you’re directing your very own stabby Hollywood epic.

Alphabear 2 introduces you to a world where bears have made a major blunder with a time machine, and need you to fix things by… spelling words. Even the in-game protagonists don’t seem convinced by that setup, but it’s a fun hook on which to hang the sequel to one of the iPhone’s best word games.

As in the original Alphabear, you make words from Scrabble tiles on a grid. When tiles are used, bears expand into the gaps. Tiles also have countdown timers, and turn to stone if you don’t use them in time, thwarting your ability to make full-screen bears.

There’s a lot going on, including several modes, oddball ‘bear speech’ victory screens, a smattering of (horrors!) education, and a mildly baffling bear collection meta-game. In all, though, it’s furry much worth a download.

Asphalt 9: Legends is a madcap, streamlined racer. Much like Super Mario Run has the plumber ‘auto-run’, leaving you to time jumps, Legends corners and steers while you focus on timing. You must perform show-off drifts, jumps, and control frequent blasts of nitro.

The notion of a driving game stripped of steering might seem odd, but it works. Races are exhilarating and the courses become puzzle-like as you figure out where and when to perform the correct actions. If letting the game do the work is not your cup of tea, there is also a manual option which puts you back in control.

As with all Asphalt games, you spend an unfeasibly long time hurtling through the air; car pinwheeling in a manner that would make even the most maverick stunt-person’s eyes widen.

For a visually dazzling, entirely over the top slice of mobile-focused arcade racing, Asphalt 9: Legends is hard to beat.

Soosiz is a side-on classic platformer – of a sort. Most such games echo Super Mario Bros, having you sprint from left to right, jumping on enemy heads, grabbing bling, and hot-footing it to an exit. Soosiz takes that basic framework, but has you explore tiny chunks of land floating in space, each of which has its own gravitational pull.

As you run, the screen flips and lurches; your brain flips, too, as you try to figure out which way is up, locate a bunch of tiny critters who’ve got themselves lost, and not accidentally careen into the void due to a misdirected jump.

But once everything clicks, what amounts to a 2D take on Super Mario Galaxy proves to be a smart, engaging mobile platformer, putting a new spin on the genre.

Sneak Ops is a stealth game that wants you to “get to the chopper”. The snag: between you and your airborne escape route are rooms packed with enemy soldiers, traps, and – occasionally – inconveniently unbreathable air. Also, you’re unarmed. Thanks, budget cutbacks!

You must therefore sneak about, avoid detection and unsportingly wallop enemies over the head whenever you get the chance. Along the way, you grab floppy disks, which for some reason are used to buy restart points. Perhaps evil dudes are all retro gamers at heart.

It’s tense, pacy stuff, with some fab visuals. Even better: there’s a new mission every day – and everyone gets the same one, thereby pitting you against many thousands of other wannabe strategic operators.

Wordgraphy looks like a stripped-back crossword puzzle with letters crammed into a grid, but the letters are muddled up and you can’t just drag them wherever you fancy. Tap any letter and you’ll be presented with a small set of possible destinations.

The aim is to ensure you create complete words. It’s often easy enough to make one or two, but then you’ll be left with the likes of CCRZK along one axis, and a realization that perhaps your other words aren’t the right ones.

A smart, interesting piece of logic word puzzling, then, and a game that’s suitably different from its contemporaries when you’re getting bored with more conventional fare.

Kind of Soccer will be catharsis in gaming form for anyone who ever felt their soccer team was wronged by an official. That’s because although this game has a pitch and a ball, points are scored by belting the ball directly at the referee’s head.

The controls are a straightforward slingshot – just drag an arrow indicator and let rip. At first, your only danger is bad aim – kick the ball out of bounds and a point is awarded against your team – but in later rounds, defenders attempt to save the ref from a beating.

Fortunately, you can continue your unsporting rage by using bonuses that pop-up, including laser sights, and one option that entertainingly turns every opposition player into a tree.

Fortnite is a massively multiplayer online ‘battle royale’. You’re dropped into a playfield with 100 other players, each aiming to be the last standing. To achieve that goal, you must explore your surroundings, find a dangerous weapon, and use it to do some serious violence.

This in itself isn’t unique – even on mobile. But Fortnite differentiates itself in key ways. It has a sense of humor – and a sense of style that isn’t dull military fare. Also, rather than just shooting things, Fortnite encouragers you to build, creating strategic defensive barriers.

The relatively complex controls are, naturally, a problem on iPhone, and can frustrate in the heat of a battle. For the most part, though, this is impressive and ambitious multiplayer gaming that makes your iPhone feel like a console.

Look, Your Loot! takes the basics of free-roaming RPGs and shoves them into a grid-based interface not dissimilar from puzzlers like Threes!

The rodent protagonist – a heavily armed mouse – moves about the grid as you swipe, his energy being depleted during battles or replenished on grabbing elixirs and shields. Whenever you enter a new tile, something new appears from the opposite side of the grid.

The key to survival – and a high-score – is carefully planning your route, ensuring you don’t end up trapped between a number of powerful and angry adversaries. It’s the sort of RPG-lite that’s perfect to quickly fire up during a few minutes of downtime; but multiple level layouts and surprising depth in the mechanics also make Look, Your Loot! a rewarding game to master over the longer term.

DROLF is mini golf combined with scribbling and a smattering of route-finding. Courses start in bare-bones, incomplete fashion. You see a ball, a hole, and perhaps a few walls. You then draw on the screen to add new barriers, before dragging a line to smack the ball on its way.

This isn’t a game that cares a jot for realism. The ball has endless momentum and merrily bounces around enclosed spaces like a trapped fly before – with luck – finding the hole, or exiting the screen.

But DROLF wants to be played, and so the only limitations are your pot of scribbling ink (for which you get unlimited undos) and your cunning planning powers when battling later stages packed full of magnets, fans and moving walls. As a tactile touchscreen reimagining of a fun pastime, it’s more hole-in-one than out of bounds.

Pocket Run Pool reimagines pool for the solo player. It gives you a table from above, with the twist that each of the pockets has a multiplier on it. Your score comprises the number on the ball multiplied by the number on the pocket, and you lose one of your three lives every time you miss a shot or pocket the white.

Aficionados of videogame pool may grumble at this game’s basic nature. The visuals are 2D and minimal, and there’s some major hand-holding regarding aiming. But any such complaints miss the point.

Pocket Run Pool isn’t about slavish realism, but taking a fresh look at pool, and fashioning a modern, quick solo game around scoring and taking risks, rather than getting soundly beaten again and again by a computer opponent on a 3D table.

Letterpress is a mix of Boggle and Risk. Two players (you and an online or computer opponent) face a five-by-five grid of letters and take turns tapping out words. But the key isn’t to show off your vocabulary; instead, you must strategize to secure territory.

Captured letters turn your color, but those surrounded by your tiles become a darker shade and cannot be flipped by your opponent during their turn. With careful play, you gradually chip away at the board; to win, you must secure every tile.

It’s a simple premise, but one that makes for surprisingly exciting battles. Games can turn on a smart play you didn’t see coming; many become like a tug of war, with you and an opponent trading blows. The claustrophobic board further adds to the intensity, and makes a nice change from countless Scrabble clones.

Shadowgun Legends is a first-person shooter with swagger, which depicts you as a show-off gun for hire, partaking in a probably prescient mix of wiping out evil aliens and reality TV.

After arriving in the game’s hub, you immediately find yourself on missions, which mostly involve following fairly linear pathways, violently shooting everything that moves – and some things that don’t. Control mostly happens by way of two thumbs (movement and gaze), with the odd trip to special power-up buttons.

For anyone deep into the world of console shooters, Shadowgun Legends may feel stripped back and reductive, but you’d have to be a misery to not have fun blasting away, gradually working your way through dozens of missions. Just remember when your worryingly eager fans build a statue of your wonderful self to worship, they’ll ditch you the second their next hero comes along.

Colorblind begins with a twist on a gaming cliche – the hero’s girl is kidnapped, but she happens to be an eyeball. So is the hero, Right Eye, who suddenly finds his world bereft of color.

Naturally, the hero sets out to rescue his love, and defeat the nefarious cloud pirates. But all is not as it seems in this world of monochrome platforms and hazards. Grab an easel and specific items spring vividly to life – coins, monsters, traps and platforms. You must make best use of the color (and waterfalls to wash it off) to work your way through the three unique worlds.

Don’t be fooled by the cutesy visuals and sweet-natured music, though – Colorblind also has an eye for old-school platforming classics. This means you’ll need tight reflexes and precision to succeed.

Orbia is a one-thumb action game where you dash between targets, avoiding orbiting monsters. The path onwards is always pre-set, so this game is all about timing – waiting for the exact moment to sneak through a gap rather than ending up getting horribly killed.

It might not be particularly innovative, but although you’ve probably seen a game like this before, Orbia is worth downloading. It looks pretty great, with a nicely cartoonish vibe. The levels and approaches are nicely varied, as is the pace, which veers between Matrix-style slo-mo and like someone’s slammed down a fast-forward button.

With hundreds of levels and a slew of skins to collect (each of which offers unique abilities), Orbia should keep you dashing for some time.

Golf Up is an endless golfing game. However, as its name might suggest, this isn’t about forever belting a ball across a horizontal landscape - the holes here head towards the heavens.

Everything about Golf Up is pretty basic. The visuals are clean, and the audio sparse. The controls are straightforward, too: drag a finger to set direction and power. A little aiming arc even helps predict where the ball will go.

A simple game, then, but Golf Up quickly proves itself to be a relaxing, meditative arcade experience, with a hint of strategy and risk. There’s no timer and no rush, but you always know you’re only one shot from your ball falling into the abyss, ending your latest attempt at a new high score.

Retro Highway marries the accessibility of modern mobile titles with the high-skill challenge and aesthetics of old-school racers. Visually, it comes across like Hang On and Enduro Racer (or, if you’re not old enough to recognize those titles, those weird games your dad used to play). But in gameplay terms, we’re very much in endless survival territory.

As you zoom along, you collect coins and jump high into the air using ramped trucks, gradually unlocking better bikes and new places where you can ride them. It’s not a very deep experience, but Retro Highway is fun to dip into when you fancy an exhilarating blast of weaving between lorries at breakneck speed, regularly leaping from ramps, and only occasionally splattering your hapless rider against an overpass.

Up a Cave is a platform game that seemingly plays out in a world of ice. As you leap about, collecting gems and stars, you quickly realize the square protagonist slides all over the place. And that’s a problem, given that the titular caves are strewn with square-killing spikes and other horrors.

This game cleverly mixes precision and speed. One minute, you’re carefully picking your way up a wall; the next, you’re zooming along like a blocky Sonic. The tension is sometimes further ramped up when you’re pursued by a mean-looking eyeball covered in spikes.

The one snag is a fairly obnoxious lives system (wait 30 minutes for five, or watch an ad) that lacks an IAP buy-out. Still, the quality of this freebie is such that you’ll put up with the inconvenience, to get another crack at the latest tricky cave.

Will Hero is a superb one-thumb arcade game that features a blocky hero dashing through a world of levitating islands, being all heroic and duffing up enemies. His foes are mostly bouncing cubes, and you must carefully time dashes to pass beneath them, or engineer collisions to knock them into the abyss.

Crack open a chest you find on your travels, and you’ll get weapons that transform dashes into violent attacks. Add in the game’s collectible helms (from unlocking loot crate chests), and you’ll end up with many potential weapons to choose from, including missiles and colossal swords.

Will Hero is fast-paced, inventive, and a lot of fun. It has a unique feel, and pleasingly bucks convention when you rescue a princess. When you do so, she tags along on subsequent adventures, gleefully hacking away at the enemies who once imprisoned her.

A Hollow Doorway finds a rectangular doorway spinning into the void. Its survival depends on your thumb – dragging left and right to align the doorway with an endless number of rapidly approaching concentric walls. Imagine Super Hexagon, if the game was instead called Super Rectangle, and only required one of your thumbs for controlling things, rather than two.

Initially, the overt simplicity makes A Hollow Doorway seem throwaway, and surprisingly basic from the brains behind superb platformer Circa Infinity and the insanely tricky Yankai’s puzzlers.

But there’s nuance here. Each of the game’s nine zones has its own character, often melding with the excellent audio. And for the long-term, these zones have a theoretically infinite range of difficulty modes – enough to push even the twitchiest of dexterous thumbs to its absolute limits.

Cobalt Dungeon finds an explorer roaming dungeons, battling monsters, going on quests, and occasionally getting a bit shoppy. The action’s turn-based, and success often depends on engaging your chess brain to think several moves ahead. When you’re surrounded by enemies, you must figure out in which order to dispatch them.

This infusion of puzzling isn’t uncommon in top-down games of this kind, but it plays out really nicely in Cobalt Dungeon. When you’re surrounded by roaming floating eyeballs, you might initially panic. But then you’ll spot a narrow path to coax them down, to off them one by one, or figure out how to exploit their sluggish movement patterns.

With procedurally generated dungeons and in-game upgrade stores, every game is different. But more importantly, Cobalt Dungeon’s clever design means that every game is fun.

Flipflop Solitaire reasons that a card game you play on an iPhone should be designed for its screen and mobile play rather than a table. To that end, it takes spider solitaire as a basic framework, then messes around with the formula.

You’re still working with stacks of cards, aiming to sort them back into suits. However, in this game you have only five columns to work with and the height of your iPhone’s display provides a vertical limit.

Flipflop Solitaire shakes things up more by letting you stack cards in increasing or decreasing value. This single change proves transformative, turning every deal into a solvable puzzle, and games with a single suit into frantic, entertaining speed-runs.

Disc Drivin’ 2 is a turn-based racing game. That might make no sense on paper, but it translates well to the screen, effectively mashing up shuffleboard with high-tech levitating tracks full of speed-up mats, gaps, and traps.

You can play alone, tackling a daily challenge or partaking in speed-runs. The latter option is ideal for getting to know the tracks – essential when battling other players online. You then swap moves – bite-sized chunks of gameplay where you inch your disc around the circuit, in races that can last for days.

There are freemium shenanigans going on, mostly for cards that unlock new disc powers, and the fixed camera can be frustrating – although if you’re facing the wrong way, you should probably resolve to learn that track’s layout a bit better. Those minor niggles aside, this is a compelling, entertaining racer that rewards extended play.

Slime Pizza is a platform game, with running and jumping replaced by catapulting the protagonist around like one of the characters from Angry Birds. The hero here (a delivery drone for Slime Pizza) is a gloopy blob that sticks to ceilings and walls, and his world is one of lethal traps, gigantic spiders, and annoyingly efficient guard dogs.

Your aim is to grab scattered pizzas and make your way ever further into a game continually finding inventive ways to kill you. With its unconventional controls and restart points that only appear every half-dozen or so screens, Slime Pizza can frustrate when you hit a tricky bit and repeatedly have to fight your way back for another go.

On the whole, though, it’s a novel mobile platformer with enough charm and smarts to make you stick around.

The Battle of Polytopia is more or less a classic version of Civilization played in fast-forward. You start off with a single city, surrounded by the unknown. You then explore, research technologies, and give anyone who gets in your way a serious kicking.

Unlike the sprawling Civilization games, Polytopia is focused and sleek. The technology tree stops before guns arrive, the standard game mode limits you to 30 moves, and new cities cannot be founded – only conquered.

For the more bloodthirsty, there’s a domination mode, where you aim to be the last tribe standing. The maximum map size expands and online asynchronous multiplayer opens up if you pay for more tribes. However you play, this is a furiously addictive, brilliantly realized slice of mobile strategy.

Six Match is a match-three game with a twist. Rather than arbitrarily swapping gems, you control a character with the oddly literal moniker Mr Swap-With-Coins, and as the game’s name suggests, he has just six moves after every successful match to make another.

The game wrong-foots you from the start. Any muscle memory you have from the likes of Bejeweled evaporates as you figure out the most efficient way to make the next match. The result is a game heavy on puzzling and light on speed.

Just when you think you’ve got it worked out, Six Match throws new mechanics into the mix: diamonds you clear by dropping them out of the well, deadly skulls and cages that push entire lines of coins. The layered strategy should keep you matching for the long term, as you figure out new ways to crack your high score.

ARcade Plane – with emphasis in the ‘AR’ – combines the complex and the simple, providing you with an augmented reality gaming experience controlled by a single digit.

The game projects a tiny city on to a nearby surface, above which a plane circles. It’s low on fuel and – for reasons unknown – must grab a set number of stars before it lands. The tiny snag: the city is rather suspiciously surrounded by extremely tall, spiky hills – and between them is where the stars are found.

You hold the screen to dive, carefully timing doing so to snatch up stars, then release the screen so your plane briefly soars heavenward again. All the while, your city grows and you unlock more planes. Simple stuff, then, but an effective and fun use of AR that anyone can get into.

It’s Full of Sparks finds you in a world where firecrackers are cruelly imbued with sentience. Aware of their imminent demise, they make a beeline for water to extinguish their spark and therefore not explode. Your aim is to help them make a splash.

Each of the 80 hand-crafted levels takes a mere handful of seconds to complete – at least when you master the precise choreography required. Before then, there’s plenty of trial and error as you tap colored buttons to turn hazards and chunks of the landscape on and off, and grab rotors that let you soar heavenward.

Despite occasionally slippy controls, this one’s a joy – full of personality and smart level design. It’s likely to put a smile on your face even when your firework goes out with a bang.

Amazing Katamari Damacy is a deeply weird endless runner. It’s based on a popular PlayStation 2 game, where a tiny prince rolls a magical ball (the titular katamari) into smaller things to make it grow.

On iPhone, the original’s free-roaming nature has been dispensed with, but its bonkers premise remains. You start off rolling nails into your ball, but it quickly balloons to take on toys, vehicles, and entire buildings.

The controls are a touch slippy – although better in tilt than swipe – and games can be lengthy. But this one’s a visual treat, with an interesting twist that makes it worth a look even if you’re tiring of games where you endlessly sprint into the screen.

Beat Street is a touchscreen brawler that wears its influences on its sleeve. The pixelated art recalls classic beat ’em ups, and the stop-start gameplay - with occasional unsporting use of baseball bats to bash enemies around the head - smacks of Double Dragon and Streets of Rage.

Yet this isn’t slavish retro fare. The game feels familiar, but its set-up is entertainingly oddball (liberating a city being terrorized by sentient, bipedal, suited rodents), and everything is controlled by a single thumb.

The controls could have spelled the end for Beat Street, but - amazingly - they work brilliantly, enabling deft footwork, punches, kicks, special moves, and the means to smash an evil rat’s face in with a brick. Apart from unnecessary grind-to-unlock levels, Beat Street’s the perfect freebie iPhone brawler.

Duke Dashington Remastered is a fast-paced single-screen platform game featuring dapper explorer Duke Dashington. Suitably, given his moniker, this treasure-hunting gent doesn’t so much walk as dash. Press left or right and he hurtles in that direction until hitting a wall. Prod up and he shoots towards the ceiling.

This turn of speed is handy, given that his adventures take place within four crumbling dungeons. He must escape each room before a ten-second timer runs down, or end up being a kind of buried treasure himself.

Smart level design turns each of the 120 rooms into something akin to a tiny puzzle. And although the entire game can be dashed through in a couple of hours, a time-attack mode gives hardy and dextrous armchair adventurers a reason to return.

Cally’s Caves 4 continues the adventures of worryingly heavily armed pigtailed protagonist Cally, a young girl who spends most of her life leaping about vast worlds of suspended platforms, shooting all manner of bad guys.

For once, her parents haven’t been kidnapped (the plot behind all three previous games in the series) – this time she’s searching for a medallion to cure a curse. But the gameplay remains an engaging mix of console-like running and shooting, with tons of weapons to find (and level-up by blasting things).

But perhaps the best sections feature Bera, Cally’s ‘ninja bear cub’ pal. His razor-sharp claws make short work of enemies, resulting in a nice change of pace as the furry sidekick tears up the place.

Infiniroom is an endless runner set inside a claustrophobic room. The dinky protagonist leaps from wall to wall, going in circles and avoiding electrified boxes that periodically pop-up.

Every now and again, a chunk of surrounding wall turns orange, before vanishing and opening things up a bit. But sometimes space within the room turns red – a warning that it’s about to become wall again, and that you really shouldn’t be there when it does. Lasers and whirling saw blades add further complications.

Each character in the game has a special power, designed to increase their longevity. But make no mistake: this is intense twitch gaming of the Super Hexagon kind.

Managing to survive for a minute requires almost superhuman reactions. Just be aware all those short games add up – Infiniroom might be brutal and frustrating, but it’s also hugely compelling.

Sonic Forces: Speed Battle re-imagines Sega’s long-time mascot’s adventures as a 3D lane-based auto-runner. Which is to say that it’s an awful lot like Sonic Dash and Sonic Dash 2, which you may have already played.

The twist here is in the ‘battle’ bit, which pits you against three other human players. As you belt along the track, avoiding traps, you can grab pick-ups – many of which happen to be weapons.

This transforms the slightly throwaway Sonic Dash format into a tense and competitive on-rails racer closer in nature to Mario Kart.

Naturally, there’s still a load of freemium shenanigans stinking the place up a bit, but even for free there’s plenty of blazing fast fun to be had.

BotHeads looks like a low-rent Badland game, with its colorful backgrounds, and levels full of silhouettes. But BotHeads plays very differently, being more about precision than semi-controlled chaos – even if you’re often pelted along against your will.

Your BotHead has two thrusters to keep it aloft. You travel rightwards, towards periodic checkpoints that allow a few seconds’ breathing space. Levels are full of hazards, from pinball-like bumpers that hurl you off-course to giant saw blades.

That wouldn’t be so bad, but the aim is to get through the entire game in one go. By means of ‘encouragement’, the trails of ex-BotHeads from failed attempts appear in the background of subsequent attempts. It all combines to make for an immediate, compelling blend of styles and ideas that’s perfectly suited to iPhone.

Super Phantom Cat 2 is an eye-searingly colorful side-scrolling platform game. Like its predecessor, this game wants you to delve into every nook and cranny, looking for hidden gold, unearthing secrets, and finding out what makes its vibrant miniature worlds tick.

It’s also a game that never seems content to settle – and we mean that in a good way. It revels in unleashing new superpowers, such as a flower you fire at walls to make climbing vines, or at bricks to increase their fragility. It also wants you to experiment, figuring out how critters who are ostensibly your enemies can be coerced into doing your bidding.

The only downside is the presence of freemium elements (ads and an ‘energy’ system) - although both can be removed with inexpensive IAP if you agree this is one cool cat to hang out with.

Anycrate takes the idea of a gunfight and hurls it headlong into absurdist territory. There’s no ‘20 paces’ nonsense here – instead, the two protagonists are on floating stone platforms, leaping about like maniacs and blasting each other with gigantic bullets.

You can share your device to play against a friend (which is admittedly more suitable with an iPad) or play against the AI.

And given that we’re firmly in arcade territory, it should come as no surprise that there are all sorts of power-ups that affect the game in various ways. Medical kits patch up your tiny soldier, but you’re just as likely to blast a crate that unsportingly sends fiery meteors your opponent’s way.

Given that you only get two buttons (Jump and Shoot), there’s a surprising amount going on in Anycrate, not least when you venture into the co-op mode with a friend, and find yourselves battling to protect a pile of bling from tiny ‘magical’ thieves. No, we weren’t expecting that twist either.

Train Bandit isn’t exactly nuanced. It depicts a showdown on top of a train, where a bandit faces off against an endless stream of foes, all of whom are quick on the draw – and armed to the teeth.

The bandit’s not going to take his impending demise lying down – instead, he’ll take as many of the enemies with him as he can. You therefore tap left and right to dart between carriages, kicking enemies in the face before they shoot you.

Make one wrong move and you’re dead. Misread the type of enemy you’re facing and you’re dead. Pause for a fraction of a second too long and you’re dead. You get the picture. But the great thing about being a bandit in a videogame – you can always be resurrected for another quick go.

Data Wing is a neon-infused story-driven racing adventure. It’s also brilliant - a game you can’t believe someone has released for free, and also devoid of ads and IAP.

It starts off as an unconventional top-down racer, with you steering a little triangular ship, scraping its tail against track edges for extra boost. As you chalk up victories, more level types open up, including side-on challenges where you venture underground to find bling, before using boost pads to clamber back up to an exit.

The floaty world feels like outer-space, but Data Wing actually takes place inside a smartphone, with irrational AI Mother calling the shots. To say more would spoil things, but Data Wing’s story is as clever as the racing bits, and it all adds up to the iPhone’s most essential freebie.

Tappy Cat is a rhythm action game, with you playing as a musical moggie. Your cat sits before a ‘tree guitar’, and notes head out from the middle of the screen along two rails. These must be tapped, held, or tapped along with another note, depending on their color.

This is routine for a rhythm action game, but it’s the execution that makes Tappy Cat delightful. It feels perfectly tuned for iPhone (your thumbs can always reach the notes), and there’s a cat-collection meta-game, rewarding you with new kitties when you totally nail a tune.

The only bum notes are a lives system (a video ad will give you five lives – although there is also a $2.99/£2.99/AU$4.49 endless lives IAP for those who want it), and the way in which a single major blunder ends your latest attempt at musical superstardom of the furry kind.

Flat Pack wraps a two-dimensional platform game around three-dimensional shapes. You control a little flying creature tasked with collecting every side of a cube before finding a level’s exit.

But figuring out where to head isn’t straightforward, because in applying a 2D game world to 3D wall surfaces, you can end up facing a different way when entering a plane from a new direction.

Fortunately, the game has a gentle difficulty curve – death means restarting a level, but not collecting cube parts you’ve already found. And Flat Pack slowly introduces its new ideas, such as enemies defeated by smashing them from below.

Should you find the main game discombobulating, there’s also an augmented reality mode, which has you walk around a puzzle with your iPhone. It’s a weird but effective experience.

Memory Path is a simple memory test that showcases how polish and smart design can transform the most basic of concepts into an essential download.

Across 50 levels, you tap left or right to move along a path toward a goal. The twist is the path disappears shortly after you enter a level. Initially, remembering where to go isn’t tough, but later levels are likely to find your adventurer regularly impaled before you finally succeed.

Levels complete, you’ll feel fully trained for the endless modes. Random shuffles the order in which you tackle levels; and Race Path is all about speed – how far you can get before the road ahead vanishes. Sharp isometric graphics, a gentle soundtrack, and unlockable characters further boost the game’s longevity.

Power Hover: Cruise is three endless runners (well, surfers) for the price of one. It borrows the boss battle levels from the superb, beautiful Power Hover, and expands on them. You get to speed through a booby-trapped pyramid, avoid projectiles blasted your way by an angry machine you’re chasing through a tunnel, and whirl around a track that snakes through the clouds.

This is a gorgeous game, with silky animation and minimal, but vibrant objects and scenery. The audio is excellent, too – the rousing electronic soundtrack urging you on.

There are a couple of snags: games can abruptly end due to difficulty spikes, and the controls initially seem floaty. But we grew to love the inertia, which differentiates Power Hover: Cruise and makes it feel like you’re surfing on air. As for the difficulty, spend time learning the hazards and mastering the game, and you’ll soon be climbing the high score tables.

Finger Smash is more or less whack-a-mole with fruit - and a big ol’ dose of sudden death. You get a minute to dish out tappy destruction, divided up into seconds-long rounds.

In each case, you’re briefly told what to smash, and set about tapping like a maniac. Hit the wrong object, and your game ends with a flaming skull taunting you. (Lasting the full minute is surprisingly tough.)

This is a simple high-score chaser, and so there’s understandably not a lot of depth here. However, there are plenty of nice touches. The visuals have an old-school charm, and the music is suitably energetic.

But also, there’s the way you can swipe through multiple items, the bomb that ominously appears during the final ten seconds, and varied alternate graphics sets if you feel the need to squish space invaders, fast food, or adorable cartoon robots. Great stuff.

Leap On! is an endless jumper with a sadistic streak – at least as far as its bounding protagonist goes. The two-eyed ball is tied to a central spiked star by a huge piece of elastic. Whenever you hold the screen, the hero moves in a clockwise direction.

The snag is hitting the spiked star spells instant doom – as does touching anything else that’s black. At first, this mostly means jumping on white orbs, and avoiding the odd lurking blob, but before long, the star starts lobbing all manner of ball-killing stuff your way.

You can fight back by grabbing power ups and smashing the white bits of projectiles, while chasing dual high scores – how many white orbs you hit, and your furthest distance from the star. Leap On! is admittedly a bit one note, but the pacy, chaotic gameplay very much appeals in short bursts.

Built for Speed is a top-down racer with chunky old-school graphics, and a drag-and-drop track editor. Make a track and it’s added to the pool the game randomly grabs from during its three-race mini-tours; other users are the opposition, with you racing their ‘ghosts’.

Handling’s simple – you steer left or right. Winning is largely about finding the racing line, not smacking into tires some idiot’s left in the road, and not drifting too much.

Initially, though, the game’s so sedate you wonder whether someone mistook an instruction to make it “very 80s” by having it seem like the cars are driven by octogenarians. But a few upgrades later and everything becomes nicely zippy.

The only real snag is the matchmaking doesn’t always work, pitting you against pimped-out cars you’ve no chance against. Still, even if you take a sound beating, another tour’s only ever a few races a way.

Knight Saves Queen is a turn-based puzzle game, based on a knight leaping about a chess board. He moves in a standard ‘L’, aiming to bump off every adversary on the board, before rescuing the queen.

Initially, he’s only faced by pawns, but soon other pieces enter the fray, forcing you to carefully plan your path. Over time, allies also appear, allowing you to further manipulate the opposition, which takes pieces every chance it gets.

The bite-sized nature of the game combined with the smart puzzle design make it ideal freebie fare for mobile. We do, however, take exception at needing perfect runs on every level set to unlock the next – unless, of course, you buy coins via IAP.

Still, if nothing else, this forces you to properly tackle every puzzle, rather than blaze through with the least amount of effort.

Flick Soccer is all about scoring goals by booting a ball with your finger. It looks very smart, with fairly realistic visuals and nicely arcade-y ball movement. You can unleash pretty amazing shots as you aim for the targets, and occasionally bean a defender.

The game includes several alternate modes, providing a surprising amount of variation on the basic theme. There’s a speed option that involves flicking at furious speed, and the tense sudden-death Specialist, which ends your go after three failed attempts to hit the target.

Rather more esoteric fare also lurks, demanding you repeatedly hit the crossbar, or smash panes of glass a crazy person has installed in the goalmouth.

Like real-world sport on the TV, Flick Soccer is a bit ad-infested. You can, though, remove ads with a one-off $0.99/99p/AU$1.99 IAP, or – ironically – turn them off for ten minutes by watching an ad.

Drop Wizard Tower is a superb mobile take on classic single-screen arcade platform games like Bubble Bobble. Your little wizard has been thrown in jail by the evil Shadow Order, and must ascend a tower over 50 levels to give his enemies a good ‘wanding’ (or something.)

It’s all very cute, with dinky pixelated enemies, varied level design (skiddy ice; disappearing platforms; watery bits in which you move slowly), and fast-paced boss battles against gargantuan foes.

Most importantly, it’s very much designed for mobile. You auto-run left or right, and blast magic when landing on a platform. Said blasts temporarily stun roaming enemies, which can be booted away, becoming a whirling ‘avalanche’ on colliding with cohorts.

The auto-running bit disarms at first – in most similar games, the protagonist stays put unless you keep a direction button held. But once the mechanics click, Drop Wizard Tower cements itself as a little slice of magic on your iPhone.

One Tap Rally distills the top-down mobile racer into a one-thumb effort. Press the screen and you accelerate; let go and you slow down. In the nitros mode, you can also swipe upward for an extra burst of speed.

It feels a bit like slot-racing, but the tracks are organic and free-flowing, rather than rigid chunks of plastic. Learning each bend and straight is essential to get around without hitting the sides – important because such collisions rob you of precious seconds.

You’re also not alone – One Tap Rally pits you against the online ghosts of other players. Each time you better your score, you improve your rank on the current track, ready to face tougher opponents. This affords an extra layer of depth to what was already an elegant, playable mobile racer.

Crazy Taxi is a port of a popular and superb Dreamcast/arcade title from 1999. You belt around a videogame take on San Francisco, hurling yourself from massive hills, soaring through the air like only a crazy taxi can, and regularly smashing other traffic out of the way.

Given the ‘taxi’ bit in the title, fares are important. Getting them where they want to go in good time replenishes the clock. Excite them and you’re awarded bonuses. Go ‘crashy’ rather than ‘crazy’ and the fare will take their chances and leap out of your cab, leaving you without their cash.

Crazy Taxi looks crude, but still plays brilliantly, and even the touchscreen controls work very nicely. For free, you must be online to play, however – a sole black mark in an otherwise fantastic port (and one you can remove with IAP).

In Fish & Trip, you command a single smiling fish, happily swimming in the ocean depths. Using your finger, you direct the fish towards eggs and other stragglers, the latter of which join you to gradually form a school. Unfortunately, everything else in the sea is hungry for a fish dinner.

At first, you’ll spot spiky anemones and the occasional sluggish green fish with big teeth. But eventually, you’ll be zig-zagging through claustrophobic seas, trying to find new friends to keep your school alive, and avoiding massive sharks that show up to the theme from Jaws.

It’s all rather simple, and may eventually pall. But in the short term at least, Fish & Trip is one of those wonderful and rare iPhone games pretty much guaranteed to plaster a smile on your face.

Topsoil, like its subject matter of gardening, is something that only really works if you’re willing to put in the investment. And that’s because it’s a puzzler that’s easy to grasp within seconds, but that rewards long-term play, as you slowly master new strategies to lengthen your games.

The board is a four-by-four grid, into which you add plants. Every four moves you can harvest a plant – or group of adjacent plants – which turns the soil. A reckless approach soon leaves you with non-contiguous chunks of land and no chance of removing loads of plants at once.

Even when planning ahead, the game’s inherently random nature can rapidly end a game. But Topsoil’s charm and gradual drip-feeding of new items to plant makes for a leisurely and enduring brain-teaser ideal for filling spare moments.

rvlvr. is an easy game to dismiss. Despite the pleasant piano soundtrack and clear visuals, it doesn’t seem like anything special. You get a bunch of interlocking circles with dots on, and must select and rotate them so the puzzle matches the image at the top of the screen. Easy!

Only rvlvr. is anything but. Once you’ve blazed through the initial levels, everything becomes a mite more complicated. You end up staring at half a dozen or more rings with dots liberally sprinkled about, realizing one wrong move might wreck everything you’ve to that point worked so hard for.

This mix of progression and challenge, alongside rvlvr’s quiet elegance, will keep it rooted to your home screen. And that you can skip any of the 15,000(!) puzzle combinations is a nice touch, ensuring you won’t remain stuck on a single test you can’t get your head around.

There’s ambition at the heart of Full of Stars, which so easily could have been yet another run-of-the-mill tap-based survival game.

Much of your time is spent in space, tapping screen edges to deftly weave your ship through space debris. When possible, you scoop up stardust to charge up your weapons system and a hyperdrive that blasts you towards your destination at serious speed.

But Full of Stars is also a role-playing game of sorts, finding you immersed in a plot that puts humanity on the brink. Along with your deft arcade skills, you’ll need to manage resources and make vital decisions to ensure your survival.

It can get repetitive, and the arcade sections are sometimes harsh, but Full of Stars is a commendable effort at trying something different – a story-driven journey that demands both arcade and strategic smarts.

Swordigo is a love letter to the classic side-scrolling platform adventures that blessed 16-bit consoles. You leap about platforms, slice up enemies with your trusty sword, and figure out how to solve simple puzzles, which open up new areas of the game and move the plot onwards.

The plot is, admittedly, nothing special – you’re embarking on the kind of perilous quest to keep evil at bay that typically afflicts videogame heroes. But everything else about Swordigo shines.

The virtual controls are surprisingly solid, the environments are pleasingly varied, and the pace ranges from pleasant quiet moments of solitude to intense boss battles you’ll struggle to survive. All in all, then, a fitting tribute to those much-loved titles of old.

Playing football on your own can be dull – that is, unless you’re the sporty hero of Footy Golf. As ever, scoring is the main aim – and there’s a goal to be found somewhere on each course. But along the way, you can also collect coins someone’s generously left lying around.

The controls are straightforward (aim with a directional arrow and then let rip); much of the challenge comes in trying to maximize your star rating by reaching the goal using the fewest possible kicks. You’ll also have to navigate increasingly complex courses as you move through a city, caverns, a factory, and a scorching desert. 

The game’s a bit ad-infested, with a mildly hateful level unlock mechanism that encourages grinding, but played in bite-sized chunks, it’s definitely more ‘match winner’ than ‘own goal’.

Although, at its core, this is a fairly standard lane-based survival game (swipe to avoid traffic; don’t crash), Dashy Crashy has loads going on underneath the surface. It’s packed full of neat features, such as pile-ups, a gorgeous day/night cycle, and random events that involve maniacs hurtling along a lane, smashing everything out of their way.

It also cleverly adds value to mobile gaming’s tendency to have you collect things. In Dashy Crashy, you’re periodically awarded vehicles, but these often shake up how you play the game. For example, the cop car can collect massive donuts for bonus points, and an army jeep can call in tanks – just like you wish you could when stuck in slow-moving traffic.

Flinging a plastic disc about isn’t the most thrilling premise for a game, which is why it’s a surprise Frisbee Forever 2 is so good. The game finds a little toy careening along rollercoaster-like pathways, darting inside buildings and tunnels, and soaring high above snow-covered mountains and erupting volcanos.

You simply dart left and right, keeping aloft by collecting stars, and avoiding hazards at all costs – otherwise your Frisbee goes ‘donk’ and falls sadly to the ground. Grab enough bling and you unlock new stages and Frisbees.

This game could have been a grindy disaster, but instead it’s a treat. The visuals are superb – bright and vibrant – and the courses are smartly designed. And even if you fail, Frisbee Forever 2 lobs coins your way, rewarding any effort you put in.

Pixel Craft takes no prisoners. No sooner have you found your feet in your little auto-firing spaceship than hordes of aliens blow you into so much stardust.

Before long, you clock formations and foes, learn to dodge huge arrows fired by a massive space bow, figure out how to avoid kamikaze ships, and discover how to best an opponent that’s apparently ambled in, lost from arcade classic Caterpillar. Then you face a massive boss and get blown up again.

It’s staccato at first, then – even grindy. But Pixel Craft has a sense of fun and urgency that makes it worth sticking with. The aesthetics and controls are impressive, and death always feels fair – to be blamed on your fingers failing you.

But with perseverance comes collected bling and ship upgrades. Then you’re the one dishing out lessons in lasery death!

(At least until you meet the next boss.)

It’s another vertically-scrolling endless survival game, where you’re pursued by a world-eating evil, but Remedy Rush is novel in subject matter and the way in which it plays.

The basics are familiar: you direct the protagonist by swiping about, aiming to keep ahead of your inevitable demise for as long as possible. But in Remedy Rush, you play as an experimental remedy (such as a cookie or sunglasses) exploring a grid-like infected body.

As you scoot about, toxins are destroyed to open up pathways, and health bursts can be collected to take out any cells and germs that are in your way. Over time, the host gets sicker and the fever more ferocious; when the end comes, you can try again with a new remedy, each one having its own game-altering side-effect.

King Rabbit has some unorthodox enemies. Having kidnapped his rabbit subjects, said foes have dotted them about grid-based worlds they’ve filled with meticulously designed traps.

Mostly, this one is a think-ahead puzzler, with loads of Sokoban-style box sliding. But instead of being purely turn-based fare, King Rabbit adds tense swipe-based arcade sections, with you running from scary creatures armed with rabbit-filleting weaponry.

Really, this isn’t anything you won’t have seen before, but King Rabbit rules through its execution. Visually, everything’s very smart, from the clear, colorful backgrounds to the wonderfully animated hero (and the little jig he does on rescuing a chum). But the puzzles are the real heroes, offering a perfect balance of immediacy and brain-scratching.

There’s a bit of cheating going on in Moveless Chess. Although your opponent plays a standard game, you’re some kind of wizard and apparently don’t want the hassle of moving pieces.

Instead, you’ve limited action points, which are used to transform pieces you already have on the board. (So, for example, with three points, you can cunningly change a pawn into a knight.) The aim remains a game-winning checkmate, and, presumably, avoiding the ire of your non-magic opponent.

It’s chess as a puzzler, then, and with a twist that’ll even make veterans of the game stop and think about how to proceed at any given moment.

After all, when you get deep into the game’s challenges, you might find wizarding powers don’t always make for a swift win when you can’t move your pieces.

Given Laser Dog’s tendency to make infuriatingly difficult games, Don’t Grind at first seems like a departure. You control a little cartoon banana, keeping it in the air – and away from massive saw blades – by tapping the screen and swiping to move a bit. It’s like a pleasant keepie-uppie effort – for a few seconds.

After that point, all hell breaks loose, with your worried-looking fruit having to escape a squishy, painful death by avoiding laser guns, rockets, and all manner of other hazards intent on shoving it towards the blades.

Collect enough stars while tapping the screen and you can unlock new victims. If you’re terrible, there are no shortcuts to bolster your collection either – the only IAP is to get rid of the ads. Brutal.

If you’re a fan of knocking metal balls about, you’re likely frustrated with iPhone pinball. Even an iPhone Plus’s display is a bit too small, resulting in a fiddly experience replete with eye strain. Enter PinOut!, which rethinks pinball in a manner that works perfectly on the smaller screen.

In PinOut’s neon-infused world, you play against the clock, hitting ramps to send your ball further along what’s apparently the world’s longest pinball table. Rather than losing a ball should it end up behind the flippers, you merely waste vital seconds getting back to where you were. When the clock runs out: game over.

The result is exciting and fresh, and the relatively simple mini-tables are ideal for iPhone. Moreover, the game’s immediacy makes it suitable for all gamers, overcoming pinball’s somewhat inaccessible nature.

The Mikey series has evolved with every entry. Initially a speedrun-oriented stripped-back Mario, it then gained swinging by way of grappling hooks, before ditching traditional controls entirely, strapping jet boots to Mikey in a kind of Flappy Bird with class.

With Mikey Jumps, the series has its biggest shift yet. Scrolling levels are dispensed with, in favor of quick-fire single-screen efforts. Now, Mikey auto-runs, and you tap the screen to time jumps so he doesn’t end up impaled on a spike or plummet to his death.

It sounds reductive, but the result is superb. Devoid of cruft and intensely focused, Mikey Jumps is perfect for mobile play, makes nods to previous entries in the series (with hooks and boots peppered about) and has excellent level design that sits just on the right side of infuriatingly tough.

Minimal arcade game Higher Higher! is another of those titles that on paper seems ridiculously simple, but in reality could result in your thumb and brain having a nasty falling out.

A little square scoots back and forth across the screen, changing color whenever it hits the edge and reverses direction. Your aim is to tap a matching colored column when the square passes over it.

The snag is that the square then changes color again; furthermore, the columns all change color when the square hits a screen edge.

To add to your troubles, Higher Higher! regularly speeds up, too, thereby transforming into a high-octane dexterity and reactions test. Combos are the key to the highest scores and, as ever, one mistake spells game over.

Satellina Zero is a somewhat abstract game that borrows from endless runners and rhythm action titles. You play as a white hexagon, sliding left to right to scoop up green hexagons streaming in from the top. You can also tap, which jumps you to the relative horizontal location while simultaneously switching deadly red hexagons to green (and greens to red). It sounds complicated, but it really isn’t.

Survival is reliant on observation and quick thinking, where you must constantly ensure whatever hexagons are coming up are the right color, jump across at the perfect moment, and slide to scoop them all up. Last long enough and you unlock new modes and music.

It would have been interesting to see choreographed levels with percentage scores, rather than games comprising semi-randomized waves that always end on a single missed hexagon; nevertheless, Satellina Zero is a fresh, compelling arcade experience.

Blokout is a furious, high-speed color-matching game that punishes you for the slightest hesitation. The initial mode plonks you in front of a three-by-three grid, and you have to swap colored squares, Bejewelled-style, to make complete lines, which then vanish.

The timer is the key to the game. A clock sits in the upper-left of the screen and rapidly counts down, giving you only a few moments to complete a line. If the timer runs dry it's game over; make a line and it resets, giving you another few seconds.

The intensity is therefore always set to maximum, nicely contrasting with the game's friendly, bold colors (which amusingly turn stark black and white the instant you lose); and if you stick around, you'll find further challenges by way of boosters and tougher modes.
 

Apparently turned off by chess’s commitment to beauty, elegance and balance, the developer of Really Bad Chess set out to break it. You therefore start your first game with a seriously souped-up set of pieces: several queens, and loads of knights. Your hapless computer opponent can only look on while lumbered with a suspicious number of pawns.

One easy win later and you’re full of confidence, but Really Bad Chess keeps switching things up. Rather than the AI getting better or worse, the game changes the balance of your set-up. As you improve, your pieces get worse and the computer’s get better, until you’re the one fending off an overpowered opponent.

It’s a small twist on the chess formula, to be sure, but one that opens up many new ways of playing, whether you’re a grandmaster or a relative novice.

In Maximum Car, you careen along winding roads, smashing your chunky car into other similarly Lego-like vehicles. When possible, you lob missiles about with merry abandon, boost, drift, and generally barrel along like a lunatic. It’s a bit like a stripped-down Burnout or a gleefully violent OutRun.

Your terrorising of other road users (through near misses and blithely driving on the wrong side of the road), rewards you with coins to spend on powering up your ride. Do so and Maximum Car speeds up significantly, veering into absurd and barely controllable territory.

Takedowns (as in, smashing other cars off of the road) are also positively encouraged; destroy the same car over enough races and it’ll be unlocked for purchase.

Along with a tongue-in-cheek commentary track, this is all very silly entertainment – great for quick bursts of adrenaline-fuelled racing, and absolutely not the sort of thing to play before a driving test.

As its name implies, Looty Dungeon tests your survival skills as you loot your way through endless dungeons teeming with traps, bosses, and falling floors.

Pick up coins to purchase additional heroes, each with different powers and stats, keeping the game fresh. Hidden dangers can easily put an end to your looting, so tread carefully and carry a big sword - which is just good advice for life really, isn't it?

Well, maybe not a sword. Perhaps a sense of self-confidence... life can sometimes be about metaphors too.

PKTBALL takes ping pong and turns into an endless arcade addiction. Outsmart your opponents to get the best score you can, get money, and unlock lots of colorful playable characters, each with their own court and soundtrack.

Once you've mastered the basics you can challenge your friends in local multiplayer matches or simply smash your way to the top of the leaderboards. This is the kind of game that you'll start playing while making dinner and only look up from when the fire brigade are breaking down your door.

A kingdom of Disney characters can be unlocked in this alternative look at the popular road-crossing game - intelligently titled Disney Crossy Road.

It's a 'magical take' on a game that has been downloaded over 50 million times, and designed to attract a new raft of players.

Cross as many roads as you can and collect coins to purchase even more stars spanning various Disney films, each with their own music and world for all you film fans out there.

And as you can imagine (if you've played the 'normal' Crossy Road before), you'll see how far you can survive with your favorites from Toy Story, Lion King, Zootopia, and many more.

At some point, a total buffoon decreed that racing games should be dull and grey, on grey tracks, with grey controls. Gameloft's Asphalt 8: Airborne dispenses with such foolish notions, along with quite a bit of reality. Here, then, you zoom along at ludicrous speeds, drifting for miles through exciting city courses, occasionally being hurled into the air to perform stunts that absolutely aren't acceptable according to the car manufacturer's warrantee.

Three bushes make a tree! Three gravestones make a church! OK, so logic might not be Triple Town's strong suit, but the match-three gameplay is addictive. Match to build things and trap bears, rapidly run out of space, gaze in wonder at your town and start all over again. The free-to-play version has limited moves that are gradually replenished, but you can unlock unlimited moves via IAP.

Few free games are quite as polished as Hearthstone, but then this is a Blizzard game, so we hardly expected anything less.

There are dozens of card games available for iPhone, but Hearthstone stands out with high production values and easy to learn, difficult to master mechanics, which can keep you playing, improving and collecting cards for months on end. Matches don't generally take too long either so it's great for playing in short bursts.

Think you know stress? You haven't experienced stress until you've played Spaceteam, a cooperative multiplayer game that requires you to all work together as a crew (and bark orders at your friends). Sounds easier than it is; failure to cooperate will probably end with your ship getting sucked into a black hole.

The clue's in the title - there's a quest, and it involves quite a lot of punching. There's hidden depth, though - the game might look like a screen-masher, but Punch Quest is all about mastering combos, perfecting your timing, and making good use of special abilities. The in-game currency's also very generous, so if you like the game reward the dev by grabbing some IAP.

Tap! Tap! Swipe! Rub! Argh! That's the way this intoxicating rhythm action game plays out. Groove Coaster Zero is all on rails, and chock full of dizzying roller-coaster-style paths and exciting tunes. All the while, you aim for prodding perfection, chaining hits and other movements as symbols appear on the screen. Simple, stylish and brilliant.

This latest rethink of one of gaming's oldest and most-loved series asks what lies beyond the infamous level 256 glitch. As it turns out, it's endless mazey hell for the yellow dot-muncher. Pac-Man's therefore charged with eating as many dots as possible, avoiding a seemingly infinite number of ghosts, while simultaneously outrunning the all-devouring glitch. Power-ups potentially extend Pac-Man's life, enabling you to gleefully take out lines of ghosts with a laser or obliterate them with a wandering tornado.

Although there's an energy system in Pac-Man 256, it's reasonably generous: one credit for a game with power-ups, and one for the single continue; one credit refreshes every ten minutes, to a maximum of six, and you can always play without power-ups for free. If you don't like that, there's an IAP-based £5.99/$7.99 permanent buy-out.

The endless rally game Cubed Rally Redline is devious. On the surface, it looks simple: move left or right in five clearly-defined lanes, and use the 'emergency time brake' to navigate tricky bits. But the brake needs time to recharge and the road soon becomes chock full of trees, cows, cruise liners and dinosaurs. And you thought your local motorway had problems!

If you're of a certain vintage, you probably spent many hours playing Solitaire on a PC, success being rewarded by cards bouncing around the screen. Sage Solitaire's developer wondered why iOS solitaire games hadn't moved on in the intervening years, and decided to reinvent the genre. Here, then, you get a three-by-three grid and remove cards by using poker hands.

Additional strategy comes through limitations (hands must include cards from two rows; card piles are uneven) and potential aid (two 'trashes', one replenished after each successful hand; a starred multiplier suit). A few rounds in, you realise this game's deeper than it first appears. Beyond that, you'll be hooked. The single £2.29/$2.99 IAP adds extra modes and kills the ads.

Posted in Uncategorised