Games for Android

Abduction! World Attack

• £1.35 / Free version: Abduction!

Abduction is loosely based on PapiJump, except when I say "loosely based" I really mean "mechanically identical to". But it's beautifully presented, bursting with colour and imagination and occasional new ideas that make it a much more lasting attraction than its inspiration.

You're a cow, and your fellow cows and a menagerie of other animals have been abducted by aliens. The aliens live in space, so the only way to get to them is by jumping vertically up the screen, landing on platforms. You tilt to control the cow's direction, and other cows come floating down from the sky. They can be collected for bonus points. Nabbing a present-shaped collectible might give you something good, like an extra life or a high-jump, or something bad, like crumbling platforms that disappear when you set hoof upon them.

There are about 25 Adventure levels, which you work your way through collecting backgrounds and characters - sheep, kangaroos, penguins and beyond, all of them playable - and another 50-odd time, score or collectible-based challenges. Defeat all of that, and you unlock the right to make your own custom levels and play against the AI. The free version has a small sample of these, about 15 levels in total.

Abduction is incredibly addictive, as anyone who's ever tried a game of its sort before can attest, but with a big world map, unlockables and plenty of characters, it's also got incentives to keep you playing beyond just higher scores. It's wonderfully presented, with bright suns and stars that shine behind the platforms the further up you get, adorable little characters and varied environments. It's superb value for money, too.

9/10

Buka

• £1.50 / Free version: Buka Lite

In Buka, the idea is to protect a grinning blue blob from hordes of evil-faced red, yellow and other brightly-coloured blobs as it travels up the screen in search of its Happy Place. The blue blob spouts endearingly broken English, encouraging your efforts as you go. It's very sweet and simple, and as the levels up the opposition it gets ever more frantic.

You tap the screen to make shockwaves that keep enemies away, and tap and hold to charge up an explosion to get rid of them altogether. They tend to explode into difficult-to-manage pieces, but you can dodge Buka out of the way by tilting the phone (or touching and dragging, if your phone's accelerometer is dodgy - you can turn the tilt-sensing off.)

Getting Buka back to the homeland is a question of judging when to deflect enemies for no points or explode them for points and subject the blob to a barrage of asteroid pieces. The flaring explosions look fantastic, and in terms of blob warfare it puts the Android's selection of terribly basic Galcon clones to shame. But it does go on for a bit too long.

8/10