Rootwork [$4.99] bills itself as a Sophisticated Card Game, but what that means is left open to interpretation. It isn't a deck building game, a collectible card game or even a multiplayer experience. It's a solo game about being lost in the woods and staving off fear while you find your way home.

Doesn't sound much like a theme you'd expect in a card game, which are usually fixated far more on mechanical than thematic elements, but Rootwork succeeded at sending a shiver or two down my spine. It's an unsettling game, rooted in mysticism and darkness, and the creepiness weaves its way into the mechanics of the thing almost unseen.

You play a character lost in the woods—a child, an elder, a teen or an adult to begin with. Two have extra benefits, two have major weaknesses. They are something like difficulty modes, and something like game's one major source of variety.

You're accompanied by a capricious force known as She. She can be helpful—her card is always in your hand. If you make use of her power, she'll win a round for you outright. Every so often She will hurt you for it, though. That gamble is the central thematic conflict of the game.

To find your way out of the woods, you take your cards and visit Sites. These locations in the woods are milestones, and each character has a few milestones they need to visit before they escape. Find the right ones, clear them, and you're free for another night.

In your way are Menaces and Sticks. You clear them by matching the colors of your cards with the colors on them. Menaces will kill you with fright if you fail to get past them. Sticks will fill your pockets, leaving you without any flexibility for forming your hand. All the while, time is passing, and the weather is against you. Each turn a weather card is used, and when they're all gone, you're lost. Fright alone can kill you, but so can staying out in the woods too late.

So you match your cards to menaces, staving off fear, loss, fury corruption and deception. You trace your path back from milestone to milestone. In the end, hopefully, you make it out alive.

In practical terms, this means a good bit of clever card management and a lot of luck. Most of the time you'll need to manage your resources carefully, tucking certain cards into your pockets and knowing when to take some strategic damage. Sometimes you'll lose because you just couldn't draw the milestones you needed. Sometimes you'll lose because every big bad menace will show up against you. Sometimes you'll win because every single hand will go your way. Small hands and short games mean there's a limit to how much variety you'll encounter.

This is offset by the characters you have to choose from, and the way Rootwork manages progression. Your wins are tallied by character, and you unlock new cards at certain milestones. Playing the Adult or Child is distinctly easier than playing the Elder or Teen, but you'll need to handicap yourself with the latter in order to unlock the next cards.

The flaw in that system is that the milestones are far apart. Twenty wins per character, up to a thousand times overall—it's a lot to ask. The gaps are a little too large to keep the game interesting via progression alone, and the core game does need a little help with its hooks.

While you're unlocking new cards, you're also unlocking the story. Rootwork has a tale to tell about the malevolence of She who rules the Woods, and you unlock it piecemeal as you escape the menaces you encounter. It's a dark and bloody tale, well-suited to this unsettling game.

If you don't care about the story and you don't care about progression, you can go ahead and unlock all the cards via IAP. The game cautions against this sort of cheating, and unless you're going to be satisfied with the intrinsic motivation of simply playing, you'll probably regret it. Playing with those regrets is all part of the theme, though. Like the terrible mistakes Rootwork will let you make with She, you're free to ruin your own experience at will.

Ultimately the card game at the heart of Rootwork doesn't quite uphold its thematic aspirations. It's creepy, sort of, but not as unsettling as the rest of the package. It's mechanically strong, but not strong enough to carry it through a thousand or more winning games. That's not to say it isn't worth playing. Rootwork is a game worth sinking into, but few will have the tenacity to dig down into its depths.

Mugshot Games' CastleMine [$0.99] is one of those rare mobile titles that did not make its initial debut on iOS. In fact, the tower defense game was first introduced on Windows Phone and garnered enough popularity to hit a million downloads across the platform. In celebration of that milestone, the developers have now ported CastleMine over to iOS. While the game's basic TD premise is relatively simplistic, its deep upgrade system, tons of missions and digging mechanic offer a lot worth checking out.

CastleMine doesn't pretend to offer a compelling narrative to set up the game; all you need to know is there are baddies underground coming towards your castle and you need to defend your fortress from them. As this is a TD title, defending your castle is done via placing towers along the enemies' path. Missions are graded with a three star system, and players earn experience after each level that allow them to buy permanent tower upgrades.

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I expected to play Magicka [$1.99 (HD)] lying on the couch with my feet up, slowly tapping the iPad in relaxing rhythms. Instead I found myself sitting-up, hunched over like a mad scientist franticly rapping on a touch-screen. I never expected to be as engaged as I would be, nor as impacted by its combat system. I did, though, expect this game to be great.

At least I got that one right.

Up to 4 players can adventure, as merry-men of magic, through Wizards of the Square Tablet’s comic-mischief story-beats. Its writing is as charming as its voice-acting and never misses an opportunity to crack a joke or make a few good references. More importantly, the story is paced perfectly for those using their iPad on the go, and never loses its charm because of it.

Magicka’s story weaves in-between 2D battle scenarios where the player – or players – is tasked to kill enemies, avoid and set traps, slay giant bosses, fight off hordes of ghouls, or simply survive. To do this one must learn the craft of Magicka; mixing and matching between 7 elements – earth, fire, water, shield, life, cold and lightning - to cast a spell. It’s up to the player to evaluate each battle's situation and cast the most effective attacks and defenses possible.

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We called it whack-a-mole, back when I was a raid healer in World of Warcraft. It's been a while, but I'll bet things haven't changed all that much. You watch a screen of green boxes slowly deplete, and do your damndest to tag them with heals as they drop. Whack - a heal-over-time on the off-tank. Whack - a big heal on the main tank. Whack - a last second save for someone squishy. On and on until the boxes stop dropping, you look up, and hey—the boss is dead.

If you ever want to get that experience without all the fuss and pressure of actually raiding—to try it for yourself, to get a little practice in, or to remember the good old days, say—Healer: A Light in the Darkness [Free (HD)] has pulled it together just about perfectly. All the tension and tedium of healing big raids on the go.

In Healer, the experience of raid healing is whittled down to its finer points. There's no positioning to fuss about, no interactive widgets to interact with, nothing but pure, clean healing. You're not the raid leader, so you can't help your imaginary friends figure out that they should focus fire or, you know, tank better. You just heal.

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Zynga gets a lot of flack for a myriad of reasons. This is typically due to ripping off other people's original ideas, spamming your Facebook feed (and your friends) with useless requests, or making a game that primarily exists to be an IAP cash cow. Did the inevitable finally happen, and they actually delivered a game that at its core is designed to be fun and playable?

Running With Friends [Free / Free (HD)] has been out in Canada for a while and was finally released worldwide a couple of weeks ago. I decided to check the game out for myself since it's free, and much to my delight, Zynga has added a successful social component to separate this runner from other games in the genre.

A comparison to Temple Run [Free / Free] is quite unavoidable at this point, so let's address that elephant in this review already. Frankly, Temple Run is indeed considered the father of all iOS runners. However if anyone's going to have beef with this game, Subway Surfers' [Free] is definitely its rival. In its core, Running With Friends is a touch-controlled lane-based runner as a opposed to Temple Run's tilt-based method of moving side to side within the game's levels.

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You smash down into the outside of an airport. There are a swarm of yellow baddies attacking the place. J.A.R.V.I.S. tells you to get going while you can. You touch a button on your suit. You’re flying through the air.

This is how Iron Man 3 [Free] begins, the iOS game based on the $1B grossing film of its namesake. Gameloft’s latest casts you as the famous Tony Stark, on a quest to save the world from the evil ne'er-do-wells. While fun, the game sadly is in stark contrast to its business model, which partly goes against the protagonist.

The first thing you’ll notice are Iron Man 3’s graphics; they are outstanding. Gameloft has definitely gone to great lengths to make the game look good. Iron Man’s suit is reflective, which slightly shows off the world surrounding him. The environment is lush and detailed, making you feel like you’re actually in a living, breathing world, not laying in bed with your iOS device on your lap. However, the environments are also very limited, and you’ll quickly wish for some variety.

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Appearances can be deceiving. In the App Store, Mosaique [$0.99] looks like it might be a generic block-pusher game, or some sort of warped Tetris clone. The truth is that developer Winning Blimp uses these familiar aesthetics to create something altogether completely different.

In Mosaique, Colored squares assemble onscreen in a seemingly random pattern, and you must navigate the screen’s perimeter to clear them by going to the side you want and then dispatching your colored square out into the field. You can only remove same-colored squares – send it out against something not matching your color, and the new color comes boomeranging back, and what you sent out originally takes its place.

It might sound somewhat complicated, but it really isn’t. It’s your level of mastery with this mechanic that will determine whether you’re a skillful player or merely just okay. It can be a little confusing at first, even with the tutorial, but the best way to understand Mosaique, alas, is to just try it for yourself. After spending a few hours with it, though, I can tell you: This is not a time-suck game in the traditional sense.

With soothing, almost meditative music playing, and a hyper-focus on the game’s sole mechanic, Mosaique can be downright distracting to the extent that the rest of the world can seemingly fall away and disappear. Falling under Mosaique’s spell, my entire world became these giant, differently hued pixels. Even though there's not a ton of depth here, there's something very absorbing about the game that's difficult to articulate.

What prevents Mosaique from being too easy is your shot meter. Every time you spew a square out to try to remove more, it dissipates slightly. If you’re careless, your play sessions will be rather short. The only way to survive is by strategizing, Raiders of the Lost Ark-style, when Indy is trying to grab the idol. If you’re in a rush and just go for the easy shots, you’ll be penalized. But if you’re crafty and realize, “Hey, if I shoot this blue one here for this green one… then I can use it to line up all these purple ones after I move the yellow one,” well, then, you’ll fare much, much better. You’ll also be able to continue on, because obliterating two or more squares in one go is the only way to extend your shot meter.

“Winning” is defined by completing seven different, increasingly more difficult puzzles. The game isn’t timed, so you can take as long as you want to hem and haw, but unless you have a chess-master’s mind, you probably will need to dive in and just start square-swapping to crack how to best survive the world of Mosaique.

Earlier this month, EA soft-launched a new version of the iconic block-clearing game Tetris in the Canadian App Store, called Tetris Blitz [Free], and we took the title for a spin in a TA Plays video to see what it was all about. Basically, it's the Tetris block-dropping-and-clearing that we all know and love, but stuffed into a fast-paced timed mode similar to Bejeweled Blitz [Free]. It's pretty good, despite being littered with all the freemium trappings that we've come to expect on the App Store.

Today, Tetris Blitz graduated from its soft-launch status and has released outside of Canada and into the world at large. Here's an official trailer showing the game in action.

Tetris Blitz is actually a great version of the classic game, and out of all the various Tetris games that have been released on the App Store over the years this one really nails the touchscreen controls the best. The downfall, of course, is the freemium-ness of the game, but at least it's not completely in your face and is pretty easily ignored. Anyway, it's free to check out, so if interested definitely give Tetris Blitz a look.

We recently mentioned how having a Minecraft style game, or even just sticking the word Minecraft into your title or search terms, is the flavor of the moment to try and snatch some downloads from mobile Minecraft fans. Sometimes, though, the block-building formula is actually used in a unique way that complements the game. Naquatic's recently-released Guncrafter [Free] is one of those games.

I never really understood the appeal of "gun apps" that let you either build, clean or just admire various types of 3D-rendered firearms, but they sure have been popular in the past. In Guncrafter you're given a grid and a set of block types that you'll use to build a firearm piece by piece. There are different size grids and different kinds of blocks that you'll slowly unlock as you play which will affect how large your weapon is and the kinds of attributes it has.

Once you've created a firearm in Guncrafter you can then take it into a shoot range scenario where you get to actually test it out by blasting away at various targets, also made up of blocks. This portion of the game actually pits you online against another player and their created weapon to see who can blast away more of the target terrain.

It's actually really fun, both to build a creative weapon and to see how it performs in competition. The formula really works in Guncrafter. However, there is one major negative that seems to be the sticking point for most players: the actual build of your weapon has no bearing on its performance. So, an elaborately-built weapon will fire exactly the same as one that's literally just a barrel.

That's too bad too, because Guncrafter could be a really deep title if the actual designs of your weapons had meaning. As it is now it's still a fun shooting gallery game, and there's something strangely compelling about creating crazy weapons of your own design, but at the end of the day the game just feels a bit too hollow to have much lasting appeal.

Like I said, though, it's still fun for what it is, and it's free-to-play so worth giving a look. I still need to spend some more time diving into it, but so far I've found that Guncrafter is way cooler than I originally thought it would be. People in the forums have been enjoying it too, so if you fancy making your own weapons and blasting away at stuff against online competition, check out Guncrafter.

If you're among the, like, 12 people who don't own Angry Birds Space [$0.99 / $2.99 (HD)], now's an awesome time to fix that. The outer space-themed take on the series is free to download across iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. You got zero dollars, right? Get clicking!

My favorite thing to do in Space is watch my birds helplessly orbit objects without any hope of actually colliding into something that can break. It's funny in that troll-y kind of way. These brave birds braved space and, possibly, travelled light years to do a job, but can't because their operator is a jerk. Eli, on the other hand, found a couple of better things to like about Space, including the level design.

We hear folks really like Space, so chances are the remaining 12 of you will, too. We're guessing this is free courtesy Apple's own Free App of the Week promotion, so you've got seven or so days to jump on the game's new $0 price.

As we mentioned at the beginning of the month with the release of Stick Stunt Biker 2 [Free], Djinn Works are the most prolific producers of stick-figure based mobile games. They crank them out at a brisk pace, but they always end up being pretty darn fun little games. Not even a month later and already they are back with another title, this time taking on the world of tennis with Stickman Tennis [$0.99].

Strangely, there aren't a whole lot of options for tennis fans on the App Store, and even Sega's mobile rendition of their popular tennis franchise Virtua Tennis Challenge [$4.99 / Free] was kind of a letdown when it released last year. However, for a somewhat simplistic, arcadey game of tennis, Stickman Tennis delivers.

The setup is simple. You'll guide your stickman through 64 different tournaments in the single-player campaign, or just hop right into a one-off quick game. You have the option of having your character auto-run to the ball or you can choose to control his movement manually. You can also choose from 3 opponent difficulty levels and the length of each match.

Stickman Tennis is controlled with a virtual stick for movement (or just for shot direction, if you choose the auto-run option) and a set of 3 virtual buttons – one each for a lob, slice, or topspin shot. You'll hold down the button of the type of shot you want to hit, and when the ball is near you release it to perform the shot. How well you hit that shot is all based on timing, so let go too early or too late and it won't result in an optimum shot.

And… that's pretty much it. Like I said, this is a simple game, but a fun one. The performance is smooth and the AI appears to be pretty competent, at least in the early goings. This isn't some deep tennis simulation game, but for what it is I'm enjoying it a lot. It feels like a good fit for mobile. Stickman Tennis is out worldwide already, so if you're interested grab it with the link below or check in with the forum community for more impressions. Also, if you're an iPad gamer you're out of luck at the moment, but a Universal update is in the pipeline.

I have to admit my eyes glazed over a bit when I took my first look at Tomb Breaker [Free] It could probably look more like Bejewled with a little effort, but I've had my fill of straight Match-3s and then some. I probably wouldn't have given it a second look if I hadn't noticed it was from Kurt Bieg, creator of the delightfully frustrating Circadia [$0.99]. That bit of trivia caught my attention, and I'm glad it did.

Tomb Breaker has promise. It's clear Bieg's Simple Machine is catering to a more casual crowd, but it boosts the business of matching gems into something a bit more cerebral than we've come to expect.

If you've played Bejeweled Blitz, you've got the basics of the setup. Tomb Breaker gives you sixty seconds on the clock to pull in the highest score you can, and the option of competing with friends on Game Center. You can use up to three boosts per attempt, paying out of a pool of gems that you can earn or (more likely) buy. It lacks some of Blitz's more aggressive psychological tricks, but the bones are there.

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There's no doubt that Mojang's Minecraft has become a nearly unfathomable success over the past few years, and as with anything that becomes popular there's a seemingly unending line of people that rush to ride the coattails of that success.

Not that I'm saying there's anything wrong with taking heavy inspiration from a game. I mean heck, even Minecraft was inspired by similar games that came before it. But in the mobile space especially, 99% of anything that gets released that's reminiscent of Minecraft is just a crappy knock-off and cash-in attempt that's of little value to anyone. "Minecraft" is the new "Angry" or "Temple" in terms of latest SEO hotness, I guess you could say.

I can tell you from personal experience working at TouchArcade that with dozens of these kinds of games coming out every week it gets very hard to decide which ones are worth exploring and which ones should just be written off as the cheap clones that they are. It gets very easy to dismiss these games when so many bad ones are churned out at such an incredible pace.

With that said, a new Minecraft-y game has been ripping up the charts lately and even jockeying for position with Mojang's official Minecraft - Pocket Edition [$6.99]. That game is called Survivalcraft [$3.99], and despite being made by just a single person it bests even Mojang's official mobile offering and even does some unique things to set itself apart from the pack. And, despite our initial hesitations, this is anything but a cheap knock-off attempting to cash in on the Minecraft craze, and is in fact the best mobile sandbox game of its kind that you can get at this time.

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Baseball season is in full swing, and in celebration of the 2013 All-Star Game coming in July Major League Baseball has released MLB.com Home Run Derby [Free], a free-to-play game that puts you in the shoes of an actual MLB player as they try to become the winner of the Home Run Derby competition. While the core game at the center of Home Run Derby is solid, and visually it looks great, the whole thing is hampered by a stingy free-to-play model that pretty much ruins what would have been a fun little mobile game for baseball fans.

The game uses a dual-currency system, MLBucks and coins. At the onset you're given enough bucks to purchase one lower-tier player from all the players who have participated in the last three Home Run Derbys. You're then given the option to play either of the game's two modes: the Home Run Derby itself or Arcade mode. Both can be played in single player or in online multiplayer.

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Whether or not you even realize it, it's a safe bet that you've got at least one game on your phone right now that uses the Unity game engine. It's a really cool development environment that allows developers to essentially code their game once, then deploy it across a ridiculous amount of platforms ranging all the way from iOS devices up to the upcoming Sony PlayStation 4- Often times with either no or very few tweaks to make it work on each device.

In the scheme of game engine pricing, Unity was incredibly cheap at its initial free bundle when coupled with the $800 package license that allows developers to build iOS and Android games... But, $800 is still a lot of money for a indie developer dabbling in game development in their spare time. As of today, it's all free.

Unity CEO David Helgason explains the thought process in a recently released video:

If you want to fiddle with Unity, head on over to the download site. Exhaustive tutorials for anything you'd ever want to do (including tutorials that start with incredibly beginner-level stuff) are plentiful and merely a Google search away. I can't wait to see what kind of things comes of this shift in pricing.

[via Gamasutra]