Games for your iPhone, iPod and iPad

Helsing's Fire – £0.59

As vampire hunter Van Helsing, accompanied by his assistant Raffton, your quest is to rid your city of monsters and undead fiends. Each level is viewed from above and contains a number of buildings and monsters. Tapping the screen places a torch (one of three, which are effectively lives) whose light will shine out and illuminate any meanies it touches, whilst being blocked by buildings. Once you have them in your spotlight you can use one of a limited number of tonics to destroy them.

The twist is that monsters and tonics come in different colours, and hitting a monster with the wrong tonic makes it stronger. You’ll have plenty of time to think at first and get used to the idea, but you’ll soon be surrounded by shielded monsters, werewolves that you must keep safe once you’ve turned them back into humans and projectile lobbing fiends that’ll extinguish your torch on contact. This is a wonderfully simple concept, lifted by superb presentation and a great ‘pick up and play’ feel, and the 90 levels will keep you going for some time.

Angry Birds - £0.59

A colleague stated just the other day ‘Who doesn’t play Angry Birds?’ and based on download figures he may have a point. This game is part of the sideways-on projectile physics destruction genre (phew) and requires you to lob various birds with special abilities from a catapult in order to recover your stolen eggs from a tribe of evil piggies. The pigs are hiding in structures made from wood, ice, girders and rocks, and these will generally need to be destroyed before you can open a pack of whup-ass on their porky behinds.

Your birds are fully tooled up with specials abilities including divebombing, splitting into three, and exploding on demand. They climb into the catapult in a predefined order, so you’ll need to think tactically in order to pick off the weak spots in the piggy fortresses. With loads of levels, frequent updates and a very low price tag, Angry Birds is a must. If you have an iPad or a device with a retina display, the HD version looks even better but costs the same.

Tiki Towers - £0.59 or free with ad support

Imagine World of Goo crossed with a barrel of naughty monkeys and a shedload of bananas. Got it? Good, that’s Tiki Towers in a nutshell. You’ll have to build a series of towers from limited amounts of bamboo in order to get your monkeys to the finishing line whilst picking up any stray bananas on the way. The towers are subject to the laws of physics, and so will sway and break under the weight of the monkeys unless you’re careful about how you string your bamboo together.

Fortunately the process of building is as simple as making a single click to add a new point to the construction, so experimentation isn’t a problem. You’ll be rescuing monkeys for some time too, as there are a loads of islands to unlock with multiple levels on each. If you go for the free ad supported version you’ll get a popup between levels asking you to buy something from iTunes, but tapping the border followed by skip will remove it. Alternatively, it’s only 59p, so consider supporting the developers if you like the free version and lose the ads as a bonus J

Sigma - £1.19

When you look around the app store, you can’t lob a rock without hitting at least five match-3 games, so they have to be different in order to stand out. Sigma has an edge over most, as it requires you to work from both sides of the playfield simultaneously. Each side contains a rotating drum of coloured blocks that you can spin with a thumb, and tapping one drum sends the block in the centre across to the other side. You’ll get bonuses for matching more than three blocks at a time, so planning and fast thumb-work will reap rewards. It’s simple but effective with a decent soundtrack, and a must have for reaction junkies.

Tanzen - £0.59

Tanzen is one of a number of tangram titles in the App store but despite a few tiny niggles I think it’s the best of the bunch. A tangram is a set of seven geometric shapes that can be arranged into images representative of real objects, and the purpose of Tanzen is to figure out how to fit them into a given outline. You can rotate and flip the shapes with a single touch, and there are over 500 puzzles to get through with no time limits or pressure. It can sometimes be a bit fiddly to choose the shape you want, and I’m not sure why you can rotate shapes through 12 angles when they’re only ever aligned to the compass points in the final image, but that aside it’s a mellow way to spend the odd few minutes

Doodlepool - Free

Doodlepool is an overhead Pool game with a great sketchy art style. You can play English pub rules, 8 ball or 9 ball variants against a variety of increasingly tough players, or take on the tables in time attack mode. Shooting the ball is simplicity itself - just hold anywhere on the table and drag a line back to set the angle and power of your shot. The trajectory of the ball and the angle of the first ball hit will be drawn in on the table, and you can release to shoot when you’re ready. As a freebie casual game this is great, although you can’t really control spin and using the plotted lines can feel a bit amateurish once you get your eye in.

Hoggy - Free

Hoggy is a superb puzzle platformer with intuitive accelerometer controls and plenty of challenge. You must steer the Kirby-like Hoggy through a series of platformed levels by tilting your device left and right. Hoggy can’t jump and will refuse to walk off platforms, but tapping the screen reverses gravity so you can walk past obstacles across the ceiling. In order to progress through levels you need to find keys, which are obtained by dropping into a series of large jars throughout the level and collecting all the fruit you can find inside. Throw a lot of meanies and some sharp timing into the mix and you have a serious challenge, but one that remains enjoyable even when the going is tough.

Dark Nebula Episode Two - £0.59

This is the sequel to one of the most popular accelerometer games in the app store, and will have you questioning just how much quality you can get for a mere 59p. The premise is simple - tilt the screen to guide your puck-like craft upwards through a series of scrolling levels, using everything from jump pads to mobile platforms to help you along. It’s not going to be an easy journey, but it always feels do-able because of the pixel perfect controls.

What comes as a surprise is the sheer quality of the experience - the sci-fi themed graphics are gorgeous and detailed, the sound is great, and the controls are silky smooth and responsive to the point where you forget that you’re not in charge of a real object. If Apple used videos of this game in their publicity I’m sure it would raise eyebrows among critics of casual gaming, and would probably secure quite a few sales too. Dark Nebula 2 is a perfect example of what you can do with Apple’s hardware if you put your mind to it, and is well worth 59p of anyone’s money.