Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows pt.2 is a strange game in many ways. For one, it’s Gameloft and not EA Mobile behind this latest title, despite the latter having been the driving force behind all previous Potter games.

Final Fantasy 2 is one of those odd mobile games where the very act of squeezing the entire game onto a small java device alone is likely to get people interested, and rightly so.

Geodefense is yet another iPhone conversion, re-packaged with achievements, and then sold at a higher price on Windows Phone. Given the quality of this neon-drenched tower defence game, though, you won’t feel like you’ve been ripped off.

Coming from Microsoft’s internal games team, Beards and Beaks is packed with original ideas and features, but doesn’t quite get them to hang together.

It’s taken a long time for the iPhone sensation Cut the Rope to make the transition over to Android, but finally an updated and refined version of the smash-hit title is available on the Android Market.

Nvidia’s entrance into the world of Android gaming has seen quite a few good-looking exclusives appear for the company’s own Tegra chip-equipped Android handsets. One of the finest is Riptide GP, a rare water-based racer from the same team behind Hydro Thunder Hurricane on the Xbox 360.

Despite not sporting the word ‘story’ in the title, Pocket Academy is Kairosoft’s latest management game to get an English translation and conversion from PC over to iPhone. However, being newer and a little deeper both in terms of options and extra features doesn’t mean that Pocket Academy is the company’s finest.

Cave’s shooters on iPhone have been almost exclusively excellent so far, with DoDonPachi Resurrection in particular demonstrating that touchscreen bullet-hell games can be even better than its physical-button counterparts.

So far, Street Fighter IV’s reign as the best fighting game on iPhone has been pretty much uncontested. With the recently released Volt disappointing somewhat due to a laggy online component (and not much else to justify a purchase on top), Capcom has opened the door for a new contender to step up and steal the crown.

The arrival of WiiWare hit Swords & Soldiers on the iPhone shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise to those who played the game on its original platform. A side-scrolling castle vs castle game, the simple wiimote controls couldn’t be more suited to a touchscreen re-invention.

Fable: Coin Golf looks like it another over-priced abusing of WP7 gamers’ patience on paper, but actually turns out to be quite a neat little game of billiards-meets-crazy golf, with some clever twists on top.

Windows Phone 7 users are once again getting the raw deal with Super Monkey Ball, apparently Sega’s attempt to find out just how deep gamers’ wallets are when faced with a recognisable brand. At over twice the price of the iPhone version, and lacking the sequel’s many improvements, WP7 owners can rightly feel a little bitter.

The best thing (some would say the only good thing) about Farmville is the social interaction as you band together to help build that new barn or buy that new cow. The actual harvesting and often ridiculous waiting isn’t quite as appealing, but it makes these moments that bit sweeter.

The eternal problem with making a poker game for mobiles is the lack of risk. Yes, it’s perfectly possible to pretend that the $100 bet you placed on the table is your own money, but deep-down you know that a stupid all-in won’t mean having to sell the wife and kids.

Great presentation goes a long way to making a good mobile game. Sure, if it doesn’t control well or lasts for just five minutes in total then a nice veneer isn’t going to be worth much in the grand scheme of things, but it does help make a relatively unoriginal offering stand out from the rest of the crowd.

Say what you like about Gameloft, but when it’s development teams are firing on all cylinders it’s hard to get too hung up about claims of copying popular IPs from other platforms.

Before Remedy spent half a decade creating the Xbox exclusive Alan Wake, the company made an odd, top-down racer for 3D Realms/Apogee back in the mid-90s called Death Rally.

Our second neo-retro title this week is Mos Speedrun, a game that once again manages to surprise with its clever modern features lurking behind its retro shell.

Do you remember Pac-Man? Of course you do, he’s been popping up in some form or another since the early 80s, changing from a (now) slow and easy chomper into a technicolour rave-like game for the most recent release on consoles – Pacman DX.

Where do you go when you’ve created one of the most expansive and ‘hardcore’ Elite-style, open-world space-combat games ever seen on iOS? The next step is a linear trick-based snowboarding game, of course.

Overlooked by many people on the iPhone, Harbor Master’s landing on the Windows docks is a welcome one for fans of line-drawing games like Flight Control.

Asteroids Deluxe is over 21 years old now. That sentence will either make you feel ancient or has made you skip to the next review.

If you’re going into Raving Babies expecting anything more than a simple yet well executed shooter, then you’re in for a disappointment.

While it’s nice to see an increasing number of iOS games coming across to Android nowadays, it’s even better when they’re standout titles on their original platform. Step forward, PewPew 2, the paid-for sequel to the free Geometry Wars-inspired shooter that more than justifies its price through innovation and superb gameplay.

Another Android exclusive, Return Zero looks, from the screenshots at least, like its a game that’s worth checking out.

It’s not often we come across a clone from the same company that published the original, but Chillingo/Clickgamer has a habit of putting out surprisingly good games with weaker concepts behind them. Sadly, Spider Jack isn’t one of them.

Rolling ball games are two-a-penny on the App Store, but despite the number of competing titles, Gears still manages to impress with its eye-catching graphics and finely-tuned level design.

Exient’s X2 Football has slowly grown to be one of the biggest names in iPhone football, so the name change to First Touch Soccer is a perplexing one.

Initially a victim of Apple’s certification process, Snuggle Truck (formally Smuggle Truck) managed to make it past the censors by changing the subjects of the game from Mexicans illegally entering the US border for a better life and healthcare to cute, fluffy animals hoping to reach a zoo for a better life (and healthcare, still).

Pang has been around for so many years now that it’s hard to imagine a time when the compulsive arcade game didn’t grace the smoky halls of arcades up and down the country.

With every major sporting tournament comes the inevitable major sporting tournament tie-in. In this case it’s the Cricket World Cup that’s on the receiving end of Glu’s delivery, just a month after the company bowled The Ashes at mobile gamers.

Putting a hat on a cat doesn’t make it Top Cat. Likewise putting a board game on top of the one-button gameplay of Tower Bloxx doesn’t suddenly make the game a strategy title.

I can’t imagine many kids wishing to grow up to be miners, especially after the terrifying and tragic events of last year, so a game in which you mine into the dark, claustrophobic ground sounds like a recipe for disaster.

The first helping of MiniSquadron was one of those rare arcade titles that simmered with depth and accessibility – packed with unlockable bonuses, yet instantly rewarding in ways few other games can match.

Games that are wilfully difficult are bound to split their respective audience in two right from the word go. Some people just don’t like being beaten around the head for hours on end unless they get better – a game is meant to be a fun experience, let’s not forget.

Devil May Cry is one of those iconic home console franchises that have people clamouring to download the moment it arrives in the App Store, hopeful that their favourite characters and gameplay have made the transition regardless of how likely that may be.

Many developers have cited touchscreens as being the primary issue when porting over much-loved games from other systems, reasoning that the control method lacks the physical feedback and accuracy required to play titles that require pin-point accuracy.

The release of any new Gameloft game is often met with either delirium or derision by many iPhone gamers.

It had to be another avian-related game that knocked the omnipresent Angry Birds from the top of the App Store. That it isn’t from a major publisher is also somewhat poetic.

Launched alongside the Xbox Arcade version, ilomilo is a game that hints at the potential Microsoft’s new system has when it comes to gaming.

Zombie games are two-a-penny on practically every system under the sun (with the notable exception of the oscilloscope), so the fact that Zombies!!! feels fresh is a big compliment to the game.

Trivia games work well on mobiles, despite the controls limiting said genre to every schoolchild and pub-gamer’s favourite format – multiple choice.

There are few games on Java mobiles that are genuinely better than their iPhone counterparts, but Zombie Infection is one such exception.

Having caused a minor shock wave among critics when it first arrived on iOS, Game Dev Story’s appearance on Android is a great excuse to dip back into this simple, yet utterly absorbing, simulation of the computer gaming industry.

After last year’s rousing performance that blew its competitors out of the water with intelligent player movement and quality gameplay, PES 11 took the iPhone football gaming crown with style over its nearest competitor, X2 Football. Instead of building on last season’s excellent performance though, Konami appear to have spent this year’s transfer budget on […]

In the same month as a classic laserdisc game hits the iPhone, the sequel to one of the poster-boys for the far more successful CD-ROM format landed, dragging with it the less-than-desirable tag of being the biggest game on the App Store so far.

Do you remember when laserdiscs were the future of gaming? Probably not, as practically no-one in Europe thought that, even when they were at their zenith elsewhere during the mid-80s.

Chillingo’s Cut the Rope wowed audiences at the tail-end of 2010, and now Big Blue Bubble’s Burn the Rope is attempting to wow iOS owners anew in 2011.

Fresh from the long-running ‘Edge’ copyright debacle, French outfit Mobigame’s latest title is about as far removed from their stark, geometric platformer as possible, or indeed, most games on the App Store.

It’s a children’s animated feature, it’s in 3D, and it’s riding high on the box office charts, so it was inevitable that the makers of Megamind would license out the title for a mobile game.

They Need to be Fed sounds odd and looks odd, but deep down it’s really just a lovable platformer longing for your attention.

The second birds-related game of the week, but the first to actually feature birds, Must.Eat.Birds is as strange as the title suggests. The aim is to stop the pesky avian thieves from stealing all your fat nomsters’ cake.

Bad controls have spoiled many a game, but what if the bad controls were a deliberate design choice? That’s the dilemma facing anyone that tries to gauge the left-field masterpiece Enviro-Bear 2010 on level terms with other titles.

Taking a break from the usual ‘Bullet Hell’ games, Bug Panic is Cave’s latest title to make the transition from arcades to App Store, following on from the huge success of Espgaluda 2 and DoDonPachi Resurrection.

It’s strange to see how tame Mortal Kombat now looks when placed next to modern games, with comedic blobs of red blood flying every which-way after even the most gentle of punches.

When id Software announced that it would be bringing two versions of its first original First-Person Shooter for over a decade, Rage, to the App Store, there was a predictable level of excitement from both specialist and more general gaming press, not least because of the eye-catching graphics on display. Alas, those hoping for the […]

Steambirds is a turn-based strategy title based in an alternate dimension where biplanes and blimps are Fusion-powered, and everyone conducts warfare by tracing lines on a screen.

The other month saw EA Mobile’s Medal of Honor impress on its second mobile iteration, and this months sees Glu’s Call of Duty: Black Ops Mobile look to shoot down its home console rival.

LEGO Harry Potter is one of the longest and most enjoyable 3D platformers on the App Store, packed with content, replayability, and humour.

There’s certainly no shortage of match-three puzzle games on mobile at the moment, so any new arrival needs to add something extra if it’s going to stand out. In the case of Dyno Gems, it appears they’ve gone for file size.

If you thought that in-depth, fantasy Role Playing Games could only be found on a dedicated games console then prepare yourself to be very pleasantly surprised by this latest effort from Zenonia.

If you come to Speedx expecting a futuristic Wipeout racing game then your expectations will quickly hit a brick wall, as indeed so will you for that matter.

Converting a decent movie into a game has proved difficult at the best of times and things don’t get any easier when the film in question is as disappointing as Iron Man 2.

Don’t be fooled by the cringe-worthy title, the latest game from BulkyPix is neither as violent as the WW2 inspiration, nor as rubbish as the pun would suggest.

We’ve already had one pleasant surprise in the art of packaging rpgs onto mobile devices this issue, now the masters of the genre Square Enix are poised to deliver an even better example.

The Rocket may well have followed Steve Davis out of the World Snooker championship, but Ronnie’s fans can still keep their cueing hands in thanks to Player One’s latest mobile outing.

The secret to successful military missions has always been at least half in the preparation. So it comes as little surprise that, with three years practise in the genre, Gameloft’s latest exploit into covert-ops Splinter Cell territory should be a very impressive one.

Much like Nottingham Forest or Leeds United, the Championship Manager series has dropped down the computer management divisions in recent years, having once been the undisputed champion of the genre.

The wave of iPhone games flooding to Java continues unabated. Last month Doodle Jump leapt headlong towards feature phones thanks to Gamehouse and now non-iPhoners can also have the pleasure of fellow App Store classic, tower defence game Fieldrunners courtesy of i-play.

It may seem odd now, but back in the day Postal was considered one of the most corrupting games of its time.

Much like Angry Birds on the iPhone, Robo Defense has stoically refused to come down from the top of the best sellers list for months now. With the Market listing the paid version as being downloaded 50-250K times already, it’s certainly a contender for Android’s first true hit title.

Often a game needs some kind of theme or setting to give it a means of entering a player’s conciousness. Even that most stark of puzzlers, Tetris, came with the Russian music and images of Saint Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow, despite the main game consisting of emotionless blocks dropping from above.

Out of all the unlikely mash-ups in mobile gaming, a role-playing fantasy poker game has to up there with the strangest. Sword and Poker 2 is an addictive turn-based poker/RPG hybrid that takes the hands from poker, like straight flush or three-of-a-kind, and then uses them as attacks against a host of unsavoury fantasy folk.

International Track and Field harks back to a halcyon day when broken joysticks were as crucial to a sports game as the 100 metres is to world athletics.

iBomber was one of the break-out hits of the iPhone platform in 2009, selling more than three million copies. For the sequel, game publisher Cobramobile hasn’t applied any drastic changes to the winning formula, but the additions it has made are welcome ones.

Some people scoffed when Sports Interactive first raised the notion of bringing Football Manager from PC to handheld devices, claiming that the systems were far too underpowered to handle the celebrated football management series.

While the big teams like EA, Gameloft and Konami may boast all the top licensed players and proud console heritage, our tip for the 2010 mobile footie title comes from the clutch of young pretenders. Although X2 Football 2010 doesn’t possess the official license for this summer’s tournament or include the same pedigree in its […]

EA Mobile’s FIFA series is back with the official license to the biggest sporting event in the world. It’s not just the presentation that’s received an overhaul – the control system has moved from the standard virtual pad set up, with buttons changing their appearance depending on the situation.

Whether you know it as Puzzle Bobble, Bust-a-Move or any other one of its names, the bubble-bursting match-three genre is undeniably good fun. Frozen Bubble was one of the more successful Bobble clones, and has now been ported to Android.

The sub-sandwich has enjoyed a meat-eoric rise in recent years, on the back of promises of healthy eating, choice and delicious taste. Whether you’ve bought into it all or not, Turbo Subs is definitely attempting to grab a slice of this new-found popularity.

Pixar’s Wall-E may have been a simple garbage-disposal robot, but that didn’t stop him from taking an epic adventure through space, with evil androids and flashing lasers aplenty.

Rocking out on stage may all look like fun and games, but behind the scenes there’s a lot of boring PR work to be done. Guitar Hero World Tour Backstage takes the emphasis off the rocking out and delves into the world of handing out leaflets and doing radio interviews.

Pac-Man’s getting on a bit now, and those power pill-popping days have sure done a number on him. For his 30-year anniversary, Namco has churned out a variety of Pac-Man related games, including Pac-Man Kart Rally 3D for mobile.

The world of the ancient Egyptians comes to iPhone in the form of HISTORY Egypt: Engineering an Empire. This turn-based strategy title takes a lot of inspiration from Sid Meier’s Civilization series, with kingdom expansion and tactical rival relationships a must.

With so many music and rhythm games now on offer, developers really have to create something fresh and original to get noticed. Punk Pie succeeds in certain aspects with Aurifi – a game playable with sound alone.

Since Jordan Mechner’s original Prince of Persia in 1989, the series has seen a number of re-envisionings, including the remarkable console-based Sands of Time and now a major Hollywood movie.

Ever since his first case on Game Boy Advance back in 2001, Phoenix Wright has led a long and prosperous career as a defense attorney, earning himself multiple sequels, spin-offs and ports.

Solving an annoying brainteaser produces a heady cocktail of relief, smugness, and satisfaction that’s hard to reproduce.

Despite the date suffix, Baseball Superstars 2010 isn’t another of those ‘serious’ yearly roster updates, but a cartoony and light-hearted simulation of America’s favourite pastime.

Unlike other sports, bowling just doesn’t tend to work as a videogame unless there’s some form of physical movement beyond simply pressing various buttons.

Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo is an almost pixel-perfect conversion of the 14-year old arcade game that was one of the first (if not the first) to combine fighting with puzzling, and it remains a satisfying puzzler even today.

Games very rarely cast the player in the shoes of an out-and-out bad guy, but this is exactly what you are in Handygames’s latest entry to the tower defence genre, Guns ‘n’ Glory.

Ever since it first slithered onto the Nokia 6110 in 1997, Snake has been synonymous with mobile phones, so it’s no surprise that so many companies want to update it for the modern age.

With girls of a certain age getting weak at the knees in cinemas for a glittery vampire this summer, it seems fitting that a game based around the grizzled original vampire hunter, Van Helsing, should be released on the App Store.

Doodle God is listed on the App Store as a game, but it’s hard to describe it as such. The idea is to combine two elements to create more advanced elements with the ultimate aim of discovering all 140 concoctions.

The first-person shooter is a tough genre to pull off on a system with no physical buttons, but that hasn’t stopped a number of developers trying.

During the 1990s the point ‘n’ click genre was at its peak, with Lucasarts in particular producing classic game after classic game. Titles like Day of the Tentacle and Sam and Max wowed critics and the public alike with their sense of humour and clever puzzles.

This may look like the second American Football game in the reviews this month, but don’t let the looks deceive you: there’s no cheerleaders, no Hail Marys, and definitely no huts here.

From purely a graphical perspective, Furry Legends looks to be an enjoyable and stylish platformer from the days when dazzling blues and greens were the colour palette of choice.

Having already wowed critics and the public alike on the iPhone, now the definitely-nothing-to-do-with-Halo-title N.O.V.A. has launched its way towards the Android platform.

With the economy barrelling up one month and then crashing back down another, surely the worst way to escape from it all is to play a game that deals with building and selling houses.

With audiences around the world still weeping quietly over the ending of Toy Story 3, releasing a poor cash-in of the film feels about as appropriate as getting drunk and disorderly at a funeral.

Remember high school – where the jocks pushed people around, the cheerleaders bitched about people behind their backs and the nerds created complex machinery based on Star Trek? Course not, life isn’t an American teen soap-opera.

It’s common for a blockbuster film or TV show to receive a (usually poor) game based on it, designed cynically to extract cash from the fans.

It may be going over 30 years old now, but the Star Wars brand still has the power to pull in the crowds.

Motor-racing enthusiasts may talk about the temperature of the track and how ‘rubbered in’ it is as factors that make driving at high speed more treacherous, but that’s nothing compared to a surface that isn’t even solid to start off with.

Over in the US EA’s Madden games are as huge as the FIFA franchise is over here, regularly topping the console best-selling charts on release and steadily introducing new features with each and every edition.

Taking a classic, well-established game and bolting on extra features rarely works, but when it’s done with imagination and flair it can end up being quite enjoyable.

The concept behind Lava Ball 3D is one of the oldest of all games, not just in computerised form – roll a ball through a maze.

Let’s face it, everyone loves a good villain. The cackling, the plotting, the arched eyebrows and the dodgy accents – what’s not to love?

When a child first starts playing football, the ball is everything. The goalkeepers (the unlucky ones) keep to their line/jumpers most of the time, but positioning is an afterthought for everyone else.

As one of the granddaddies of the Real Time Strategy (RTS) genre, it seems fitting that the final entry of the Command & Conquer series lays down the law for all the new upstarts to follow.

It seems odd that Gameloft are releasing a game in 2010 with a license that hasn’t been seen in the cinema or in book form since 2001, but when the results are this good, who’s complaining?

Top Gun 2 really stretches the definition of a film tie-in. Featuring exactly no-one from the original film (except a fleeting mention of Ice Man), the only real connection to the source material is that both have ‘The Danger Zone’ song, and both have jet planes.

The greatest appeal for people that play Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG) is the community and the company. Yes, the gameplay is deliberately designed to keep people playing far longer than any kind of game out there, but no-one wants to kill 20 boars for hours on their own.

It’s been five months since Mirror’s Edge first ran and flipped onto the iPad as a launch title. Delayed almost as many times as Duke Nukem Forever (maybe not quite that bad) it’s been a long wait for iPhone owners to have the chance to see what all the fuss was about.

What exactly can a spider do that makes Spider-Man so special? It can’t escape a large glass or perform complicated arithmetic.