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Pocket Gamer's top 50 iPhone and iPad games of the last five years (30 to 11)

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Pocket Gamer's top 50 iPhone and iPad games of the last five years (30 to 11)
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iOS

Five years ago, on July 10th 2008, the App Store opened its virtual doors to the public.

In the intervening half decade, Apple's dusty little shop has grown into a video game megamart and is now filled to bursting with amazing titles.

Today, we continue our countdown of the Pocket Gamer team's favourite games from the App Store's history. We'll crown the Top 10 iTunes titans tomorrow.

Oh! And if you're in a celebratory mood, we recommend you check out the blowout fifth anniversary coverage on our sister site, 148Apps.

They've got interviews with some of the people that have been around since the beginning of the Store, including Brian Greenstone of Pangea and Ed Rumley of Chillingo. Essential reads indeeds.

Jacob Jones and the Bigfoot Mystery
By Lucid Games - buy on iPhone and iPad Top 50 iOS games

Top 50 iOS games Jacob Jones and the Bigfoot Mystery is a colourful episodic adventure title in which you take on the role of a young whippersnapper called Jacob.

You're Camp Eagle Feather's newest recruit, and your aim – through solving puzzles and talking to all manner of creatures and critters – is to remove the shroud of mystery that surrounds your new home, and uncover the many secrets that it houses. - Anthony Usher

Edge
By Mobigame - buy on iPhone and iPad

Top 50 iOS games

Top 50 iOS games Edge is more than just the subject of the most feisty legal fight in recent memory, and a fantastic symbol for sticking it to trademark trolls.

It's also a moreish platformer about a clunking great cube that tumbles through abstract stages.

And best of all, that unlikely geometric hero controls perfectly on a touchscreen. - Mark Brown

Sword & Poker 2 By GAIA - removed from the App Store

Top 50 iOS games

Top 50 iOS games Thinking about Sword & Poker 2 makes us sad.

When we consider that unexpected yet perfectly realised combination of poker hands, turn-based RPG battles, and strategic placement, it's almost too upsetting to think that developer GAIA is no more.

There will never be a Sword & Poker 3. Too sad, too sad. - Jon Mundy

Score! World Goals
By First Touch - download free on iPhone and iPad Top 50 iOS games

Top 50 iOS games 8.32pm. Saturday June 29th, 2013. London, England. Fàbregas clips a delicious ball through to Iniesta. In one majestic, balletic, poetic motion, the mercurial Barcelona midfielder turns and volleys the ball just beyond the reach of Stekelenburg. "OK: 1 star."

8.33pm. Saturday June 29th, 2013. London, England. Fàbregas clips a delicious ball through to Iniesta. In one majestic, balletic, poetic motion, the mercurial Barcelona midfielder turns and volleys the ball unerringly into the bottom-left corner. "Excellent: 3 stars." - Richard Brown

Flight!
By Armor Games - buy on iPhone and iPad Top 50 iOS games

Top 50 iOS games It takes a special kind of game to convey a complex, heartwarming story through levels of simple gameplay and static images.

Flight! manages this feat by mixing a compelling story with bite-sized levels of paper airplane aeronautics and a memorable soundtrack. It's a complete gem of a casual game. - Matthew Diener

Fieldrunners
By Subatomic Studios - buy on iPhone or buy on iPad Top 50 iOS games

Top 50 iOS games While it's a less complete game than Kingdom Rush (more on that in a bit), there's a reason Fieldrunners is arguably the most popular game of its type on iOS.

It set the tone for a certain type of tower defence game, whereby you create your own twisting death-routes lined with automated gun turrets for waves of enemies to wade through. - Jon Mundy

True Skate
By True Axis - buy on iPhone and iPad Top 50 iOS games

Top 50 iOS games Believe it or not, most skating games are not realistic. No, you cannot perform the most balls-out board stunts with a button-press. And yes, professional skateboarders experience the same gravity as the rest of us.

True Skate is different. It has tricky finger-flicking controls and real world physics, which reward the patience and persistence of a real boarder. - Mark Brown

The Silent Age
By House on Fire - download free on iPhone and iPad Top 50 iOS games

Top 50 iOS games Day of the Tentacle taught us that point-and-click adventures go great with time travel.

That point is proven in The Silent Age, which has you bouncing back and forth between a fun-loving 1970s, and a post-apocalyptic 2012. Your actions in the decade of groove have a domino effect on the future, which is the basis for a series of intelligent and innovative puzzles. - Mark Brown

Kingdom Rush
By Ironhide Game Studio - buy on iPhone or buy on iPad Top 50 iOS games

Top 50 iOS games It says everything about Kingdom Rush that when the sequel was released recently, we were relieved that Ironhide hadn't messed with the formula.

It's as near to a perfect realisation of the tower defence concept as you can get, with brilliantly balanced yet diverse units, a perfectly judged learning curve, and a killer comic book art style. - Jon Mundy

Chaos Rings
By Square Enix - buy on iPhone or buy on iPad Top 50 iOS games

Top 50 iOS games Here's someone who knows a thing or two about role-playing games.

Final Fantasy creator Square Enix decided to give mobile gamers their very own fantasy epic in Chaos Rings, and the result was a huge new adventure, with top combat and gorgeous graphics. The sequel's worth a stab, too. - Mark Brown

Async Corp.
By Powerhead Games - buy on iPhone Top 50 iOS games

Top 50 iOS games At first glance, Async Corp looks and sounds unremarkable, evoking as it does a faceless computer-controlled bureaucracy.

But give it a go and you'll find that it has more personality in its ascii faces, its terse memos, and its preposterously addictive gameplay than every other colour-matching puzzler you've ever played. - Rob Hearn

World of Goo
By 2D Boy - buy on iPhone or buy on iPad Top 50 iOS games

Top 50 iOS games If you're playing World of Goo for the first time, you might be surprised by how ungooey it is. The aim of the game is to create precarious, wobbly, but basically rigid scaffolds for the tar-like goo balls of the title to swarm across.

It's a tricky puzzler with oodles of vaguely Burton-esque charm, and it works far better on iPad than on any other platform. - Rob Hearn

Orbital
By bitforge - buy on iPhone or buy on iPad Top 50 iOS games

Top 50 iOS games Orbital involves launching expanding balls into a well and then hitting them with other expanding balls to make them disappear. When a ball comes to rest beneath a line near the bottom of the screen it's game over.

There's a Gravity mode, in which expanded balls exert a gravitational pull relative to their size. That's Orbital – unique, addictive, and brilliant. - Rob Hearn

Miku Flick /02
By Sega - buy on iPhone and iPad Top 50 iOS games

Top 50 iOS games Bright, massive, and expensive, Miku Flick /02 is like the 1960s muscle car of rhythm games.

Even if you've never listened to a single Vocaloid song, you'll find the flick and tap mechanics here an enjoyable challenge– and the visuals are some of the best available for rhythm games on the App Store. - Matthew Diener

Bastion
By Supergiant Games - buy on iPhone and iPad Top 50 iOS games

Top 50 iOS games Bastion proves that you can make even the most well-worn of game genres - in this case the action-RPG - into something truly special without messing around with its core principles.

A fresh, detailed fantasy world and a beautifully melancholic storyline marry with solid virtual controls to make for one of the best console conversions on iOS. - Jon Mundy

DrawRace 2 By RedLynx - buy on iPhone or buy on iPad Top 50 iOS games

Top 50 iOS games DrawRace was an idea that deserved a better treatment, and in DrawRace 2 it got one.

RedLynx's impressive sequel is a gorgeous, growling monster of a game with all the modes, tracks, car classes, and polygons that you could possibly want in an iOS racer, bolted onto an ingenious and still largely unduplicated line-drawing control scheme. - Rob Hearn

Cut the Rope By ZeptoLab - buy on iPhone or buy on iPad Top 50 iOS games

Top 50 iOS games Cut the Rope is the quintessential iPhone game. You feed candy to a greedy monster in a series of taut, well-engineered puzzles, with a three star scoring system, a cute plush-toy-in-the-making hero, and physics.

If it had tower defence and endless running, you'd never need another game. - Mark Brown

New Star Soccer
By New Star Games - download free on iPhone and iPad Top 50 iOS games

Top 50 iOS games New Star Soccer asks you to intervene only in the key highlights of each of its football matches through a satisfying drag-and-tap interface.

At a time when replicating the console footy experience on iOS appeared to be a bit of a dead end, New Star Soccer demonstrated a potential way forward for the beautiful game on touch devices. - Jon Mundy

Tilt to Live
By One Man Left - buy on iPhone or buy on iPad Top 50 iOS games

Top 50 iOS games Tilt controls tend to be vague and inconvenient compared with virtual buttons, and relatively few games have put them to good use.

Tilt to Live is the best of them, arming you with atomically precise accelerometer controls and challenging you to weave and dodge your way past waves of electric red death balls. - Rob Hearn

Flick Kick Football
By PikPok - buy on iPhone and iPad Top 50 iOS games

Top 50 iOS games Anyone who thinks that touchscreen controls lack the analogue deftness of a modern console control pad needs to have a go with Flick Kick Football.

It's a game that leans entirely on its flexible yet rock-solid control system. Swerving, dipping and arrowing the ball around, over and through those defensive walls is delightfully tactile, to the point where even the non-footy fans on the PG team are Flick Kick believers. - Jon Mundy We finish our countdown, with the top 10, tomorrow.
Mark Brown
Mark Brown
Mark Brown is editor at large of Pocket Gamer