iPhone Roundup

geoDefense Swarm

• Developer: Critical Thought
• Price: 59p

The original geoDefense was the best fixed-path Tower Defence game on the iPhone: a series of devious maps and a smart drag and drop control system that blended brilliantly with fizzing neon graphics stolen wholesale from Geometry Wars. geoDefense Swarm is Critical Thought's attempt at sewing up the free-path Tower Defence market too, and the results are equally addictive.

Some may prefer the military chic of Subatomic's Fieldrunners, but Swarm has more content, better maps, slightly more satisfying units, and special effects which will make you feel like you're having just the right kind of grand mal seizure at an eighties disco. Prepare yourself for some wonky difficulty spikes early on, and be warned that the game literally insults you whenever you lose, but such casual brutality only serves to make your eventual victories all the sweeter.

9/10

Poppi

• Developer: Pompom Games
• Price: 59p

There's no nice way of putting this: Pompom specialises in making games that look like they might be taking place inside some gigantic deep-space uterus. Shooters such as Mutant Storm and Space Tripper are wriggly, bacterial, and distinctly gynaecological, peopled by deadly clusters of sperm and nasty little many-toothed viruses (according to the internet, this is the correct plural for virus, incidentally, even though it looks weird to me).

Poppi, then, the tiny team's first iPhone game, is something of an aesthetic departure: the backgrounds might exude a slick shimmer as they shift uneasily, and the soundtrack still features the rumbling white noise that suggests that, somewhere near the game's playing area, stomachs are churning and blood vessels are flinging their gooey cargo about, but the puzzle pieces themselves are clean, brightly coloured, and distinctly non-disgusting.

Despite that, Poppi still displays Pompom's sharp focus on mechanics. Building a little on the Bliss Island format (the developer's only real disappointment so far), players prod a variety of falling disks around the screen, with the aim of connecting them with identical pieces before they hit the bottom.

While it initially seems simplistic, a handful of smart variations heat things up, and the resulting game, while not as wetly charismatic as much of the studio's output, will still draw you in for far longer than you might expect.

7/10

Backbreaker Football

• Developer: NaturalMotion/Ideaworks Games Studio
• Price: 59p

According to Backbreaker, American Football is a game about hugging - or, more accurately, a game about avoiding being hugged. Reducing the complex stop-start rules of the sport to a simple race up the field towards the goal area, dodging the vicious lunges of a handful of opponents, Ideaworks' game benefits from controls that boast the same stripped-down immediacy as the premise.

A series of tilts steer your footballer, while on-screen buttons allow you to juke left and right, spin your way out of trouble, and even show-boat across the finish-line, and, with your score rocketing upwards with every encounter, it all works fantastically well - every touchdown transformed into a barnstorming victory, while excellent visuals and sound turn each wipe-out into a hilarious tragedy.

A prelude to NaturalMotion's forthcoming console game, Backbreaker has a leaderboard-chasing appeal that transcends its subject matter. Simple, certainly, but brilliant with it.

9/10