Atomic Pinball Collection

Atomic Pinball Collection is, at launch at least, in fact just a pair of pinball tables. You get a revamp of Color Monkey's highly regarded and hyphen-infused Revenge of the Rob-O-Bot, and new table Masks of Glory.

These can be played as demos until you hit a score cap, at which point you're expected to pay up.

Spoiler alert: it's well worth paying up. Both tables are very nicely designed, both in the visual sense and also mechanically.

Pinball is a physical kind of arcade game, and so 'feel' is important. Atomic Pinball Collection nails this side of things, with two solid tables boasting excellent physics.

There's no point where you feel cheated by an errant ricochet, and on iPad Air-level hardware, there wasn't a single stutter during review.

Another thing these tables have in common is they're quite simple. This isn't a criticism. Instead, it makes them perfectly suited for mobile play.

Unlike the relatively gigantic tables found in Zen Pinball and the complex modern fare in Pinball Arcade, Atomic Pinball Collection's two tables are comparatively immediate, accessible and manageable.

From the off, you feel you've a fighting chance of playing the game and actually seeing what's going on - even on an iPhone 5s, you don't find yourself trying to pick out the ball from complex art, spindly components, or ramps criss-crossing all over the place.

That doesn't mean Atomic Pinball Collection hurls you back to 1970s pinball, though. This app may not have the bewildering array of table missions you'd find in its aforementioned contemporaries, but it's far more than pachinko with flippers.

There are plenty of targets and things to do and discover on both tables. It just all feels very focussed rather than sprawling.

The tight-knit nature of the tables perhaps also helps Atomic Pinball Collection to be one of the finest-looking examples of the genre on mobile. The smaller playfield makes for bold, chunky table components, and there's plenty of life evident, from subtle movement to frantic dot-matrix animations.

The tables do play a little differently, though. Attack of the Rob-O-Bot, where you face off against a giant android, ramps up the visuals from the original and seems a touch easier to progress through.

But it's still a slightly awkward table that doesn't always flow well, and it's now lumbered with irritating voice acting, which yells COMBO! DOUBLE COMBO! when you manage to hit a bunch of ramps one after the other. Everything eventually clicks, but you have to work at it.

By contrast, Masks of Glory is, well, glorious from the get-go. It's a fast-paced, ramp-happy, hugely rewarding table.

It's relatively easy to get multi-balls, and you soon find yourself in bouts against wrestlers, shown via on-playfield characters and dot-matrix animation, while you head for victory by successfully smacking targets.

While the table is energetic and vibrant, you always feel in control, and, more importantly, it never stops feeling like you're building to something - even if in one case that happens to be a giant taco.