And so, one month after iOS and Android, Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto : San Andreas arrives on Windows Phone. It's a stupidly big title, and Rockstar's vision in getting this on a mobile device should be commended. They've made all the code work, but does it still feel like a Grand Theft Auto (GTA) title?
Tower defense games are rather popular on smartphones. There's a lot of room to innovate new ideas, or to implement the classic ideas very well. Zero Defense focuses entirely on the latter angle, and this title shows that you can put together a great game by covering all the bases and not adding in anything stupid. This is tower defense as you would expect it, but done with enough style and passion to make it enjoyable.
Thousands of years ago, someone looked up in the night sky and created the constellations, joining up stars to make arbitrary shapes and implying that a 'w' was really a woman called Cassiopeia. Now you too can join up stars with 'Galaxy' on your Windows Phone, but you have to join up all the stars with a single line in order to pass through each level in this brightly coloured puzzle game from Magma Mobile.
Popular on iOS for years, Flower Garden - yes, yes, it's a simulation of growing flowers in plant pots - has now come to Windows Phone. Is it likely to satisfy your green fingers? Is its freemium nature likely to hit your wallet harder than an Autumn storm on your precious pots? I don my gardening gloves and investigate...
Get the cars through, don't cause an accident, and if all else fails, call up a B2 bomber. Managing the traffic in LA is as boring and as death-defying as it sounds, but here comes Traffic Frenzy to turn municipal management into a tasty little game.
Can you get the ball to the exit? It's a standard trope for puzzle games, but sometimes you find a little gem that draws you in. Let me introduce you to Super Smith Bros' little bundle of fun that uses the far seer physics engine and a pair of wicked minds to the puzzle genre. This is... Drawtopia.
In a sense, there's little point in reviewing something which everyone can grab for free anyway - but this is an official Microsoft Studios title, and this is Minesweeper, always one of my favourite casual 'logic' games, so it's worth a look through, if only to entice you to grab it now and try for yourself. Plus, it's Xbox Live-enabled, so you get to win some pretty easy gamer points - again, all for free.
Following on from Dots Master, developer Noam Behar brings another classic pencil and paper game to Windows Phone. Mega Tic Tac Toe continues the real-world look, and brings an engrossing challenge to gamers on the Windows Phone platform.
A clever mash-up between the constant running genre and the likes of first person shooters like Doom and Quake, Into the Dead is finely balanced gameplay. Very finely balanced. On a knife edge - for some it will be all the zombie killing they crave for just the initial purchase price, for others the groundswell of extra in-app-purchases will prove rather more expensive.
It shouldn't surprise me that the classics are usually tarted up in any mobile app store, but it means that when I do find a game intro that hooks me, I'm going to get a little surprise when I realise "I know this!". Such is the case with Boxed In, AE's latest release for Windows Phone. Ready for the spoiler? It's Sokobahn.
