Games for Android
Ten picks for Google OS.
Totemo
- £1.50 / Free version: Totemo Lite
Another from Hexage, one of the most reliable mobile developers working with the Android Market. We can forgive them for making their games available to iPhone users too. Totemo is a simplistic and indescribably infuriating logic puzzler. It describes itself as "mind-soothing", but actually it'll make you want to break your phone in half. In a good way.
It's got an ancient Native American theme. A screen of lost spirits blinks balefully at you as you try to connect them in the right sequence and send them on their way to the afterlife. A totem on the left of the screen dictates how many spirits must be joined together to make them disappear. They can only be joined in vertical and horizontal lines, and when you've tapped a spirit, its potential partners stare disconcertingly out of the screen to alert you to their presence.
It's certainly novel, and it takes a while to click, but once it does you begin to see the patterns rather than opting for simple trial and error. Shaking the phone resets the level if you've left a stray spirit with no hope of rescue. You'll need to go through the tutorial to make sense of it at first.
8/10
Armored Strike Online
- $3.99 / Free version: Armored Strike Online (Lite)
Armored Strike's case isn't helped by the fact that it kept crashing my phone - if you're running 1.6, give it a miss or risk completely borking your handset. It's a classic tank game, and an impressively full-featured one, which explains the relatively high price. It has online play, complete with chat and leaderboard rankings, as well as 25 weapons, but only three maps, which is mildly disappointing.
Terrain is destructible, and you can pick either a tank, a slow-moving heavy tank or a quick, vulnerable mech to trundle about in. Players take it in turns to select a target, figure out the trajectory and fire away. Zooming in and out is a bit of a faff, and the sheer proliferation of numbers on the screen is off-putting, but otherwise it works better than any other tank game on the Android.
The Lite version gives you just one tank and only five out of the 25-odd available weapons, which can be bought and exchanged for cash between rounds. It makes up for an unintuitive interface with a clean, bright visual style and beguilingly nostalgic midi-music.
7/10