As far as match-three games go, there's plenty of room for change and innovation; unfortunately, few developers seem inclined to use it. The new deep-sea-themed match-three game Jewel Legends: Atlantis falls firmly into that un-expansive camp. Although a prime example of established mechanics, the game does nothing whatsoever to advance the match-three genre.
The iPhone has no shortage of games that have you flinging cartoony creatures at various targets with something approximating physics. If you imagine an Angry Birds where you navigate levels with multiple flings of your cute mascot, rather than aiming for a single stationary objective, you've got a pretty good handle on what Bombcats is like. Are we at our saturation point for using animals as projectiles, or will you want to spend all nine of your lives playing Bombcats?
I think that life around camp just got a whole lot more hairy! Jacob Jones and the Bigfoot Mystery borrows from the narrative-puzzle style of gameplay that's seen in the Professor Layton series on the Nintendo DS, but has some cool ideas and concepts that are all to its own. In the first episode of a planned five, we see Jacob arrive for his first stay at summer camp, after passing by something that looks suspiciously like Bigfoot on the side of the road. What follows is a light adventure with some clever puzzling to be found, but a lot of dead air and wasted potential all around.
As I prepared to write this Contraption Maker preview, the realization of why my Grandma hates Pee-Wee's Big Adventure suddenly hit me. It was, after all, the movie that introduced me to the beautiful chaos that is the Rube Goldberg device.
Chuck the Muck is the latest in line of fun and quirky games in the Planet Muck universe, right behind last year's well-received action-oriented Critter Escape. This time around, one of those lovable critters has teamed up with a big muck named Chuck for a head-scratching, physics-based good time. So how do our critter pal and his new friend Chuck hold up in a puzzle-platform environment?
The television drama Castle follows novel writer Richard Castle in his adventures with detective Kate Beckett, using his skills as a novelist to help solve every case that comes along. Now, fans of the television show can help Castle solve his next case in Castle: Never Judge a Book by Its Cover, a new hidden object puzzle game that's actually really entertaining, even if you've never watched the show.
It may look like one of the now-ubiquitous minimalist iPhone weather apps, but Mosaique is more like the love child of Lumines and Echochrome than another reinvention of the thermometer. Beautiful in its simplicity, simple in its design, and satisfying in its gameplay, Mosaique checks all the boxes of a great puzzle game by being the essence of them.
Tadpoles may not look tasty to humans, but to everything that lives in the pond they might as well be chocolate cake. Tasty Tadpoles is a clever little arcade game by Mark White that is one of the most pleasantly simple iOS games around. And despite the name, we're pretty sure no tadpoles are actually harmed during the game, despite being eaten over and over again.