Mobile Games Roundup
Bugs! Birds! Butterflies! Kahoots! Halcyon!
If you're one of the many who's only just joining the smartphone party, it might strike you as rather odd that it's such a monumental pain to find out what the best games are.
From the handset itself, the focus is nearly always on the new releases and the perennial best-sellers. There's barely any means of finding out about the games you missed – even ones only a few weeks old. Trying to get any daylight among this lot is practically impossible.
With that in mind, you might imagine the handset and OS makers would be more invested in making an intuitive hub or web-based marketplace to make it easy to browse from your computer, but they're a complete mess. Windows Phone 7 has only been out for a matter of weeks, and already it's overflowing. Browsing the iTunes App Store is like unpicking a Gordian knot, and the less said about the hateful Android Market the better.
Just as well we're here to spare you the pain, then...
Halcyon
- iPad - £2.39
While you sit in Costbucks browsing the interwebs with one hand and trying not to spill Gingerbread Latte down your pink cardigan with the other, you wonder aloud why no-one has bothered to make an iPad app that's part spatial-action puzzler and part interactive stringed instrument.
Well wonder no more, because Zach Gage has just the thing to fill the gaping void in your otherwise perfectly balanced modern life. Think of Halcyon as a world of would-be lovers yet to meet, only those lovers are coloured arrows travelling along the tracks of life.
As they travel inexorably along their predetermined paths, it's your job to point the finger of fate at them, and ensure that they meet the partner of their dreams, fall in love, have children and spend the rest of their lives despairing at the never-ending spiral of debt.
In other words, as the arrows converge from the sides of the screen, you have to swiftly create pairs by drawing a line to the track you wish the arrow to move to. Success only brings more colour-matching fun, though, and as you do so, the 'strings' procedurally create a calming sonic swamp.
Halcyon might well ask that you untangle the currents of the wind, land, sea and air, but it's as vicious and unpredictable as a Friday evening jog across Victoria Station concourse.
8/10