Mobile Games Roundup

Toyshop Adventures

• Android - Free (in-app purchases available)
• Previously released on iPhone and iPad - Free

If the best things in life are free, the worst things in life must be the things we have to pay for – like in-game items.

Under normal circumstances, Glu's rather innocent 2.5D side-scroller would pass most of us by as being a fairly inoffensive platformer. Nothing special. A little floaty in the jump department, maybe. Rather generic to look at, but by no means the worst game ever to grace a mobile phone. The fact that it's free – and recently ported to Android – caught our attention.

For the first 20 minutes or so, you'll dutifully scoop up the marbles scattered around, and ace each level without breaking a sweat. You'll get told about the time-limited power-ups, like the double jump and shield, and then find reason to use them. And then swiftly run out of the required marbles to 'buy' them.

Topping up this in-game currency involves buying packs, which cost anything from £1.79 for a jar of marbles to £11.99 for a cart of crystals. I'm not even joking.

The problem isn't so much that it's 'freemium'; after all, you got the first batch of levels for nothing, it's that the extra levels aren't remotely worth paying for. Any game designed to make people pay to double-jump needs to be pointed at and laughed at until it dies in a heap.

3/10

iBlast Moki

• Windows Phone 7 - £2.49 (12-level free trial available)
• Previously released on iPhone (£1.79) and iPad (£2.39)

The Windows Phone 7 line-up has been something of a rogue's gallery of iOS games to date – and here's another one to pay extra money for!

Released to warm applause almost 18 months ago, Godzilab's cutesy little number caught the eye with its deceptively simple blob-blasting formula. Armed with a limited quantity of bombs, (and eventually balloons, wheels and other tat) the idea is to place your objects so that they manoeuvre poor little bulgy-eyed Moki to a whirling vortex of pain. A better place, presumably, where the locals don't explode you to death for being on their land.

Get it right, and it's on to the next, more challenging stage, where you might have to, for example, set up a chain reaction, or blast obstacles out of the way first. Unlike Angry Birds, it's not about achieving your goal in a set number of turns, but repeatedly making fine tweaks to the placement so that it all happens in one hit. It's all a big fiddle, but an absorbing faff all the same.

Although 90-odd levels of physics fun is a fair return for a few quid, it's a shame they stripped out the iPad's level editor. Aren't new versions supposed to add features?

7/10