When The Rock isn't playing the role of part-time WWE Champion on Monday Night Raw, he can often be found playing other parts on various movie sets. But something strange is happening in Studio 51, and it seems everyone around has either gone missing or wants The Rock dead (or at least beaten severely). Are they rabid John Cena fans? Movie critics who think five Fast & Furious movies was enough?

 As my kids would no doubt agree, there are two kinds of monsters: the scary kind that cause nightmares, and the friendlier kind that you see in kids' movies and TV shows. Here Be Monsters deals more with the latter than the former, combining a lot of things you've done in previous Facebook games along the way. Surprisingly, it actually turns out to be pretty fun.

Badland is the debut game from Frogmind, a small studio comprised of two developers who cut their chops over at Redlynx on the deviously challenging Trials series. With a history in precision motocross, it's somewhat surprising to see the studio's first game take on a floatier style of side-scroller, more akin to Jetpack Joyride's tap to fly gameplay. But once you dive into Badland's lushly-drawn world, it's clear that Frogmind knew exactly what it was getting itself into.

Mighty Dungeons bills itself as a cross between old-school board games like Hero Quest and Warhammer Quests and videogames like Diablo and Dungeon Master, but the truth is that it's a fairly straightforward roguelike. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, and as roguelikes go it's certainly gussied up in its Friday finest, but I think it's important to establish what we're really looking at here: a  top-down dungeon crawler with simple, repetitive gameplay.

The best games not only entertain, but teach us something. Actually, since the word “teach” conjures images of stuffy classrooms and boring lectures, perhaps it's better to say, “the best games are the ones that pique our interest in the real world.” While hidden object game Vampire Legends: The Story of Kisolova isn't the slickest or most original game ever made, it deserves credit for pointing us toward an intriguing supernatural story rooted in real historical events.

The year is 1891.  Anthony Beechwood, alone in his mansion’s attic, hangs himself.  A final letter that he has mailed to his lifelong friend, J. Devitt, arrives with only the phrase “Videte ne quis sciat” scrawled across the page.  Devitt recognizes this code from their time spent together at a school for scientific study, and that Beechwood must be in trouble.  He leaves immediately to find his friend and offer his support, putting in motion the first events of The Last Door: Chapter One – The Letter.   

Before they ever hit the App Store, well-meaning mechanic siblings Joe and Jim had already been on quite the adventure. A valiant but failed Kickstarter campaign introduced them to the world, but left them with an uncertain future. Meanwhile, public fallout between the game's creators and close collaborators dotBunny put the poor duo in the middle, faced with the prospect of languishing in legal limbo forever.

It’s interesting that Lost Tales: Forgotten Souls contains a form of the word “forget” in its title, as this is one dated hidden object puzzle game that’s incredibly easy to forget. While the game’s storyline is actually quite interesting, it’s presented with enough technical issues and an overall lack of detail that makes this one more disappointing than fun.

Lie Swatter is a quirky new trivia game from the makers of the You Don’t Know Jack series, which tests how well you can spot a lie in a lineup of truths. And who better to give you these lies than a buzzing swarm of overweight and lopsided flies? But while the humor and variety of categories are there, a number of technical issues and design flaws ultimately leave the game caught in its own fly paper.

Gamer nostalgia: a force to be reckoned with.  It’s encouraged ports, remakes, and replays of an untold number of games we simply refuse to forget.  It’s brought pixelated graphics back into mainstream acceptance over a decade after they became dated.  And now gamer nostalgia has become its own gameplay mechanic, thanks to Evoland.

It’s likely rough for developers of interactive novels to hit the sweet spot that falls just in between “interactive” and “novel.” If your novel relays a big tale without stopping to let you make a story selection, it’s not very interactive. On the other hand, all the story selections in the world won’t make a boring game worth playing. If a studio is unable to strike a perfect balance of interactivity and decent storytelling, then it’s preferable to do like Dysfunctional Systems Episode 1: Learning to Manage Chaos and give the audience a solid tale over lots of decision-making.

In what is a sentence that I'm about to have taken wildly out of context from this point onwards, the “match-3” sub-genre shares a key similarity with the works of William Shakespeare. That being: it's at the focal point of people's obsession with “reinvention.” In the same way you'd be hard pressed to go watch a performance of Hamlet today without hearing about the bold choice to set it in a dystopian future or the wild west, each new jewel, orb, or color-matching release comes complete with a twist. 

Released back in the summer of 2011, the explosive sequel to ‘Splosion Man added environmental variety, increased difficulty, and new gameplay elements to go along with its pink character palette. The ‘Splosion series was one of the few remaining Xbox exclusives, but no longer. Along with a straight PC port, now you can finally ‘splode on the go. Ms. Splosion Man retains its awesome and charm on your iPhone and iPad, but the additions to this port threaten to contain the blast.

Video games based on World War 2 are perennially popular, and iOS is no exception. From implementations of venerable mechanics like World in War to complex simulations such as Battle of the Bulge there’s already a gamut of games available. But Herocraft think they can muscle into this crowded space with latest release Strategy & Tactics: World War 2.

Edge of Twilight: Athyr Above for iOS is an example of what happens when you pour lots of creative energy into building a game world without putting enough of that energy into assembling the actual game. This action RPG takes place in an intriguing world that’s fueled by some neat ideas, but you probably won’t stick around long enough to absorb the setting because the core game just isn’t very fun to play.

Touch screen controls aren't often accepting of side-scrolling platformers. The level of precision seen in games like Super Mario Bros. and Sonic the Hedgehog is often understated. Sometimes, a game comes along and reminds us just how important tight controls can be. There's a bit of upside to Super Daddio 2, but a sloppy control scheme and other fundamental issues create a handful of problems.

Chillingo released the first Tiny Troopers game back in June of 2012 to much acclaim, so a second tour through this miniature warzone didn’t seem like too far-fetched an idea. While Tiny Troopers 2 might play it safe as far as sequels are concerned, the sprawling battlefields are more vibrant, the action is more precise, and your troopers are back and still as tiny as ever in this fun and quirky shooter.

In what is possibly the most consistently creepy adventure series around, PuppetShow is back with a new installment in PuppetShow: Destiny Undone. The scampering doll head on a mechanical spider's body is also back, complete with its bad attitude as it causes mischief everywhere you go. Somebody smack that thing with a broom already!

Cheesy Chess is a cute, challenging logic puzzler with very simple rules based on the timeless game of chess, but it suffers somewhat from a lack of gameplay variety. Chess aficionados (or those who aspire to be) may love it, but the truth is that once you've seen one level, you have, for all practical purposes, seen them all.

In a contest for longest named online game, The Hobbit: Armies of The Third Age can hang with just about anyone. It's not quite as successful on the originality front since it plays close to, but not quite the same as, its mobile cousin The Hobbit: Kingdoms of Middle-Earth. Yet it's got just enough to call its own that if you were going to play one Tolkien-flavored builder/combat mash-up, this would be the one.