Best of 2012 (Top 5):
From NimbleBit, the creators of Tiny Tower, comes the next game that's going to occupy bite-sized pieces of your time for the next several months. Pocket Planes is the team's latest offering in the casual simulation department, putting you in charge of airports and passengers, planes and people, and challenging you to make it all run smoothly and swiftly so you can, well, do it all on a much bigger scale. It's the perfect formula for a "just one more level" kind of game, and if you were one of the many souls who fell victim to Tiny Tower's amazing level of addictiveness, Pocket Planes might just hook you twice as hard.
Outwitters is an asynchronous multiplayer strategy game from One Man Left, the creator of the equally captivating mobile game Tilt to Live. Outwitters takes place on a hex grid and stars three races of characters, each with a handful of unique units. By steadily moving soldiers across the board, deploying specialist healers, scouts, and the like, each team vies for control and the ultimate destruction of the other side's base. It's the most intense experience you can have with chubby pink soldiers and a field full of fish fighters!
Last Day of Work loves virtual sims. I mean seriously loves them, at least according to their lead designer. And, well, their product line, which includes the massively popular Virtual Villagers series. For those of us who love messing with the lives of little virtual people without all that faffing about on an island, Last Day of Work created Virtual Families, a game which featured the animated people without the exploding volcanoes. Now they've come out with the sequel to that fabulous game, Virtual Families 2: Our Dream House, which deepens the gameplay of the original in new and interesting ways, and all for your handy portable iOS device!
The tower defense genre has been around for years, punctuated every so often by the release of a game that sets a new standard for how things should be. One of the first for the browser world was Desktop Tower Defense, and for the mobile market, an early heavy-hitter was the original Fieldrunners. Developer Subatomic Studios took a few years to do it, but the team has finally rolled out a worthy sequel with Fieldrunners 2. Expect more maps, more variety, more units, more enemies, and more rewards with this stunning release that will rewrite the way you think of the tower defense genre on iPhone.
The latest in Toge Production's popular series of zombie action-strategy games, Infectonator 2 thrives on frenetic chain-reaction based gameplay, its awesome sprite art, and the pure adrenaline rush one gets by infecting the world, continent by continent. It may be a bit taxing on the CPU for such mindless fun, but that just means you'll keep going even after someone has taken a chomp from your brain
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