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The best iPhone and iPad games this week - Soccer Physics, Amid the Ruins, Modern Combat 5: Blackout

The sublime to the ridiculous

The best iPhone and iPad games this week - Soccer Physics, Amid the Ruins, Modern Combat 5: Blackout
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iOS
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Every Friday, Pocket Gamer offers hands-on impressions of the week's best new iPhone and iPad games.

Soccer Physics
By Otto-Ville Ojala - buy on iPhone and iPad (£1.49 / $1.99)
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Soccer Physics is a very silly game. It involves trying to get a ball into a goal but gives you almost no means of scoring intentionally. You're more likely to score a goal by falling upside down onto the ball than you are by kicking it.

You control two separate players at once, though the word "control" misleadingly implies some kind of influence over proceedings. You tap on the screen to make your pair of players bounce and lurch in a largely unpredictable manner loosely deriving from the positions of their ridiculous puppet bodies.

It shouldn't work, but it does. Each round is a desperate giggling scramble to make your players behave, and there's just enough of an illusion of control that every unintentional lob or unforseeable rebound into your opponent's goal feels like a testament to your prowess.

Soccer Physics is a frantic, ludicrous, unique casual game, and it's even better if you can find somebody else to play it with you.
Modern Combat 5: Blackout
By Gameloft - buy on iPhone and iPad (£4.99 / $6.99)
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In its own way, Modern Combat 5: Blackout is just as silly as Soccer Physics, if only because you play as a super-soldier who looks like a male model and has the improbably lyrical name of Caydan Phoenix.

There are few surprises in this highly derivative blockbuster sequel. In the single player you blast your way through numerous spectacular set-pieces, killing nondescript virtual jerks. And in the multiplayer you deploy the skills you've acquired in the single player to kill nondescript human jerks.

Yes, it's a massive rip off of Call of Duty. But that means it's the closest you're likely to get on a touchscreen device to the cinematic spectacle of Activision's apocalyptic meathead mega-franchise.

Walking Dead: Season 2 - Amid the Ruins
By Telltale - buy on iPhone and iPad (£2.99 / $4.99)
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Telltale's Walking Dead series is a unique proposition - an action-adventure game with almost no puzzles and very little action, unless you count simplistic QTEs.
The gameplay is almost incidental. As the harrowing story of Clem and her fellow survivors unfolds in the grimy landscape of post-zombie apocalypse America, you play your part primarily by making choices that determine how the other characters will treat you and how the story will play out.

'Amid the Ruins' is the penultimate chapter in this season, and it's characteristically grim, as Clem and co. struggle to overcome their understandable despair and hold onto their humanity while pausing every so often to stab a zombie in the brain.

Rob Hearn
Rob Hearn
Having obtained a distinguished education, Rob became Steel Media's managing editor, now he's no longer here though.