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We've been following Dodonpachi Resurrection [$4.99] for a while now, from its first announcement, to the first gameplay trailer, and even the pricing and release date.  And after all this anticipation, developer Cave's follow up release to the excellent Espgaluda II [$8.99/Lite] actually lives up to the hype. In fact, I like it even more than Espgaluda II, though I'm not necessarily saying one is better than the other. They're very different beasts, and really it's worth owning both if you like top-down shooters. But Dodonpachi Resurrection feels like a more well rounded experience, and caters really well to both casual shooter fans and the most hardcore of them all. There's near endless replayability due to an ingenious scoring system, and Dodonpachi Resurrection deserves a spot on every shmup fan's home screen.

Visually, Dodonpachi is a very striking game. There is no fancy Retina Display support, as this is originally an arcade game running at an entirely different resolution, and it would be unrealistic for Cave to redraw all of the artwork to suit the iPhone 4. That said, the game still looks damn good. There are three different screen sizes to choose in the options. Small has a huge border area but makes the graphics look the sharpest. Large fills the iPhone screen with the game and a small border on the bottom, but the sprites and text look slightly blurry. Medium is the default and it's in-between the other two settings. I fancy the large setting, as I don't really like borders in my games and the blurriness honestly isn't that bad. The game is filled with tons of huge explosions, humongous transforming bosses, and dozens of enemies and bullets onscreen at any given time. No matter what screen size you play with, it all ends up looking really impressive.

There are two game modes in Dodonpachi, the original arcade mode and a new iPhone mode. Arcade has you choose from three different ships and three offensive styles. These styles can give you unlimited bomb use, a more powerful alternate cannon to switch to, or a combination of the two. They all can help you in different ways, and as such each ship and style combination has its own leaderboard in OpenFeint. The arcade mode is a lot of fun to be sure, but the iPhone mode with its unique scoring system and brand new Hyper Cannon weapon are what really stand out in the game.

In iPhone mode, there is no need to pick styles, just which ship type you want to use. A divided gauge in the upper right of the screen is used for the SM scoring system. A circular area surrounds your ship, and narrowly avoiding these bullets but letting them pass through this area (known as “scraping”) fills the gauge towards the M side while also building up a multiplier in the upper left of the screen. You can continue to do this all the way until your multiplier hits x1000, if you wish. When the M side of the gauge is full, you can hit the Hyper button to start your ship firing wildly, and control the direction of fire by touching the ship and turning it. If you touch the ship and spin it in circles during this time, you build up your Hyper Cannon which unleashes an enormous beam of destruction that obliterates everything on the screen.

Killing enemies in rapid succession is what fills up the S side of the gauge, and once it's completely full you will gain whatever your multiplier is at for every enemy you destroy. Essentially, you use this SM gauge in a yin-yang like harmony of avoidance and utter destruction in order to achieve incredibly high scores. It's really brilliantly designed, and it may sound complicated on paper but it's pretty easy to grasp onto after playing for a bit. Admittedly, I'm not a hardcore bullet hell shooter guy. I love me some shmup action, but more the typical brand of them, and I've always been apprehensive of the bullet hell type because they just seemed so difficult. Not so with Dodonpachi, and I really understand now how different a bullet hell shooter is and the different type of gameplay it brings to shmups.

And this brings me to what I really appreciate about Dodonpachi Resurrection, you don't have to play it any particular way. Yes, you can endlessly scrape bullets and build huge multipliers, then strategically destroy many enemies in search of massive scores and coveted leaderboard spots. Or you can play it much like a normal shooter, using the bombs and special weapons to destroy the many enemies and bosses in spectacular fashion as you progress through the levels to the end. Heck, I beat the game twice before I even fully understood the scoring system, and had a total blast doing it. This is one of the first games of this kind where I've felt like any type of gamer can get a lot out of the experience.

There's a lot more to Dodonpachi too, like the absolute spot-on relative control system, the excellent brand new music for the iPhone mode, many OpenFeint achievements to unlock, multiple options and difficulty levels, hidden modes, and more. But the bottom line is that if you're a fan of shooters in any way, you'll want to pick up Dodonpachi Resurrection. There's not currently a lite of the game (there's one on the way), but the introductory price of $4.99 will be going for the next few days before jumping to the regular price of $8.99. Also worth noting is that you'll need a 3^rd generation device or higher, or an iPad, to run the game due to the insane amount of sprites it pushes at any given time. A veritable love-fest is going on with players in our forums who are enjoying the game as much as I am, and as far as shooters go on the iPhone it doesn't get much better than Dodonpachi Resurrection.

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Quest of Knights Onrush [Free] was originally thrown together by developer MoreGames and Chillingo to spearhead a marketing campaign for their then primary focus, Knights Onrush [$0.99], a castle defense game. It turns out that their promotional app, a side-scrolling arcade beat 'em-up, was even better received than the game it was promoting, and in April we revealed that it was being made into a full fledged game. That game, Knights Rush [App Store] is finally here.

Knights Rush takes the formula of the original game– what was essentially a limited, endless mode-only beat 'em up– and breathes the life of an entire campaign into it. Not shying away from that very definition, developer MoreGames envisioned an 'entire campaign' to mean 40 sizeable campaign levels over 8 unique worlds, and a battallion of 50 different enemy types and 8 giant bosses to clog the daylights out of. Not to mention two very different endless modes that improve greatly on its origins thanks to the huge library of art assets now available.

The campaign begins with a short in-game cinematic where your knight, after a little soul-searching, gets pulled into an alternate dimension. It's a no-fuss opener designed to get you into the action as soon as possible, as it's clear this is where the developer has spent most of their time. You start with a tutorial level, where you are soon introduced to two other knights to battle with. Before beginning each mission, you spawn in a portal room, where you can select from one of the three characters: a human Roman-esque knight, an other-world looking, dual scythe wielding knight, and a dwarven, hammer wielding knight. They each play very differently and have their own set of skills and perks to unlock.

The skill system itself needs some explanation, as it may not be apparent how it functions when first picking up the game. Each level, you begin by choosing a character, which is then spawned at level 1. Even if you come out of the first world at level 14, you'll still spawn in world 2 with your character reset. At first, this put me off, as I was having lots of fun with the progressive empowerement of my knight. In retrospect however, this seems to be a very clever implementation. Firstly, it allowed me to explore the breadth of each characters abilities over the campaign, mixing them in ways that I was not able to do in my first attempt. And secondly, it gave a nice sense of character scaling as I sliced through the 5 levels that make up each game world, leveling periodically without maxing out each and every skill.

Ultimately, each character has only 2 active spells that can be unlocked. Abilities are sorted into 'skills' and 'perks', and each level up you have access to 1 skill and a couple of perks. Perks supplement skills and your standard attacks, by adding benefits such as fire or ice to your attacks, or by increasing the rate at which you level or critical strike, or how much health is restored when you pick up health potions (or even how many additional skills or perks you earn each level). Skills on the other hand, include your two active abilities and several other passive abilities, such as attack strength or health bonuses. Each ability has 5 levels, and over the course of a world you'll generally be able to max out 3 or 4 of the reasonably lengthy list before having to reset.

As well as your active skills, the game includes a variety of consumable spells, from a crazy fox strapped with dynamite to your standard room-clearing freezes, proximity mines, or giant balls of energy. Though combat suffers a little from a tendency towards a truckload of frantic attack button mashing, the 3 skills nearly always at your disposal are crucial to surviving anything after about world 3. At this stage, the odds you face will progressively become more and more overwhelming and any previous thoughts of encroaching monotony are quickly swept away in the chaos. Unfortunately this doesn't extend to the huge, great looking boss enemies, who after the horde of enemies you have to wade through to get to, largely seem like pushovers. I would have liked to see a little more strategic varience to these encounters.

In any case it is clear that alot of time has been spent on the enemies in Knights Rush. Having 50 different enemy types is no small feat– but having them all looking unique and with their own individual abilities and attacks is simply astounding. You'll encounter a host of different enemy knights, swamp monsters, giant crabs, giant spiders, the undead, wizards, vikings, golden scorpions, jumping iron-maidens…and more. These are then backed up by the legion of mechanical devices that are littered across each of the worlds. Worlds are replete with spiked traps, falling blades, rotating saws, raining arrows, giant boulders that fall from the sky, cannons, ballistae– you name it, it's there. And in an interesting twist, these enemies can only be defeated by standard attacks (if at all).

Knights Rush has to be one of the most gorgeously detailed and painstakingly created game worlds we have seen on the iOS device. Each character and enemy is inked in a stylized fashion closely resembling that of Castle Crashers on XBL. The backdrops are equally lovingly rendered, richly detailed and set-off in layers to give a pseudo-3D effect that I absolutely love. Playing through the Super Endless Mode– where worlds and enemies are randomly generated as you progress– is a visual treat.

Finally, the standard Endless Mode rounds out the Knights Rush content, where levels you unlock in the campaign can be played endlessly. High scores for both endless modes are recorded in Chillingo's Crystal social platform, which offers additional replay value above and beyond the Campaign's 3 or so hours of game time (which can effectively be doubled or tripled if you decide to attempt Hard or Insane difficulties).

While some may initially be deterred by the few active skills available or the kitten-soft boss fights; you can't dispute that the sheer weight of content here resembles something more like what we'd expect from an expensive console downloadable title. That there are three very different knights to fight with further compounds the game's fun factor as you delve into their individual skill sets. All up, Knights Rush is a highly recommended addition to any action fan's game library, and should be a no-brainer pickup for beat 'em up fans. (Note, we did encounter a small bug where reloading the campaign following an endless mode sessions resulted in the wrong skill tree for our chosen knight, something we expect the developers will address soon but certainly not game breaking.)

If you're still on the fence, head over to our forums to read other readers' opinions and be sure to check out the (slightly outdated) gameplay trailer above as the game looks infinitely better in action.

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First time iPhone developer vol-2 just released their inaugural game on the App Store this afternoon. No, Human [$1.99] is a physics-based puzzle game set in space which begins with an amusing conversation between the humans proclaiming they will conquer the universe and the universe simply responding "Oh really?" From there, you're walked through a brief tutorial which explains that in order to rid space of humans, you must flick fireballs at various satellites, space stations, and/or rockets to clear each level.

50 levels are included, and as you progress through the basic levels you eventually come across targets that have shields which must be hit twice to destroy. Further on, you come across asteroids in space with their own gravitational push or pull that must be intelligently used to arc or repel fireballs along with others that have to be ignited by existing flaming fireballs before they can be flicked. Gameplay is basic and fairly linear with most levels only having one viable solution. Also, playing through all 50 levels only took me (and others on our forums) less than an hour.

But neither the short play time or simple gameplay kept me from enjoying the game one bit. In fact, I'd say it's one of the better physics-based puzzlers I've played recently because it's just dripping with minimalistic style. Each level has a clever title which oftentimes is a vague hint for how you should complete the level. At the end you're met with an equally witty remark fitting the theme of purging the universe of humans which persists through every aspect of the game.

You could easily complain about the length of the game, the limited replay value, the extremely basic implementation of online scoring, and a number of other things. However, it isn't often that I come across an iPhone game that I enjoyed enough that I played from start to finish in one marathon session. I almost like that No, Human plays this way, as it feels like an oddly complete experience. The game doesn't drag on long enough for you to get tired of it, and instead I just found myself saying "Wow, that was cool" as I completed the 50th level and my overall score was displayed.

No, Human satisfies quite a few things from my checklist of what I like to see in iPhone games as well in that it does a good job of resuming when you quit the game, it's universal, and even looks great on the Retina Display of my iPhone 4. The developer is active in our forums, and the web site even mentions a potential expansion pack in the works.

If physics puzzle games are your thing, this isn't a game you want to miss.

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Craneball Studios is well known for providing us with apps that are just that little bit different to anything else out there. Their latest project to hit the App Store, Monorace [App Store] continues that tradition; a gravity-centric side-scrolling platform racer that takes takes one-touch gaming to a whole new place (or 'pace' for that matter).

Monorace pits you as one of three distinct drivers– Fat Big D, Skinny Gus and Hot Jane– of a giant mechanical wheel called a Monobike. The basic idea behind Monorace is straightforward– get to the finish line as quickly as you can and avoid going slow. Going slow is bad– it gets you stuck, it gets you minimal stars (which are needed to unlock further tracks), and ultimately, it gets you dead.

At the beginning of each level, your Monobike launches into full-throttle and never looks back– sticking to any surface it encounters but always moving forwards. Your job is limited to ensuring it always has somewhere to go, by avoiding obstacles and turning gravity on its head when the need calls for it. Gravity is pivitol in Monorace; as the entire world shifts on its head when you tap the screen, throwing its polarity upside-down. If you reach a ledge normally, you'll drop down to the next level; if you're racing upside-down, you'll drop upwards to the next level. If you're getting queasy already, don't fret– it's a whole lot easier in practice.

Another important feature to understand in Monorace is that slopes of any kind, be they upwards or downwards, will drastically slow your racer. The beginning tutorials make it clear that you are better off jumping mid-air down (or up) these chutes than touching the floors or cielings as they may be. Other obstacles are littered throughout the world which can also put the brakes on your racer. Spikes, pits, open-air gaps– these are all things that if not avoided, will end in your demise. Other obstacles like slow pads and jumpers (which force a polarity shift) can throw your speed and trajectory completely into disarray, whilst speed pads and time pickups are essential to getting the best laps.

The menus and characters in Monorace look really slick, and though the characters don't have any racing differences, their personalities and drawling over-the-top voice-overs lend a fun, tongue-in-cheek vibe. The levels themselves are blander in comparison; but when the game is paced as fast as it is, the lack of detail is not that noticeable. That said, I would have liked the detail of the menus to carry through to the rest of the game.

There are two career modes to choose from in Monorace, a Beginner career and a Racer career comprising 40 levels each. The former leniently scales the difficulty of its levels, whilst the latter throws you head-first into more mind-boggling and twitchy racing experiences. It often takes a couple of tries to get your head around certain sections of each race, particularly how the polarity shift will affect your headlong rush.

Supplementing the campaign mode in Monorace is also an Endless Mode which provides a randomly generated endless level in the same vein as the likes of Canabalt, scoring you based on how far you reach. Scoring in both modes is recorded by OpenFeint, which also niftily displays your friends scores in each level screen and lets you initiate Challenges, a feature that Monorace is obviously pushing users to make the most of, as your Challenge stats are displayed prominently on the main menu.

Monorace is a different kind of one-touch racer that provides some exhilarating but potentially frustrating gameplay, as repeat attempts can easily escalate into the dozens. In that respect (for better or worse) it reminded some of us a little of Squareball in feel. The career missions range from easy to outright gruelling, but the sheer number of them means completionists can be occupied for a long while. For those drawn to the topsy-turvy polarity shifting and break-neck pace of Monorace; a challenging, mind-bending racer awaits.

Be sure to check out the hilarious trailer above too, and pop into our Monorace thread to see what our readers are saying.

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Bumps is a new physics-based puzzle game from developer Utopian Games with a cute style and clever mechanics. Aliens have captured most of the population of a circular race known as bumps, and it's up to the few who haven't been caught to collect the keys on each level in order to release their friends from imprisonment. Don't let the lighthearted style of the game fool you, however, as some of the levels will really test your puzzle solving fortitude. With 54 unique levels and a number of interesting mini-games to play, Bumps will keep you entertained for quite some time.

To play each level, you'll strategically place bumps at various spots around the screen. Hitting a button then enables gravity, allowing the bumps to fall down and hopefully collect all the keys that correspond to each ones color. Oftentimes you'll even have to “bump” into another bump to push them and get them rolling towards a key. Other elements like springboards and moving platforms can help you accomplish your goal. There's even anti-gravity switches in certain levels, so once you drop the bumps to collect keys they will then hit the switch and have to float up to grab the others. It's a bit hard to explain but easy to get the hang of, and a nice tutorial introduces you to the concepts in Bumps. The levels are all really cleverly designed and will often have you smiling once you figure out the intended solutions.

Bumps is split into six differently themed worlds, with nine levels in each for a total of 54. Medals are awarded based on how many tries it takes you to complete a level, but every level can be retried as many times as needed if you get stuck. In a nice twist, each world begins with its own distinct mini-game to break up the action, and there are four other mini-games independent of the level structure that can be unlocked as well. The mini-games include variations on iPhone mainstays like air hockey, pinball, brickbreaker, and more. They're pretty simplified versions of these games but are a nice distraction from the puzzle solving.

While the gameplay in Bumps is well designed and fun, a couple issues about the game stick out as annoying. Hitting the retry button during a level resets the position of the bumps, so if you're just trying to make a small adjustment to one bump you'll have to reposition all of them over again. Also, by default the game zooms in when you touch a bump to give you a closer view. I didn't really like this zooming feature, and it can easily be disabled with an icon in the upper corner, but the game fails to remember that you disabled it from level to level, so it must be disabled each new level you play. These are relatively minor issues that don't affect the enjoyment of the game, and Utopian Games has already stated in our forums that both issues will be fixed in the next update, as well as adding a new world with nine brand new levels.

Overall, Bumps offers a good amount of gameplay wrapped in charming sound and visuals. The bouncy, floaty physics engine makes for an interesting way to solve puzzles, and is a lot of fun. iPad owners can look forward to a native version of Bumps coming to that device in the next couple of months. This version won't be a direct port, and will feature all new levels and graphics to take advantage of the extra screen size and higher resolution. The mini-games in the iPad version will have same device multiplayer for up to four players, which should make for some hectic fun in between solving puzzles. Until that time though, the iPhone version of Bumps is a blast, and is recommended if you're looking a new puzzler with some unique ideas.

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Ponos is one of the App Store developers that always gets my attention when they release a new game. Their first title was the underappreciated Puzzle Prism, a 3D-tower take on Tetris. Their followup titles included the enjoyable and original Mr. AahH! and Mr. Space!!.

With Puzzle Cosmos they return to their block dropping roots and have released what can best be described as a cross between Tetris and Lumines.

In Puzzle Cosmos you are presented with dropping square shaped pieces made up of up to 4 different colored blocks. The goal is to match up to 4 different like colors in order to eliminate them from the board. Once a piece falls down, you are able to move it to the left or right on the board. The piece "rolls" along the board changing its orientation (along with the colors it is composed of). Once you are happy with the position, you can drop it into place. If you match up four colors they begin to glow. After a short period of time, those pieces are eliminated from the board. However, you can continue to add like-colored pieces during that small window to build up chains and increase your score.

Throughout the game, the board steadily rises pushing the entire board towards the top of the screen. So, it becomes a fast-paced race to stay ahead by eliminating blocks as quickly as possible.

The game comes with both flick and customizable button controls. I thought the button controls worked perfectly and never bothered switching from the defaults. Global high scores are included as well as 4 different game modes: Standard, Time Attack, Dead Line, and Flash / Rain.

In some ways, I love this game. There were a few people in our forums for which the game never seemed to "click". But for me, the fast paced nature of the game really gave me a frantic Tetris vibe that I hadn't had in a long time. Little design decisions like being able to rotate a block in place when it is up against a tall structure adds some strategy/skill beyond the luck of the drop. That said, this game is hard. Unlocking the additional modes require you to score 50,000 or higher in Standard. I've only been able to hit that score a handful of times, and when I do it seems as much to do with luck of the pieces as it does with my skill as a player. The game just ramps up really quickly, and I'd love to see a more casual mode where you could take your time.

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For all the remarkable games we are seeing nowadays on the App Store, we are blessed with very few epic RPGs. It seems that developers are still unwilling to invest in the content heavy, quest-driven adventures that many other platforms routinely enjoy. Publisher Nate Games has thoughtfully identified this gap in the market and have given us the next best thing– a direct port of a critically acclaimed 2009 title for the PSP– Crimson Gem Saga [$9.99] by Atlus Games.

As the name would suggest, Crimson Gem Saga is indeed an epic by definition, weighing in at a satisfying 30-40 hours of story-driven, turn-based combat and exploration of a colorful, mythical world. Crimson Gem Saga makes no delusions, drawing strongly from the tenets of the Dragon Quest series in doing little to crack the molds of the genre, but focusing instead on bringing that traditional RPG experience in as fine a package as possible.

The wrapper to that package comes by way Killian, a tightly wound chevalier graduating from military academy and ready to embark on a new life in the big wide world. It's a setting told ad nauseum by RPGs, a factor that Crimson Gem Saga doesn't shy from. Wholly self-aware, Crimson Gem Saga instead colors that grey backdrop with a surprisingly well written, often humorous dialogue and a host of jaded protagonists alway at each other's throats– an interaction practically unheard of in JRPGs.

To look at Crimson Gem Saga, one would have to agree that it delivers abundantly in eye candy. The game is portrayed with a mixture of highly detailed and diversely animated sprites (for both characters and world objects) and painted, layered level design. In many ways, Crimson Gem Saga aspires to the likes of Star Ocean, with the same colorful and richly populated world and detailed anime dialogue sequences rounding out the game's visual spectacle.

Undoubtedly the meat of any RPG is in its combat system, where you'll be spending the majority of your time over the length of the story. And combat remains largely derivative in Crimson Gem Saga. You won't find any complex limit system or interwoven skill trees to get your head around; but on the iOS devices, that is actually a blessing. The most difficult concept to master is the eventual use of linked attacks, where certain powerful skills are only made available if particular characters have consecutive turns. Otherwise combat is straightforward but constantly challenging, maintaining its lustre throughout the game.

Where Crimson Gem Saga falls short is in its seemingly lazy port; something of a curse of crossing the platform barrier. The on-screen buttons are just plain ugly, something that could be forgiven (though we wish there was an option to hide them entirely) if the implementation was otherwise acceptable. But this is not the case, with the menu system providing a saga of its own to overcome. Context sensitive areas on the screen aren't readily understandable, and the swiping mechanic is backwards and overly sensitive. Granted, hours of playing the game does eventually train you to negotiate the UI's hitches, but do expect initial frustration.

Compounding these issues are a few major bugs encountered; from a game-stopping cutscene crash we experienced on our first play through (fortunately, not on our second), to a widely experienced upgrading item crash. And voiced dialogues are terrific when they do work, but also intermittently cut out and seem to arbitrarily skip sequences. The silver lining to all this is that the developer has already responded to complaints on our forums with a patch being worked on to address some of these problems.

Notwithstanding the above, Crimson Gem Saga is a well-rounded title whose whole certainly exceeds the sum of its parts. Its traditional approach to RPGs meshes well with its witty dialogue to deliver a surprisingly engrossing adventure. Though combat is simple, even the average encounter is never a push over and so remains fun and engaging. The characters too are infectious and constantly at odds with each other; giving rise to some very funny dialogue and pop gaming culture references. If you can endure the clumsily ported menu system, then Crimson Gem Saga will reward you with a notoriously rare, epic RPG on the iOS platform.

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An official version of Risk [$4.99] just hit the App Store, and as I mentioned in the roundup from the recent EA event, this really seems like too little too late from the massive game developer. When third party software first graced the iPhone, it wasn't hard to see the potential that the touch interface had for board games, and this potential only grew as Apple implemented push notifications which allowed developers to create some extremely robust asynchronous multiplayer experiences. An absolutely fantastic example of this in the classic board game arena is Carcassonne [$4.99] which we detailed in our review not too long ago. In Carcassonne, developers The Coding Monkeys masterfully duplicated the board game while providing more single player and multiplayer features than I think anyone was expecting when we first heard of the game.

In Risk: The Official Game, EA brings a fully licensed version of Risk to the App Store with futuristic looking graphics, a decent soundtrack, and all the same army fortifying dice rolling gameplay that has been evolving for the last 50 years through various iterations of the board game. You can either play single player against AI opponents, or play local multiplayer with up to 6 players on a single device, or up to 4 players with their own devices via WiFi or Bluetooth. There's a decent amount of stat tracking and achievements in game, but that's where the bells and whistles stop.

The problem with Risk is that the brand name is so powerful that I think that most people who are downloading it are just thinking, "Oh, finally, Risk for the iPhone!" without being aware of the many other better alternatives which aren't exactly the same as Risk, but scratch the same strategic dice rolling itch– Often with much more content, options, and game modes. If this applies to you, here are just a few of the better Risk knock-offs available on the App Store:

Lux DLX 2, $4.99 – This world conquest game which recently was updated to version 2.0 sports universal compatibility between the iPhone and iPad, single device multiplayer, challenging AI, and tons of new maps to play that can be downloaded within the game for free. If you want to try Lux before buying, there are two different free versions, Lux Touch, and Lux USA which are also universal apps.

Generals – Online Global Conquest!, $2.99 – Where Generals lacks in multiple maps it more than makes up for in the online multiplayer department. Like most Risk-like games, you can play locally on one device with human or AI opponents and Generals also allows you to organize online games over WiFi or 3G. Currently, games are played in real time online, but the developers are working on an update to add push notifications to allow for up to 20 games to be played simultaneously as well as more online game modes. The free version has ads and no multiplayer, but will give you a good idea of what you're getting in to.

Stratergery, $1.99 – Also a universal app, Strategery boasts single player, single device multiplayer, and online multiplayer with push notifications. My favorite thing about Strategery is that it randomly generates maps of four different sizes, which always keeps things fresh since you need to develop new strategies on the fly instead of just going by your old standby of building up armies in Australia. Strategery Lite is also available, which doesn't have any ads but lacks a few gameplay options and online multiplayer.

Dominion, $1.99 – Like the other games already mentioned, Dominion has local and online multiplayer with either classic world domination mode or objective based games. It has multiple maps and a full featured online component with asynchronous push alert powered play, player statistics, and a bunch of other goodies. Unfortunately, Dominion isn't universal so if you don't want to run the game pixel doubled on your iPad you will have to spring for Dominion HD.

Unless you really really need to play the official Risk game for some reason, I'd really give any of the four previously mentioned games a spin if you're looking for some awesome online world conquest action. At least for me, board games are exponentially more fun when you're playing with real people, and if the success of Words With Friends [$2.99 / Free] is any indication, most tend to agree.

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