GAMES OF THE WEEK - The 5 best new games for iOS and Android - January 30th

"There’s a simple elegance at the heart of Zach Gage’s word game that makes it very appealing." wrote our reviewer Chris Schilling on the original SpellTower back in late 2011. "Not just in its mechanics, but its aesthetic, which is clean, crisp, and refreshing. A grid of letters has rarely felt so attractive."

And you know what, he's right. SpellTower+ is a relaunched version of SpellTower, likely released to address the massive divergence which took place regarding screen resolutions in the time since, and it remains as true to those 9-year old words as the original did.

What is SpellTower+ though? It's a word-puzzle game about finding words among tumbling towers of letters. Words have to be of three characters or more, but there are also a few more modifiers which can come into play including word length or the impact that certain length words, or certain tiles, can have on surrounding letters.

There's more content than before, specifically, there are more modes which can be purchased if you're getting along well with the core, free-to-play game. But regardless of how you play, there's a definite joy to be found in the humble chimes (or rumbles, if you are running silent) of scoring and clear UI.

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The year is 2044, there is only ruins and powder left of the human civiliz... oh, wait. The year is 2004, Usher ft. Lil Jon and Ludacris hold the chart with "Yeah", the hottest new gaming phone is the sidetalking Nokia N-Gage and Disgaea: Hour of Darkness has just released for the PS2.

Disgaea 1 Complete is that PS2 launch, smoothed out, available for Android and iOS devices. In my books, being one of the people who did dip into it back in those lighter years, it was one of the most interesting twists on traditional turn-based strategy games available. You could build up ally units from scratch, customise and reset those units, and it also had the Item Worlds.

You could dive into every item in the game to level it up, and within those items (which were a series of battles as per the standard games) you could find even more items. An infinity of levels. Combat was interesting too, masses of combos were available through clever unit placement, and a lot of the tiles gave extra rules to units standing on them which added an extra layer of planning to the grid-based strategy.

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Dungeon Faster was almost in my top 5 games of the year last year, as a matter of fact, it was most definitely 6th place, and my playtime will attest to that. Well, for those of you who are using iOS devices, you can now grab one of last year's strongest Android releases.

So what is Dungeon Faster? It's a shrunk-down dungeon crawler with card-based mechanics. For each run you pick a class and customise your cards, then dive into a somewhat linear S-shape of rooms. Each room has ONE large opponent in it, however, they're not revealed at first. Instead, you can tap around on a grid to find bonuses, rewards, dangers and your exit route. Tapping through each grid doesn't feel like exploring a dungeon, but it ticks all of the boxes and most importantly it is incredibly quick and fun.

Sometimes you are doomed from the start, other times you'll manage to blast open a shortcut or place down a fountain to help you on future runs. Either way, there's an incredible amount of depth in the game and, regardless of how advanced your playstyle is, Dungeon Faster remains succinct and to-the-point throughout.

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I first played Pico Tanks back at Casual Connect London last year. It was great, and probably one of my favourite games of the entire show. There's something incredibly fun-filled about the juicy caricatures of war-vehicles which make up the 3VS3 brawler's roster - even if they do just end up blowing each other up.

Back when I wrote about Pico Tanks last year I explained my favourite thing in the game: "Many of the objects within the arenas shake, rock and wobble in reaction to the mess you create". A little extra effort which makes all the difference in the final product.

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Last, but not least is Might & Magic: Chess Royale. It was a tough choice between this and a few others, but this one pushed past the rest due to it being a fusion of the battle royale and auto-chess genres. You need real guts in order to go for both of those in the same game, and while Ubisoft certainly has the budget to explore, we're very surprised at how well they've done.

Our very own Dave Aubrey, the man of mystery, took a quick dash at it and reported good things earlier in the week: "Might and Magic: Chess Royale changes enough small things about the auto chess genre to make it one of the best entries in the genre, if not the best." That bodes incredibly well considering the deluge of entries into the auto-chess genre - it's hard to keep track.

Does the IP lend itself well to it? I'll leave you to decide that, personally I find that Might & Magic as an entity is incredibly hard to pin down, however, it certainly seems that - regardless of the skin it wears - Might and Magic: Chess Royale does enough in the game systems department to deserve celebration.

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