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Heads up: Junk Jack [$2.99 / Lite] is going Universal really, really soon — provided nothing goes wrong in the certification process. Creator Pixbits has submitted the long-awaited, might-not-be-hey-it-could-happen update to Apple and are waiting for it to go live with just as much glee as we imagine the third-person mining game’s fans are.

This update also includes an exhaustive amount of fixes, tweaks, and changes, as we’ve come to expect from Pixbits. Of note, golems, mummies, frogs, new frogs, and headless zombies have joined the list of mobs. The game’s visuals have also been tweaked thanks to its “faster engine,” and cooking and farming are now a thing you can do. If you’re really into what’s new, definitely check out the game’s official blog. For example, there is no way you would have known that the maximum stack count is 65535 unless you read it somewhere else. Nope, no way.

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On paper, Radiant Defense [Free] doesn’t stack up when compared to other tower defense titles. It shouldn’t be as good as it is. I mean, it only has ten levels, and its free-to-play model gives you just a handful of towers to work with unless you want to pay more. But Hexage is full of surprises, and this free tower defense game is certainly one of them. It might not work on paper, but it sure works in practice.

All too often, freemium titles either lock all the fun behind a paywall or let you skip right over the gameplay if you put down your money. Radiant Defense does neither. I can’t say for sure that you can get through all ten levels without making a purchase. I couldn’t, because Radiant Defense is crazy hard. Buying any (or all) of the four optional tower packs gives you more room to strategize, but it just barely makes the game easier. Paid or free, you’re going to have to get your hands dirty.

Radiant Defense offers a mix between static path defense and the ability to create complex mazes. Players are often handed a few loose modules between waves. These can be used to build walls. Sometimes this is advantageous—drawing enemies out along long, winding paths is a good way to make sure they die well before reaching their goal. Other times it’s suicidal. Some enemies regenerate, so luring them away from your carefully crafted kill zone just means they’ll continue on, fresh and ready for more.

The tower selection adapts to any situation the game throws at you. You start out with the ability to build or research ballistic weapons for pure damage, energy weapons to take out shields, and the other usual suspects—towers that slow or weaken the enemies, and powerful area-of-effect towers. The purchasable packs add variety, with mines and blades to bar passage, weapons of mass destruction, and a few things that are just plain odd. Each has its own cost and drawbacks, though, making for a decently balanced experience no matter how many (or few) packs you own.

That balance falls on the side of intensely challenging throughout. Radiant Defense is unforgiving, with brutally long levels (making up for their limited selection) and increasingly aggressive waves. The game never lets up—every time you think you might have a handle on all the tricks you’ll need, it throws even more enemies at you in even more aggressive combinations. It can be aggravating, but it makes winning all the sweeter.

Not every part of the challenge is as sweet, unfortunately. The worst bit is dealing with frustrating tower AI. Towers will happily shoot the first thing that crosses their paths, blithely ignoring targets that are about to hit the goal. This behavior is consistent, so you can plan for it. It might even be intentional—it certainly gives players a reason not to use tight corridors to their advantage each and every time. But as difficulty goes, this isn’t the fun sort. It can leave you floundering moments after you’re sure you have everything under control.

There are concessions to this frustration, though. Each wave can be restarted as many times as you need without penalty, so you’re free to experiment with the best possible moves you can make with the resources you have. Anything you do before beginning the wave will stick, though, and while you can sell back unused towers at cost, upgrades can’t really be reversed. Your strategy may hinge on what seems like a simple decision: whether to spend your cash in the lull between waves or save it for the madness in the midst of combat. The latter is easier to revert but much harder to pull off.

That sort of decision-making drives the strategy of Radiant Defense. It’s rarely just a matter of this tower or that tower. Instead you’re balancing upgrades, positioning, and pathing, all while you decide if you should meet the current threat with force or save up for an unknown future.

If you’re comfortable with difficult games, Radiant Defense is easily worth the download. It’s a nice little package—decent art and music wrapped around generally excellent gameplay—and the price is more than right. It’s refreshing to find a game that respects your intelligence, money, and time. All the better that it’s good fun, too. Take a look, and stop by our discussion thread to share your thoughts.

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Reviewing games you have a history with is always difficult, especially when they’re derivative titles from a series you hold dear to your heart. Looking back on it, at some point I’ve owned each of the eight Burnout games that make up the franchise going back to the original that was released all the way back in 2001.

If you’ve never played a proper Burnout game (which is a problem you really should look into solving) here’s what the series is all about- Imagine a high-octane arcade racer that not only has a fabulous sense of speed, but takes the typical car damage system dozens of steps further into a car crashing system. Instead of merely beating the competition to the finish line, gameplay focuses on making sure your your opponents never actually make it there.

Subsequent sequels took this many steps further, even evolving into entire game modes that focused entirely on orchestrating the most elaborate pile-ups you can. It’s from these game modes that Burnout Crash [ $4.99 ] is distilled from, making its original appearance on Xbox Live Arcade and PSN late last year.

In Crash, the familiar racing game camera angle is replaced with an overhead birds-eye view of your car. The game consists of a series of intersections, each with slightly different layouts and traffic patterns, and you need to unleash as much damage as possible. Initially, you drive in, and slam into some cars. Cause enough damage, and you’ll be able to explode again, and vaguely control where your car gets blasted to in the process. This continues until you’ve either let five cars escape off screen, or you’ve reached the damage threshold for the level.

Burnout Crash perfectly embodies the horrid cliche of “Easy to learn, but difficult to master.” It’ll only take you a few tries to get a handle on the game physics, but actually learning the nuances of where to try to stack up cars on each intersection and how to position your own car to not mess up existing piles almost turns Crash an entirely unexpected physics puzzle game, especially if you jump into it expecting something like previous Burnout titles.

Gameplay is further spiced up by special cars that appear such as a wave of police cars that block part of the intersection to the insufferably terrible driver Dr. Beat who will restore one of your missed cars if he survives his drive on and off screen. (However, as Penny Arcade points out, he’ll crash into anything.) Additional game modes also add a decent amount of replay value.

My first experience with Burnout Crash was on Xbox Live Arcade, as a $15 title. Like most Burnout games, the overall energy of the game was amplified by a real soundtrack, heavy amounts of voice work, and a fabulous tutorial, creating an absolutely fantastic first impression. Those last two things? Nowhere to be found in the iOS port of the game. I could understand cutting a lot of the voice overs if EA was shooting for the 3G download limit, but the game weighs in at 146MB currently. The lack of any kind of tutorial is even more puzzling, and has left players in our forums confused as to what you’re even supposed to do in the game.

That’s not what has me personally disappointed the most though, as I already know how to play and usually play iOS games with the sound very low or off so voiceovers don’t do much for me. What I’m bummed about is that for whatever reason, EA thought the best (and only) way to control the game was via a weird system of swiping gestures to move your car around after each crash breaker explosion.

If you can “see the Matrix” behind Burnout Crash, it’s apparent that what you’re playing is a very elaborate and cleverly disguised ball-rolling game. Imagine something like Labyrinth 2 [ $4.99 ], except instead of freely rolling the ball you can only move when a crash breaker triggers, and instead of trying to make it to the end, you’re trying to roll into as much as you can. It’s because of this that tilt controls, even when playing on the Xbox 360, felt like they’d make the most sense- as they often do in top-down games.

On the technical side of things, given just how long EA has been working on the iOS port of Burnout Crash, there’s some odd flaws. While I’m thankful the game is universal, some of the textures in game are blatantly low-resolution on the new iPad. I’ve experienced Game Center weirdness, with popups often telling me that the game is not recognized by Game Center. Additionally, most intersections start with some noticeable frame rate drops as you race towards them. Also, the little springy “boing” sound that plays each time you swipe the screen really needs to go.

Admittedly, I’m probably being overly nitpicky because of my experience with this game. However, the things Crash feels like it’s missing don’t make a whole lot of sense, especially when it comes to the game’s tutorial. Regardless, I’m still going to play through Crash over and over again on my iPad, with my fingers crossed that EA eventually addresses some of these things. And even if they don’t, if you’ve never played the console version, I’m not even sure you’ll care or notice.

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I love word games, but they have a bit of a PR problem: the vast, vast majority are glorified takes on the word search with a new hook here and a novel mechanic there. And y’know, I don’t really mind—give me a reason to frantically form words and I’m usually happy. Letterbox [$1.99] is a pretty good reason. It’s a game in the word-search mold, bringing in 3D block stacking for its special touch.

Word hunting in 3D is entertaining on its own, but Letterbox goes a step further. Finding words is a means to an end—the real goal is to use those words with a variety of special blocks to tear your tower down. It becomes a game as much about destruction as it is about creating words.

Though ShockPanda is keen to call the game “Jenga meets Boggle” in its marketing material, the Jenga comparison is a bit loose. There is no fear of collapse, here, no tottering physics. Instead, you carve away at your cube with each word you make, letters disappearing and leaving gaps behind.

It’s easy to create precarious outcroppings of letters that become utterly useless. But with a little careful planning, you can carve away their supports and let them tumble down. In Jenga this would be a failure—here it’s a necessity. Once reunited with the bulk of your letters, those left over Ws and Ks that were so useless on their own become powerful tools.

The more awkward letters of the alphabet are marked as orange blocks rather than white, and each one is destructive in its own way. Sometimes they’ll clear a tunnel straight through your tower, other times they’ll clear all the blocks that surround them. That’s great, because your ultimate goal is to clear away 100 percent of the blocks on screen. It’s a high bar to reach, but it’s a lot of fun to try.

There are other special blocks to help you strategize. Some rotate whole rows or columns. Another merges nearby blocks into a single mega-block. I have a love/hate relationship with the one that drops down a new layer of letters. It slows down your climb toward 100 percent, but it may be the only thing to do if you can’t find a word in what you have. And, of course, wild card blocks are always a treat.

Letterbox comes complete with three game modes. In Clear Mode, every word you play drops more letters on the pile. In Panic Mode, they’re added every few seconds. Chill Mode gives you only the letters you start with. They’re minor iterations on the original concept, but they switch the game up just enough to keep it from getting stale too quickly.

Though the fundamentals are solid, Letterbox flubs some of the details. The camera is reined in too tightly, so you can’t always see the letters on top of the tower or deeper inside it well enough to tap them. The interface is uncomfortably reminiscent of SpellTower [$1.99] at times. The soundtrack borders on grating—it’s full of well-executed electropop by Yung Sir, but vocal tracks don’t mesh well with extended play sessions.

It’s fun to destroy your way though each tower of letters, compelling enough to keep an eye on Game Center to see if you can come up with the best word or the highest clear percentage. But ultimately Letterbox is one more play on traditional word game mechanics, and it isn’t quite cool enough to overcome the creeping sense of familiarity. If you’ve been looking for a new word game to pass the time, check it out and let us know what you think. If it would take something really special to convince you to drop one more word game onto the pile, this isn’t the game to get you there.

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A lot of studios are turning to the casual market to expand their base and diversify portfolios speckled in viscera and splatters of crimson. League of Evil studio Ravenous Games is doing just that with its side-scrolling puzzle game Burger Cat. The result is unique: Ravenous is undoubtedly delivering something that feels like a Ravenous joint, but it’s appropriate for our little ones and game-challenged family members.

It accomplishes this by removing the barrier of entry, while maintaining the vibe and the high-level production we expect from a Ravenous product. In the game, you play as a cat on a quest to find hamburgers. Functionally, this adventures boils down to a bunch of instanced quests where you, as a maestro of landscaping, have to alter the 2D world the cat inhabits in order to get him to a burger. The movement is automatic, but your ability to add and remove blocks of land or introduce an item that changes the way the cat interacts with its world is manual.

For example, in the game’s first level, you’ll need to add a block of land to the corner of a hill so the cat can scramble up the hill as if it were a stairway. In the next, you actually build a similar stairway with three blocks of land, two of which will need to be stacked on top of each other. As the game progresses, you’ll get much more imaginative items: a mouse that re-directs the cat’s attention, a spring that rockets the cat into the air, a pick-axe that removes pieces of the environment, and so on. Actual obstacles that add repercussions, like spinning cogs with blades, are added steadily. The items you’ll receive have a hard cap in each level, and I had the most fun really playing with what I could do with the least amount of stuff, though creating conga lines of items has its simple pleasures, too. In fact, Burger Cat seems to encourage experimentation, as it often gives you way too much.

It’s a different game from the folks who made League of Evil, but it feels similar from a production standpoint. The art is bright and bubbly like the new visuals in League of Evil 2, and the animation work is on par. Music, on the other hand, is exceedingly epic. It almost rewards you before you do anything. Excuse me, but I want my Ode To Joy when I get my hamburger, and not before.

If this looks familiar by the way, it’s because it existed on Flash before. Burger Cat is a new-look port of a WobblyWare title you can play for free right now. In this shot of the original below, take note of how smooth this new iteration looks: no more grids, a less clumsy UI, and less mess in general.

“We updated the graphics to be more cartoony and made some design changes to make another one of our polished iOS releases,” Ravenous told TouchArcade. “The game just felt more suited to touch screen controls and has a lot of potential with the casual market.” And it does play exceedingly better. This game is a breeze to control with your fingers. I’ve zero complaints with what I’ve played so far.

And that’s the thing: we haven’t seen everything Burger Cat has to offer, so stay tuned as we obtain a final build and deliver our final thoughts. My gut says, though, that this is something we’ll be pretty happy with, even though we’re not its market. Look for this to hit April 12 across iPhone and iPad.

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Ever been BASE jumping? Yeah, me neither. The closest I’ve come is with AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! (Force = Mass x Acceleration) [$2.99] by Dejobaan Games and Owlchemy Labs (the folks behind Snuggle Truck [Free]). This is the latest in a series of extreme BASE-jumping titles from Dejobaan, but it’s the first to come to iOS. As we mentioned in our preview, it’s a somewhat shortened port of AaAaAA! for the Awesome, and it’s pretty fantastic.

I’ve messed around with the PC AaAaAA! titles, but they’ve never really clicked for me. Now I know why: I wasn’t playing with tilt controls. There’s a world of difference between controlling a fall with a joystick or mouse and peering down over a massive drop, diving over and holding your fate in your hands. Not quite the difference between playing a game and actually jumping, but it’s still pretty great.

Tilt controls are a turn-off for a lot of people, and I’m no exception. I like the idea of being comfortable playing a game while out in public, and that’s a lot less possible when you’re thrashing around like someone who’s never held a controller before. I set that prejudice aside for AaAaAA!, and I have no regrets. The tilt controls are precise, kinetic, and massively immersive.

AaAaAA! is BASE jumping in a fantasy land. The acronym stands for buildings, antennas, spans and earth, and those are the things you’ll jump from here, but they’re structures designed by a madman in a world without physical constraints. Hundreds of towers floating and merging on top of one another, highways that spiral in and out and around each other in endless stacks, ventilation shafts with dozens of fanblades leading into great tunnels of rings – these are just some of the pathways and obstacles encountered during the game’s many journeys to the ground.

This take on BASE jumping also ratchets up the difficulty from reality. The sport is incredibly dangerous, but much of that sense of danger would be lost in a straight digital translation. Most levels would be a quick fall with a brief landing. Instead of being ranked by distance traveled, here players are ranked by how much risk they can take on without breaking every bone in their virtual bodies. Scores are determined by kisses and hugs: a kiss is a structure near-missed, and hugs are earned by holding close to any single structure. This is, as one might imagine, extremely likely to end in maiming, and should never be tried at home.

The result is a very tense game. I found myself gripping my phone tightly, jerking it out of the way of this oncoming girder or that platform I hadn’t noticed. A prayer under the breath seemed suitable after some tight escapes. It was more than enough to convince me I’m not cut out for BASE jumping, but I sure enjoy the facsimile.

AaAaAA! comes equipped with a few dozen levels, and you can choose how you want to approach them. You begin with a small supply of teeth (and has there ever been a more disturbing currency name?). These aren’t a premium currency, you earn them in-game. You can unlock any level beside, above or below one you can already access, using a thousand teeth or so to open each of the first few. The costs increase from there. So do the rewards: you earn up to 1300 teeth per star, and each level awards up to five stars.

To get top marks, you’ll need to use the unlockable tools you can find scattered in the level map. One gives you the ability to interact with spectators. Fans stand on blue girders in some levels, and protesters stand on red ones. You can give your fans the thumbs-up for extra points, and you can flip off your foes. It’s a particularly satisfying way to earn bonus points. There are also bonuses to be earned for spraying graffiti on government buildings, if you want to be a little extra subversive.

Otherwise earning the big scores just requires good performance and a bit of understanding of the level layout. Each level comes with a training blurb to help you find the best approach. Sometimes that’s whipping around collecting kisses, other time it’s aiming for bonus score plates. Once in a while it’s hitting birds on the way down. The game can be a touch gruesome, but the looks are always sterile and unbloodied.

You don’t need to do extremely well to unlock all the levels—an average of three stars or so should do. It’s just more fun to go for five. Also worth noting is that 21 of the levels are leaderboard levels. Game Center’s restrictions don’t allow for all the levels to come with leaderboards, but there’s a nice representative mix that you can compete on.

There are a few extras to be found in the journey, but I won’t spoil them. Suffice it to say that Dejobaan has a quirky sense of humor, and there are oddities to be found around every corner. Some are obvious, like entertaining splash screens and odd vocal cues. Others can be unlocked, and ought to be experienced at least once.

In fact, I’ll go ahead and say the whole game ought to be experienced at least once. I’ve had a ridiculously good time with it. AaAaAA! is an excellent game, and for me, at least, this is the definitive way to play it. The quirkiness goes overboard from time to time, but it’s easy to skip past to get to the good stuff: the white-knuckled dives straight down to near-certain death. It’s almost enough to make one want to BASE jump. Or maybe skydive—if AaAaAA! taught me anything, it’s that my extreme sport career would be short-lived. If you’re also into armchair sports you should pick this game up, then drop by our forum thread. We’d love to hear about all your close calls.

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I came to Jeff Minter’s oeuvre late, around the time of the XBLA release of Space Giraffe. I mention this not (only) to display the depths of my ignorance, but to provide context: there’s more to love in Gridrunner [$0.99] than just nostalgia. For anyone who missed the heyday of the Commodore 64, Minter’s iOS titles might seem a bit unapproachable, but consider giving them a shot – they might surprise you.

Gridrunner wears its roots proudly, but it isn’t a dogmatically faithful recreation of the 1982 original. Or, rather, it isn’t only that: both the Vic-20 and Commodore 64 version of the title are present here as optional modes. The real fun is in the remake, which takes the things that made Gridrunner great from the start and runs with them. The grid and its cruel lasers, the little ship that faces them down alone, the flying droids and the missile pods they leave behind – all these things return. This time they bring along retina graphics, power ups, new foes and moments of bullet-pulsing glory.

This isn’t the first time that Minter has revisited Gridrunner—it’s the third in the last decade alone. Gridrunner++ was released in 2002 and Gridrunner Revolution came out in 2009. Both brought in big changes. They were trippy, colorful departures, introducing features like score multipliers and ship rotation. This new iteration hews a little closer to the original, but Minter has clearly brought in much of the game design wisdom he’s picked up in the interim. The resulting game looks and plays like the original – assuming your memories of the original come with a big helping of rose-tinted nostalgia.

This new Gridrunner is a great little vertical shooter, the classic turned on its side. There is only one potential problem standing in the way of enjoying it as much as any retroesque shooter on iOS – its controls. If you play on an iPhone or iPod touch, you might be in for trouble. If you play on iPad, have patience. Once you’re past the learning curve, things will be just fine.

The controls feel quite a bit like Mage Gauntlet’s [$2.99] Pro Stick. As with that game’s superb virtual joystick, you can put your finger nearly anywhere on screen and move your fingertip minutely to move your ship in any direction. This took some adjustment. Most vertical shooters I’ve played use 1:1 movement ratios, and emulating that had hilarious but wildly ineffective results. I had to learn to move gently, and to stop lifting my finger (for goodness’ sake). Once I got over that hump I was very satisfied with the precision of the controls, especially once I switched to my iPad. They’re equally precise on smaller devices, but I can’t find a spot to comfortably rest my finger without regularly blocking important stuff like my ship and the things coming to kill it.

After moving over to iPad, I could finally see what all the fuss was about. It’s hard to survive in the world of Gridrunner. As with any shooter, there’s a mess of enemies to deal with. Centipedes that travel back and forth and diagonally, blobs that travel erratically, shrapnel bombs, ships that hunt you—the list goes on. Some leave behind static pods that must be destroyed before they drop missiles (though those missiles are worth quite a few points if shot down…), and all the while a laser travels across the edge of the grid, firing downward every few seconds.

Defeating enemies is particularly rewarding in this iteration, as many drop rings that power up your shots. There are eight different powerups, and they can be stacked and combined in interesting ways. There are spread shots and directional shots that can speed up, spread out, last longer and ultimately explode into bullet hell when upgraded far enough. This lasts only moments, but it’s an incredibly satisfying few seconds while it does.

Without multipliers or any other finicky scoring mechanics to worry about, surviving is the only real mark of success. With so much out to kill you, you can’t afford to let your focus drift for even a moment. You’ll die a lot, but Gridrunner has that covered: at the end of each level it awards an extra life. This won’t always be enough. Eventually you’ll burn out your last life, and then it’s game over.

For players who are more concerned with seeing all the levels than earning the most prestigious scores, Gridrunner has a casual mode. This saves your best scores and life count every four levels and lets your restart there when you fail. Casual mode is ranked on its own leaderboard, but it’s still worth playing for those of us who need a little help progressing. For the hardcore, Pure mode is where it’s at.

As I mentioned, you can also play the original Vic-20 and Commodore 64 versions of the game. It took me a little while to find them, but I adore the way they’re accessed: just turn your device on its side. Either side will do, as each offers its own alternate mode. Cool, no? Also a bit opaque, but them’s the breaks when Minter’s involved. Similarly, the game is paused by tapping a spot in the middle of the upper half of the screen. There’s an invisible paw/heart shape there, I’m sure you’ll manage to find it.

There are more than a few other Minterisms to be found – odd text splashes as you progress, ridiculous kudos for passing each level, that sort of thing. Still, this is one of the more restrained games of his I’ve played, easy on goat breeding, llamas, wacky visuals and awkward sound effects. I rather miss those things, but I suppose we’ll always have GoatUp [$1.99].

Whether you have reason to be nostalgic for Gridrunner or not, it’s worth checking out. It’s a best-of-both-worlds sort of remake: faithful to its forebearers but filled with clever modern enhancements. If you’re dead-set on believing that the original is best, you can go ahead and play that instead. It even has its own leaderboard. Really, though, newer is better in this case. Hopefully we’ll see an alternative control set for the iPhone and iPod touch crew, but if you’ve got an iPad it’s all systems go. Enjoy, and pop by our forum thread to brag about your high score.

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There’s nothing like a freak ice storm to make me crave a tropical vacation. Warm, sandy beaches, gentle ukulele music, streaming sunlight, being fired from a slingshot in an attempt to rescue a captured princess—there’s really no substitute. I guess the closest I’m going to get for now is playing Brave Beak [Free], a tropical adventure with an island soundtrack that just might help me forget that I’m a hollow shell of a person waiting for the barren landscape to crack and bring even a glimpse of the glorious spring that is to come.

In Brave Beak, you control a cranky little parrot on a mission. You must direct him through a tropical paradise knocking down obstacles, freeing prisoners, collecting treasure and gobbling up fish, rainbows and even bits of the moon to keep his energy up and save a captured princess. I’m not sure why the bird is so very, very cranky (perhaps the pressure of being a parrot forced to fly through space itself and rescue a princess single-wingedly got to him), but during the course of the game a lot of valuable island real estate is damaged, ships are sunk, and (in a move sure to…ruffle a few feathers) local wildlife get unceremoniously slapped out of the way.

At first glance, Brave Beak kind of looks like an Angry Birds/Tiny Wings hybrid. You’re fired from a slingshot, knock down precariously stacked structures, and tap the screen to keep your bird aloft. When playing, however, it doesn’t feel like either of those games. In a way, it feels almost like a Super Mario game, right down to the coin collecting aspect…if Mario was, uh, actually a bird, flew around instead of jumped, and ate fish all day long.

The controls are incredibly simple. Tap the screen to send your bird higher through the clouds, let go to plummet towards the ground. The higher you fly, the more energy you use, and if you run out completely you fall unceremoniously to the ground and the level is over. You can replenish your energy throughout the level by eating fish, coconuts, rainbows (yes, really) and more. Additionally, you can make your energy last longer through the judicious use of elements the game gives you, such as kites, ramps, and hammocks to catapult you further through the levels while giving your wings a rest.

In a page out of Jetpack Joyride’s book, each level has a set of objectives that you must complete in order to move on. These objectives range from “collect x amount of x” to subtle introductions to game mechanics such as “taste the rainbow,” alerting you to ways of better playing the game without boring, obtrusive tutorials. And since it’s unlikely that you’ll complete each objective your first run (flight?) through a level, the replay value is high, with minimum frustrations.

In addition to the story-progressing objectives, there are other challenges you can undertake too. Each level has five gold coins to collect, and there are various items with different properties to help extend gameplay, add points, and otherwise enhance the game. There’s a feature that enables you to send messages in bottles to other friends playing the game, which they pick up during the course of their own adventures. It’s kind of a fun way to interact with friends over the game (on top of the standard “I’m pwning u on the leaderboards” way), and it’s these touches that kept me replaying levels despite having already beaten them.

Overall, the game quality is so high and the gameplay so fun that it was well worth the download for me. Now, if only future updates could somehow make one of those fruity drinks with all the umbrellas appear next to me (preferably in a coconut bowl with a Krazy Straw), it would be pretty much near perfection.

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I may be dating myself here, but there was a time when I was completely obsessed with Windows Solitaire. I wanted to see every pixel of the game’s window covered in the cards that hopped down at the end of the game, and the obsession lasted just as long as it took to make that happen. Since then, stacking cards onto other cards hasn’t held the same charm. Then I picked up Fairway Solitaire [Free / HD] and now I’d kind of like my life back, please.

It’s not that Fairway Solitaire is particularly challenging—quite the opposite, in fact. It follows Big Fish Games’ usual mandate of making everything as player-friendly as possible. But between the dead simple gameplay and the weirdly compelling golf metaphors, I’m totally engrossed. And reading around online and in our forums, I’m not alone. This game gets its hooks into people more than one might expect from a golf-themed card game.

The game is built around one-card draw solitaire. The field is covered in cards that are stacked in various piles, face up or face down, and one card is drawn from the remaining deck at a time. You can put any card on top of that draw if it’s higher or lower by one. You keep stacking them until you have no cards left within one point on either side, and then you draw your next card.

Golf provides the framework in with the game is played. Each game is a single hole of a golf course. The score for an individual hole doesn’t matter all that much because your real goal is to hit below par for the whole course. The beauty of this system is that when you get to those awful awkward moments when the last few cards on the table just won’t work, you can end your game and move on to the next hole.

In fact, a cleared table will land you well under par. Not only does this make successful games particularly rewarding, it also keeps you from getting bogged down in losses. Just pick up your clubs, dust yourself off and move on to the next hole. You’ll even it out in the end.

Speaking of clubs, they play a vital role in Fairway Solitaire. You can find them as you play or buy them with Golf Bucks, and they can be used as cards for cheating. Whenever you’re in a tight spot with few cards left in your deck, you can pull out a relevant club and build off that instead. Again, this design cuts down on frustration and adds a teensy bit of strategy thanks to the relative scarcity of Golf Bucks and the long cooldown on each club.

Not that they’re all that scarce. You earn Golf Bucks for everything you do. They come from achievements, from finishing holes, from really good shots. They also come from in-app purchases, if you’re so inclined. You can use them to buy clubs or gear that gives you other advantages, like letting you see how many cards are left in the deck or clearing away a few hazards at the start of each hole.

Fairway Solitaire starts with one course pack, which contains six courses and about twenty-four holes total. If you choose to pay a dollar to unlock the rest of the courses, there are ten course packs that open up as you progress and one that can be unlocked with Golf Bucks. The differences between holes lie in the card layouts, the hazards present (which generally must be cleared by finding a hidden card or sacrificing a card from your deck), and the number of cards you need to get through to make par. Since most of the holes have their card selections randomly assigned, you can pretty much play forever.

Quirks abound, like realistically banal golf banter (which can be turned off) and overarching story about an angry gopher. The latter only comes up when you draw a wild card, which will throw you into a random gopher-related situation. Some give you clubs or take away your cards, and some are silly little minigames that award you with Golf Bucks.

Some of the other quirks of the game are less pleasant.The HD version doesn’t include Game Center, while the standard version is about double the file size. Multitasking drops off unusually quickly and without it you’ll be sent back to the start of the hole. And prepared to be inundated with ads for other Big Fish Games titles whenever you load Fairway Solitaire up fresh.

Those annoyances aside, this is the new solitaire title to beat in my books. What it lacks in difficulty it makes up for in sheer mindless entertainment, which is arguably what solitaire does best. If you want to push for a bigger challenge you can always go for three stars on each course, but success ultimately comes down to luck of the draw. Instead, I’d recommend enjoying Fairway Solitaire as the never-ending meditative experience that it is. Let other games be challenging. For this one, compelling and fun might just be good enough.

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One of the coolest things about the rise of mobile games is watching the platform evolve in fast-forward. Every day we see new ideas forming out of old ones, business models adopted, abandoned and rebuilt, and the capabilities of iOS reaching brand new heights. Case in point: Ragdoll Blaster [$0.99]. In 2009, this was a doodle-style physics puzzler with a barebones interface. It was massively popular, but the App Store was young. In 2011, Ragdoll Blaster 3 [$0.99 / HD] is an explosion of color and whimsy, with few sacrifices made to what makes the series great: damn fine physics puzzles.

I love how these games make you think a bit about applied physics. It’s not just knocking over this tower, stacking that block without letting the whole works fall, it’s levers and pulleys and magnets on top of all that. So it’s great to see the puzzles wrapped in a much more appealing package. That’s the best sort of makeover, wouldn’t you say—one that makes the outside as fine as the inside?

The new look has something for everyone, except perhaps lovers of doodles or dark, moody steampunk. If you’re into cute things, you’re set. The art is colorful and bubbly, the ragdolls have reached their ultimate Sackboy evolution and the whole interface looks like it’s been sewn and glued and stuck together out of cardboard and plush. If you’re more into high-score hunting and precision, Ragdoll Blaster 3 has you covered too. The interface now has space to drill down to more detailed ratings: the number of dolls blasted, time taken, and buttons collected contribute to your total score and star rating.

If you’re new to the series, here are the basics. Each level has at least one cannon and one target. You need to shoot a ragdoll from one to the other by touching the screen, with a visible firing guide helping you on your way. You control each shot’s power, arc and aim with a single touch of a finger, with distant shots firing with more force than close ones. The ragdoll launches on the arc you set, interacting with everything in the level and hopefully reaching the goal, or at least the next cannon, at the end of it all.

The ragdolls come in five flavors, all of which are stupidly cute. You’ve got your standard ragdoll, who does nothing more than flop on command. You’ve got an Ice doll that slides like mad on frozen surfaces. Pudge dolls are heavy and look it, and the rather unhinged Fire dolls burn any wood they touch. Then there’s the robot, who’s as attracted to magnets as his metal body implies.

Ragdoll Blaster 3 doesn’t give you free reign with the dolls (though wouldn’t it be cool if it would?). Instead your options are limited by the cannons present in any given level. Each cannon is set to a single type, and you can activate new ones by firing dolls into them. This lets Backflip Studios create adorable things like a cupcake cannon that launches Pudge dolls, and it lets them keep control of the ways you can complete each level. On the flip side, though, it keeps your solutions from ever feeling particularly inventive. If there’s a second cannon, you’ll need to reach it. If it’s a fire cannon, be on the lookout for wood. It’s a little too cut and dry, especially since the more creative levels are wildly entertaining.

That’s not to say there aren’t many creative levels, but in a list of 100 physics puzzles there’s certain to be a few duds. I’d happily pass on pixel-hunting levels, and there are a few of them. Whether by design or by accident, certain levels don’t seem to work quite how they need to work, and getting through them requires either great luck or a growing pile of carefully flung dolls. This is where a level skip would come in handy, and while Ragdoll Blaster 3 has one, it’s not the best kind. As in Angry Birds, you can pay to unlock a Mighty Eagle-style Rocket Ragdoll. It’s on an hour cooldown, and you can pull out in-game currency to speed that up. There are also solution hints (read: “spoilers”) for every level, if the problem you’ve run into is more where to fire your shot and less “why won’t this bloody doll hit the block so it moves the other block like it needs to?”.

Did your ears perk up at the mention of in-game currency? Don’t fret, it’s not a big thing. Every level has buttons you can collect, and they contribute to your level score and ranking. You can then use them to unlock adorable costumes for your dolls—I was tempted to grind for the Robot Knight. If you’re short on buttons and you don’t want to grind, you can pay for them.

While grinding gives you a way to pass the time once you’ve burned through all 100 levels, and you can always hunt achievements or work on your scores for the Game Center leaderboards and hidden stars, what I’d really like to see is an update with a few more levels. Ragdoll Blaster 2 was a bit tougher and more inventive on the whole, and I’d love to see Backflip take this game to that level. With its looks it could easily be an App Store darling, but right now Ragdoll Blaster 3 is a bit lacking in longevity. The game could hit a sweet spot for challenge with a few of the missing elements from 2, like portals, and a few more levels that combine all the different dolls.

As it stands, the game is still easy to recommend. For long-standing fans, it might be a little too simple, but there’s a lot of promise and plenty of new content. For new players, it should be just right. Ragdoll Blaster 3 is more inviting than the series has ever been before, and it’s filled with fun physics challenges at the cost of relatively little frustration. If that’s not enough and you want a serious challenge, swing by our forums. There’s an ongoing competition for fewest shots, and I assure you it will leave your ragdoll blasting skills sorely tested.

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