Top 10 best iPhone and iPad games: October 2011

October has been a funny month.

Fundamentalist nut job Harold Camping once again messed up his calculations for the whole 'End of the World' thing, and has finally hung up his Nostradamus hat for good. Just about every street in the world is being occupied, either by protesters or trick-or-treaters.

And on the last day of the month, the world's population reached a lofty 7 billion, meaning that Rovio has had to recalculate the fraction that hasn't bought Angry Birds yet.

Oh, and a bunch of awesome games hit iOS, from funky adventure Shantae to brain-busting chemistry sim SpaceChem. Here are the ten best games of the month, based on our reviews, Quality Index, and a whole heap of personal bias.

Shantae: Risky's Revenge
By WayForward Technologies - buy on iPhone and iPad

It's nice to see a game get the recognition it deserves. Charming adventure series Shantae has always been shafted by the masses, but now here's your chance to right those oh-so-many wrongs.

Risky's Revenge is inspired by retro classics like Metroid, giving you a yawning great overworld to explore and lots of intricate dungeons to delve into. Shantae's got a handful of attacks to begin with, but the half-genie chick can turn into animals by belly dancing.

The controls work wonderfully, and while the graphics are somewhat cramped inside a hefty blue border you're still treated to some of the most gorgeous and colourful pixel-art on the App Store.

SpaceChem Mobile
By Zachtronics Industries - buy on iPad

A chemistry-focused puzzler with reactors, atoms, and a pop-up periodic table might sound a tad dull, but this rock-hard iPad game is anything but. Chasing the perfect solution, tweaking problems, and outsmarting other players is electric fun.

In each stage you're given a handful of elements that you must break, bond, fuse, and move to create compounds. You do this by laying down tracks for a pair of nano-scopic robots, and plopping down commands so they work in perfect unison.

It's a little overwhelming at first, but by the end of the stage you'll have a whirring factory of automatons, all working to carry out your own personal master plan. Your solution will then be compared to other gamers in a gratifying/soul-destroying chart.

Scribblenauts Remix
By Warner Bros - buy on iPhone and iPad

If you can spell it, you can create it. That's the mind-boggling premise of DS rehash Scribblenauts Remix. Simply type out a noun and, if you fancy, a couple of adjectives and it shall magically appear.

That means you can leap a chasm on a slightly soggy pogo-stick or cause some dinosaurs to go extinct with a fire-breathing giraffe. The limit, quite literally, is your tiny, malformed imagination. You'll get back 50 stages to play with, but the free-for-all sandbox is probably the best bit.

Squids
By The Game Bakers - buy on iPhone

Clever tactics game Squids manages to take a stat-heavy numbers game and hide it deep under a layer of charm and personality. Even those averse to traditional turn-based games can fall in love.

That's because it mushes up the tactics with the tactile, meaning you send your cephalopod army into battle not with a button press, but with a Angry Birds-style catapult. You literally pull back those suckers and fire them into action.

You'll still need a head for strategy, though, if you want to come out the other side unscathed. You'll need to make smart moves, a good use of your various characters, and some defensive tactics alongside the pure power.

Super Crossfire
By Chillingo - buy on iPhone or iPad

Crossfire is a refugee from the ongoing experiment that is Xbox Indie Games. But, for our money, its tasty recipe for an addictive score-swapping time-sink works far better on mobile.

Like Space Invaders wired on caffeine and dipped in neon, it's a manic space shooter with a secret. Tap a button and your ship zips from the bottom to the top of the screen, out-flanking the enemies in the middle.

You'll need to use this skill wisely to pick up loot dropped by dead foes, get around bullet-blocking shields, and generally stay alive amid the noisy chaos of Crossfire's harder levels.

Bring Me Sandwiches!!
By Adult Swim - buy on iPhone

What do you get when you violently fuse the brain-boxes of Grumpyface Studios and Adult Swim? Other than a horrendous mess and a life imprisonment, you probably get juicy platformer Bring Me Sandwiches!!

You play as hapless delivery kid Jimmy Nuggets, who's on a presidential order to deliver monster sarnies to alien invaders. What follows is a Katamari-style affair, where you bundle random items and miscellaneous trash between two slices of bread. Endlessly creative and hopelessly fun.

Modern Combat 3: Fallen Nation
By Gameloft - buy on iPhone and iPad

Gameloft's globe-trotting blaster might not be the biggest war game this winter, but it certainly won't go down without a fight. Fallen Nation is big and bombastic, with a hefty storyline and a towering online presence.

The solo campaign throws you into 13 different missions around the world, in a last-ditch effort to snuff out terrorism. Online, you've got 12-player brawls and a ladder of ranks and customised weapons to scale.

It might not be exactly like having genre titans Call of Duty or Battlefield on the go, but as our review confidently states - "No other mobile FPS can match it."

The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn - The Game
By Gameloft - buy on iPhone and iPad

It's always a surprise to see a good film tie-in. They're usually relegated to a Z-list developer and rushed to meet opening night, resulting in dissapointing cash-ins. Not for The Secret of the Unicorn, as French developer Gameloft obviously saw it as its patriotic duty to do right by Tintin.

This hodge-podge collection of different game ideas - including mystery puzzle sections, flying a plane through an electrical storm, racing camels and fending off pirates - will keep you on your toes for a good few hours. It packs in fresh ideas and presents them with panache.

Bike Baron
By Mountain Sheep - buy on iPhone and iPad

There are a few things that a developer needs to get right when making a Trials HD-style stunt bike game. It's got to have a dependable physics system, it's got to let you restart the stage instantly, and it's got to be as hard as nails. Bike Baron checks all three boxes.

As in Trials, you need to propel your bike over several different courses, made of haphazard piles of barrels and ramps and bombs and bumps. By ever-so carefully manoeuvring your bike, hopefully you can make it through the right way up. And alive.

It can get absurdly hard, but that never stops it from being dangerously addictive. Towards the end, nailing just one stage can take the best part of an hour.

Mage Gauntlet
By RocketCat Games - buy on iPhone

Hook Champ developer RocketCat's first foray into a post-hook world treads some uncommon ground. It's a dungeon-crawling RPG without numbers. A loot-hoarding role-player without sidequests.

Which might sound crazy, but what it really equates to is an RPG with the frustrating bits toned down and the fun bits turned well up. In practice it just about works, concentrating the enjoyment of bashing rats and hoarding loot to a fine degree.