Features

The best iPhone and iPad games this week - Transworld Endless Skater, Beyond Gravity, Blackwell 1: Legacy

The best iPhone and iPad games this week - Transworld Endless Skater, Beyond Gravity, Blackwell 1: Legacy
|
iOS
| New releases round-up

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

Transworld Endless Skater
By Supervillain Studios - download on iPhone and iPad (free)

yt
Subscribe to Pocket Gamer on


Like Appy Nerd, Transworld Endless Skater is a game designed to promote a product or brand. Unlike Appy Nerd, it's really quite good. And it's fairly original, at least in the elements that it combines: lane-based auto-running, and trick-based high score-chasing.

The aim is to travel along the screen from left to right performing ollies, jumping off ramps, grinding along rails, and generally showing off.

The controls are clever, assigning different sorts of actions to multi-directional swipes on four different areas of the screen. And the game propels you along with a series of challenges and a cleverly pitched score-chasing metagame.

Unfortunately, this being a free-to-play game, it eventually propels you face first into a paywall, but before you get to that point you'll have had hours of fun, and the gameplay is enjoyable enough that you'll probably find yourself dipping into it for weeks.

Beyond Gravity
By Qwiboo - buy on iPhone and iPad (69p / 99c)

yt
Subscribe to Pocket Gamer on

Beyond Gravity is a game about dying in space. It's about trying to stay alive for as long as you can while knowing that in the end you're doomed to the loneliest kind of death mankind has so far devised for itself.

Except it's fine, because it's just a video game death, and when you come back you come back stronger.

The aim is to leap from spinning planet to spinning planet, timing each jump so that your scientifically inaccurate arc coincides with a line of screws and nuts that disappear with a satisfying tinkle when you hoover them up.

With these screws you buy upgrades with which to win more screws with which to buy upgrades and so on. It's a familiar mechanic, but Beyond Gravity has enough charm and polish to deserve more of your attention than the ten thousand other endless games that almost certainly came out this week.

Blackwell 1: Legacy
By Wadjet Eye Games - buy on iPhone and iPad (£1.49 / $1.99)
yt
Subscribe to Pocket Gamer on

Blackwell is a dialogue-rich point-and-click adventure series by Wadjet Eye Games, the studio responsible for the excellent Shivah and Gemini Rue.

You play as reclusive spiritualist Rosa Blackwell, a richly drawn character who, along with her spirit guide Joey Mallone, has to counsel the dead by working out how they died or finding something that will bring them comfort.

This being a point-and-click adventure game, there are items to collects and puzzles to solve. For the most part these take the form of clues picked up in conversation and hastily jotted down (Blackwell is a journalist, after all), allowing you to comb the written evidence for contradictions and conversational ammunition.

Legacy is the first of five episodes in the series, and its imaginative premise, believable characters, well-designed puzzles, and superb voice-acting have all got it off to an encouraging start.

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