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The 3 best iPhone and iPad games this week - Swap Heroes and more

Finally, some pixel-art and a three-star casual game on the App Store

The 3 best iPhone and iPad games this week - Swap Heroes and more

Every Friday, Pocket Gamer offers hands-on impressions of the week's three best new iPhone and iPad games.

RETRY
By Rovio - download on iPhone and iPad (free)
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There's something poignant about the name RETRY. Nobody could say that Rovio is languishing, and its latest Angry Birds spin off Angry Birds Transformers is actually pretty decent, but RETRY suggests a trace of longing to get back to a simpler, more creative time.

Or it could just signify that you'll be pressing the big green 'retry' button extremely frequently, because RETRY is very tricky.

The game involves piloting a little pixel-art plane across a series of islands. You'll spend your time bouncing through the sky, accidentally doing loop-de-loops, crashing into walls, and hurriedly starting again.

RETRY could have been utterly inconsequential, but Rovio has shown its class with responsive, well-judged one-touch controls and an equally well-judged difficulty curve that's just on the right side of frustrating.

Splot
By Frozenbyte - buy on iPhone and iPad (£2.49 / $3.99)
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Splot – the moderately anticipated iOS casual game by Trine developer Frozenbyte – is initially quite disappointing.

It looks the part, with cheerfully polished cartoon presentation and a familiar casual mobile game aesthetic. The gameplay involves racing an oily blob to a UFO, rescuing little yellow chicks along the way, which is a decent enough premise.

But its controls are all over the place. One minute you're holding a finger down on a side of the screen to bounce along, and the next you're tapping on Splot himself to make him bounce from wall to wall in a narrow space, and the next you're leading him around underwater like a dog on a lead.

It's highly unintuitive, but once you master the controls these races become enjoyable and occasionally exciting affairs, strung together with an unobtrusive (and IAP-free) upgrade system.

Swap Heroes
By Christopher Savory - download on iPhone and iPad (69p / 99c)
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Swap Heroes is yet another interesting new game, roughly three years after I thought all the iOS game design possibilities had been exhausted.

In this simple yet ingenious turn-based battler you have to manage a party of four as they take on a succession of fantasy monsters that lurch down the screen in three lanes.

Three of your heroes are lined up in a row along the bottom of the screen, and the fourth is behind them. Different heroes have different skills, from ranged attacks to powerful melee strikes, and each of them has a special power that you activate by swapping them from the back row to the front.

Each round involves swapping your heroes around to match their capabilities with their enemies, and manage their health reserves. It's a simple set of rules resulting in an accessible, original, and challenging battler.

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