iPhone games round-up

The iPhone is fast establishing itself as one of the best platforms for mobile gaming. But with so many title to choose from – and without Lite versions for all of them – how do you know which are worth downloading? We check out seven titles to see if they are worthy of your time.

Pocket God
With its bright sugar-coloured graphics and open-ended gameplay Pocket God may not be the most challenging game around but it’s certainly one of the more distinctive.

It’s basically a mini-version of Peter Molyneux’s Black & White, in that it’s all about exercising power over your tiny island kingdom and its hapless inhabitants. You can do anything from dragging the sun across the sky to feeding and punishing your people.

Undoubtedly, you’re going to spend the early hours experimenting with all the ways you can torture them; from tossing them into a volcano to exposing them to lightning strikes, luckily they can be easily replenished at any time.

Pretty soon, however, you’ll have exhausted these possibilities, which is where the weekly updates come in handy.

Telltale reinvented episodic gaming with their continuing adventures of Sam & Max, and Pocket God treads a similar path. Every week there’s been a new downloadable update, usually adding some gameplay element rather than a completely new adventure.

The real problem with Pocket God is its limited scope, and having a playing area that barely fills a single screen and no real objectives ultimately defeats it.

However, at the price you can’t really complain and we look forward to the inevitable sequel with perhaps a bigger island.

Verdict: Small in scale and price, big on charm. (7/10)

Zombieville USA
It may play like Metal Slug but, drawing visual inspiration from Jamie Hewlett (Gorillaz, Tank Girl) Zombieville is the grungiest game we’ve ever seen – a graffiti stained bloodbath where ammo is strictly limited and failure results in your hero’s brains being eaten.

You can enter houses to hide or collect extra cash, to be spent at the end of every level on ammo and 15 different weapons, including machine guns, shotguns, lazers and flamethrowers.

Undoubtedly impressive to look at, the problem with Zombieville is the gameplay, which involves nothing more than moving left and right and shooting. Movement is controlled by left and right arrows in the corner of the screen, with a quick dab in the centre to shoot.

Unfortunately, it’s not the most accurate interface, and when bullets are in this short supply, it’s annoying how often you waste them by shooting into thin air or not at all.

Zombieville is doing well in the App Store charts – so let’s hope the developers use the money to produce a sequel that balances those brilliant visuals with bigger and deeper gameplay.

As it stands, it’s a well priced casual game but also a massively missed opportunity.

Verdict: Despite the initial wow factor, this runs out of ideas faster than ammo. (6/10)

Popularity: 6% [?]

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