The best Android games this week - 99 Bricks, Blek, Eliss Infinity

Every Friday, Pocket Gamer offers hands-on impressions of the week's best new Android games.

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Tetris by way of Harry Potter. Except, well, not really. 99 Bricks: Wizard Academy is a stacking game. Your goal is to build the highest tower you can - simple enough.

Unfortunately, the blocks you use are tetrominoes, meaning that they come in all manners of awkward shapes. It becomes a comedy just trying to balance them on top of each other without them toppling.

What makes proceedings harder are the jealous wizards of the academy. They'll send birds to knock into your tower, and make some of the tetrominoes huge in an effort to mess you up.

Your classmates will probably succeed in screwing you up lot of the time. Sometimes it can feel outright impossible to progress.

But that's where the challenge and fun of 99 Bricks lies, and where it will probably turn some of you off. Either the lighthearted tomfoolery will keep you entertained, or you'll get in a right strop.

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Blek is easily one of the smartest touchscreen games ever made. Yep, that's a grand statement, but this is a game that deserves it.

It's a puzzle game in which you draw lines with your fingers to pop coloured bubbles in each level.

The shape of the line you draw will be repeated over and over as it travels across the screen. So it will curve or wriggle, maybe even slither its way towards its target.

It's a wonderful, original mechanic that feels a bit like ink painting. But it does take a little getting used to, and during the introductory process it might be a little frustrating.

Stick with it, though, and you should find Blek to be one of the most elegant puzzle games on a touchscreen.

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Steph Thirion's Eliss is considered a classic iOS game for its simplicity and originality (in the same way as Blek might be). Unfortunately, when it came out five years ago, it was an iOS exclusive.

Luckily, Thirion's follow-up Eliss Infinity has brought the experience to Android at long last. It's time to find out what all the fuss is about.

The idea is to drag and re-sized coloured circles so that they fit into their pre-designated holes. You pinch, stretch, split, and swipe them around the screen to do so.

But it becomes a frantic fight for space. No two different colours can touch, as it will run down the meter at the top of the screen for the duration of their contact. If that meter drops to empty, you fail the level.

Add a couple of asteroids flying across the screen, and up the number of circles that need matching, and Eliss Infinity becomes a chaotic fumble. A lot of fun, though, and a good game to play with others on a single screen.