Haunted Hollow

Haunted Hollow is a curiosity. It's a turn-based strategy game of sorts, condensed and tweaked for a more casual audience, that sees you battling for control of a small village with an AI or real-life opponent.

You lead an ever growing army of spooky creatures, from ghosts to grim reapers, out from your mansion base into the titular township to scare the living daylights out of the residents. Scare all the houses and you're the winner.

The twist comes when the villagers get bored of your shenanigans and form a mob to stop your wicked ways.

You begin with a single-room mansion and no creatures of the night. At the start of every turn you receive a random new room to add to your evil estate. These let you generate monsters to go out and do your evil bidding.

There are three types of beast - Fighty, Scary, and Strange. Fighty monsters can scrap with the opposing team and villagers; Scary monsters can capture town houses, which you need to do in order to win; and Strange monsters offer special abilities to help your other units.

The aim of the game is to scare all of the houses in the village. But once you've scared enough villagers to fill up a meter in front of the church they get sick of you and form an angry mob. This mob will attack monsters and burn down houses to try and purge the village of evil.

The longer the game goes on the more of these mobs you create. The opposing team can recapture houses by scaring them, and there are buffs that let you fill up the meter and unleash a horde of angry pitchfork waving humans on nearby foes.

There's not a great deal of content in the game, and you'll need to shell out quite a lot of cash to buy all of the monsters that are available as IAPs. The AI isn't always smart enough, either, and it's pretty easy to win games once you know what you're doing.

Pass-the-device and online multiplayer are where the real meat is, and it's always more fun playing against real people, but there's still a feeling of emptiness that the game can't quite shake.