Mobile Games Roundup
Reckless! Shoot! Dexter! Angry! Buka!
Angry Birds Halloween
- iPhone / £0.59
- iPad /£1.19
If David Cameron is a huge Angry Birds fan, then we may as well all give up now. Perhaps we'd be better off looking to Rovio to bail out our ailing economy - they seem to have mastered the art of making a silk purse out of a sow's ear.
In this stopgap release, nothing much has changed. It's still the same bird-flinging game it ever was - it's just marginally more difficult, and has 45 Halloween-themed levels to obsess over when you've probably got better things to do.
But, as usual, the game's teeth-gnashing one-more-go appeal keeps you inexplicably glued to the game, desperately trying to suicide-bomb those pesky green pigs hiding out in rickety wooden structures (and inside pumpkins, improbably). You might even openly hate the game, but there you are, trying one last time to see if you can gain one tiny sliver of retribution.
Fair enough, it's very much more of the same, but when you've sold seven million copies worldwide, a cheap and cheerful level pack can't hurt. Unless you're in charge of the country.
7/10
Buka
- Android / £1.50 (Free demo available)
- iPhone/iPad / £0.59
Every bubble has to pass its fizzical. Even delightful little balls of cutesy joy like Buka. Now come on, work it, work it!
Having presumably been kicked out of bubble camp, the simpering Mr Buka now has to find his happy place in the face of extreme disapproval. As well he might, but there's precious little chance of that when lots of stern-looking angry bubbles keep insisting on encroaching on his personal space. How rude.
With only a feeble explosive attack at your disposal, you have to shoo these wicked fiends away for as long as possible. It's a bit like Shoot To Kill, oddly, in an alternate universe where everything's bubblicious, and grown men sing about life as a Space Hopper.
Happiness is a futile, fleeting thing for Mr Buka, however. Eventually he'll find his happy place, only to face an even more concerted onslaught. And then another. And so on. Why do we gamers always play things that eventually spoil our fun?
7/10