Friday £5 - Run Roo Run, Fingle, and Hero Academy

It's amazing to see the sort of talent that the App Store can attract. Developer 5th Cell used to hang out with Nintendo on the DS, with games like Scribblenauts and Lock's Quest. Now, its focus seems to be the iPhone.

The creator of Hero Academy, on the other hand, is filled with veterans of the strategy scene, with blockbuster epics like Halo Wars and Age of Empires under their belts. Its latest tactical game might be a little smaller in scope, but it's no less smart and creative.

One of the reasons so many talented teams are switching their attention to the the App Store is its democratic nature. Indie titles aren't shoved into a separate category or buried in a back room somewhere - they're out front, rubbing shoulders with Rockstar's finest and Capcom's latest.

Everyone's welcome, it seems.

And that's the theme for this week's Friday £5 - a weekly feature where we trawl through all the games released in the last seven days on iTunes and pick out the best ones you can buy for a fiver.

Hero Academy
iPhone - Free - Robot Entertainment

The asynchronous multiplayer movement is a godsend for busy gamers. Even with the most hectic of schedules, you can have a fierce one-on-one battle asynchronously - simply make your moves when it suits you.

Hero Academy is a tactical battler featuring warriors, mages, and archers, with two teams trying to wreck each other's magical gems - turn after turn. You get about six moves per go, letting you deploy units, move about the board ,and get into fights with the enemy.

To suit the quick play nature of the game, it's all heavily streamlined. The battlefield is a tiny single-screen board, and not some massive kingdom. The units, powers, and upgrades are presented as a random shuffle along the bottom, like the letters in Words with Friends. You can immediately tell what a unit does just by looking at the cartoon artwork.

Hero Academy has a wealth of prestige behind it: Robot Entertainment made indie favourite Orcs Must Die, and the team was formed from the ashes of now-dead Ensemble Studios, creator of Halo Wars and Age of Empires.

It's fun stuff, and you get to play for free to see if you like it - though we'd recommend forking over the 69p to drop the ads if you enjoy it. They're pretty invasive.

Fingle
iPad - 69p - Game Oven

Talk about fortuitous timing. This clever co-op game hit the App Store just days after being nominated for an award at the Independent Games Festival.

It's no surprise that it's up for medals: this is a game unlike anything you've played before. But, that's not surprising, because before the iPad, with its 11-finger multi-touch display, Fingle just wouldn't be possible.

It is "Twister for your fingers", in that reductive way we critics like to describe games. You need to move squares around the board with your fingers, pushing them away from obstacles and into goals. Sounds simple enough, right?

It is, until another player is introduced. They're in charge of other squares - in other colours - and you'll often find yourself getting in each others's way, tangling fingers and touching skin. You need to work together to navigate the board, and push past the sexual tension to win.

Run Roo Run
iPhone - 69p / iPad - £1.49 - 5th Cell

Washington-based developer 5th Cell is no stranger to ambitious projects. Drawn to Life on DS let the player illustrate huge chunks of the game, while Scribblenauts included an entire dictionary's worth of nouns as props for you to magically conjure up.

So, we weren't particularly surprised when it revealed that cartoony one-button platformer Run Roo Run would get an extra ten levels delivered every single week - on top of the 420 in the main game.

It's a typical endless-runner. In search of her joey, mother kangaroo bounds across deserts, caves, and the Aussie outback: you've got to tap the screen to make her jump over objects.

If you mess up, little arrows appear on the ground showing you exactly where you leaped from, so you can copy your good jumps and tweak your bad ones.

The game is a series of ultra-short levels, just seconds in length. The difficulty quickly ramps up as 5th Cell adds bouncy tyres, anti-gravity, poles that reverse the roo, and more.