I don't know about you, but I think Disney's foray into mobile games might have yielded some of the most creative work of its recent years. Ignoring of course the companies they own, the Mouse House has been seen as lagging in both the movie and videogame departments for quite some time. As anyone not living in a sewer themselves knows, that all changed with the release of Where's My Water? [$0.99] For the first time in...well...ever, a new Disney icon had been created at the videogame level first, and the company seemed to be using mobile to kick off an upswing in the quality department. So naturally, with an alligator as their new face of gaming, they'd follow things up with...a fluffy kitten. Wait, what?

If Mittens [$0.99] - from its seemingly detached concept to its unexpected existence - has you skeptical, you're not alone. Heck, in our TA Plays for the game, Brad drew some early conclusions about the way that the experience seemed like it was playing things disappointingly safe both from a mechanical and creative standpoint. Having now cleared through all of the game's levels and its available bonus pack, it seems that like its in-game collectibles, this one might just be a gem after all. As with the title's titular feline, though, players may go through ups and downs along the way.

The thing is, where Swampy brought with him not only a novel concept but a slew of memorable levels - each of which felt like it had a distinct theme and purpose - Mittens meanders much more on its way to eventual greatness. As with any physics puzzler, the basics are covered in the first few levels of each zone, with the core concept revolving around the need to swipe and tap our brave kitty to safety on a quest to impress his true love. Unfortunately, this introductory mindset seems to bleed into a large portion of the game's first fifty levels, with many of them feeling like indistinct, unmemorable versions of one another.

You know that sense you get when a new level in a three-star puzzler feels vaguely like a rearranged version of the one you played just far enough back that the game thinks you forgot it? Yeah, it's that.  All the trademark elements are in place, including sliced ropes, last minute drops onto bouncy objects, and risky collectible snagging - painted with a Disney polish that ensures everything feels smooth and precise. Yet for all its emphatic not-badness, there's a lingering feeling of ho-hum in the first two zones that's hard to shake. A sense that Disney might be trading in slightly on its newly minted supremacy in the genre, doing far less than they could to justify a purchase.

The yin to this more reserved yang, however, comes in the form of the levels that appear towards the end of each zone, as well as almost the entirety of the game's third area. Reassuringly, Mittens does eventually step out of the genre's comfort zone to deliver a much fresher take on a well-trod play style. First appearing as five bonus levels that are unlocked as you collect gems, these more complicated stages feel like a wonderful mix between Amazing Alex [$0.99] and Cut the Rope [$0.99]. Each one  departs from the "tap here, swipe this" feeling, instead forcing you to navigate landscapes already full of motion, and piece together the perfect timing needed to play your role as the little furry cog in a miniature machine. Better still? They tie together wonderfully and make up for the feeling of detachment prevalent throughout earlier levels. My particular favorites are the five final circus big-tops of the second zone, that culminate in a brilliant level full of tightropes, cannons, and miniature cars.

And while the last zone and the game's much tougher (and more imaginative) harbor zone continue this trend, I can't help but wonder why it feels like it takes almost half the game to get there. Drawing further attention to the game's design foibles is a seeming lack of effort in  - of all areas - production values. Mittens' is completely without stage music save for a repetitive chime at the end of a level, and the cut scenes that exist to punctuate play pale in comparison to the subtle, endearing storytelling achieved in Where's My Water? Except for grating meows when you fall into blackness or foul up, the titular kitty lacks all semblance of a personality, and it proves nigh-impossible to invest in the game beyond the compulsive desire to beat its levels.

This, perhaps, is the predicament I'm having with Mittens. You'd be hard pressed to call it bad by any stretch, and about half way through, it manages to take off in ways not hinted at in our TA Plays video to become a pretty wonderful take on the physics puzzler. At a dollar, and with a future that will doubtless be filled with more content, fans of the genre would be hard pressed not to pick this one up. At the same time, however, it's more than a little disheartening that Disney seems to have followed up their return to form with a return to safety, and I don't think it's unreasonable to expect more than a competent time-killer from a studio of their pedigree.

Like a top notch student handing in a rush job, Mittens sags not under the weight of what it does wrong, but all that it could have done much better.

I'm a big fan of survival horror games, especially ones like Amnesia: The Dark Descent and Slender, which provide no means of defending yourself from their boogeymen. You run and hide, or you die. While scoping out upcoming App Store releases late Wednesday evening, I learned about Eyes - The Horror Game [$0.99], a port of the indie PC title of the same name that promised a similar flight-no-fight experience. On an iPhone.

It was to laugh--to guffaw, I tell you!--at the idea that any game on a five-inch screen could make me shriek like Jamie Lee Curtis in a Halloween flick. But I am comfortable enough in my rugged masculinity (I haven't shaved in six weeks) to admit that's exactly what happened. I downloaded the game, plugged in my ear buds, turned off the lights, and turned up the volume. And within two minutes--give or take 60 seconds--I bounded out of bed mumbling "Nope nope nope nope" and switched the bedroom lights back on and started in on the much more cheerful Sonic Dash.

The goal of Eyes, like the controls you'll use to accomplish that goal, is deceptively simple. Ransack an old house to retrieve bags of money. A virtual stick moves you forward and back, sliding your thumb over the right half of the screen rotates your view, and you pick up objects by tapping them. Drawers also open with a quick tap. Simple, just like I said.

The hard part is mustering the courage to pillage and plunder. Eyes immerses you in incredible atmosphere, and as any survival horror savant will tell you, the right atmosphere makes or breaks the experience. Every chamber is dark and dusty. Wind howls and batters against the walls, your footsteps thump along, clocks tick and tock, and doors creak when you open them.

Those ambient noises set the mood, but they also serve as an early warning system. When your teeth begin to chatter and the furniture begins to rattle, make for the nearest room and cower in the corner. A ghost roams the manse, and she's not keen on the idea of letting you abscond with her earthly possessions. Catch more than a glimpse of the lady of the house and it's game over, much like bumping into the Slender Man in his backwoods domain.

The inherent sloppiness of the virtual stick inadvertently added to my experience. Doors are supposed to open when you push against them, but unless you hit them dead on, you'll just slide back and forth against them like a drunkard who's forgotten how knobs works. Every time the ghost got the jump on me, I ended up turning heel and throwing myself at the nearest door and fumbling against it due to the virtual stick's slipperiness. That heightened my sense of panic; I felt like I was a character in a horror movie who was too overcome with fear to properly grasp and turn a knob.

To finish Eyes, you need only collect a specified number of bags determined by your difficulty level and escape through the front door before the ghost nabs you. The house both helps and hinders your quest. Bags and other items such as keys are randomly strewn about each time you play. Your map fills in as you explore, but does not show your position, so you'll need to keep track of every twist and turn you take, especially in the basement. Eye symbols, also randomly placed, let you look through the ghost's eyes for a few moments--a handy if disorienting tool that can help you plan routes.

My only complaints are the ease of finding money bags and the short length of the game. The bags sparkle, standing out even in pitch blackness. Some are stashed away, but you can spot most by standing in one spot and turning around. Once you collect your bags and hit the front door, that's it. You're done. Once you learn your way around the house, completing the adventure won't take long even considering the random placement of items. I understand why randomizing the architecture isn't possible, but I'd love a longer experience--maybe an extra stage or two as IAP, or perhaps a sequel or remake along the lines of Slender: Arrival.

Those are minor gripes, though. Take my advice: don't be like me. Wait until after dark, shut (lock) yourself in a quiet room, and pop in your ear buds. Eyes is as immersive, as unsettling, and as chilling a horror experience as you'll find on any platform, if not as lengthy as horror fans would like.

Hello everyone. My name is Eli, and...I can't say no to the retro aesthetic. Wow! It feels good to get that one off my chest. In all seriousness, though, the resurgence of 8 and 16-bit era visuals on iOS has done a number on my wallet over the past few years, and that's been somewhat of a double-edged sword.

On one hand, I've discovered some fantastic experiences steeped in nostalgia: everything from Velocispider [$1.99 / Free] to Mikey Shorts [$0.99 / Free]. Yet for every gem that's still on my device, there's at least three lame ducks that have suckered me in with the power of childhood fan service.

So when I discovered Pixel Licker Games' Slayin [$0.99] as the result of a friend's tweet - complete with an icon that looked like a cartridge and an in-game controller skin - I knew I was powerless. The only question that remained was: would it be a wonderful walk down memory lane, or end up collecting virtual dust with all the other deleted duds?

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Remember when the word "port" conjured up terrifying visions of developers taking your favorite arcade game and cramming them into cartridges that spat out blurry graphics and fuzzy sound? Twisted Pixel does, and they know it wouldn't be proper to make gamers revisit those dark days, so they put forth a solid effort teaching their Xbox Live platformer, Ms. Splosion Man [$2.99], how to speak mobile. Solid, indeed, except for a bothersome implementation of an IAP pay wall.

(Unfortunately the 'sploding star also speaks teenager, and that just won't do. Immediately open the options menu and disable VOX, her constant "Oh mah GAWD!" jibber-jabber. Done that? You're welcome. Okay, then. Let's continue. )

Unlike ports of 3D games that require more virtual buttons than you have fingers, Ms. Splosion Man keeps things nice and simple. You've got a slider to move around and an invisible "splode" button anywhere your right thumb pleases. You can enable a virtual stick, but as you only need to prance left and right, the slider feels better and more responsive. Exploding pops you into the air. Press it twice and you'll do the Ms. Splosion Man equivalent of a double jump.

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Arguably the best part of the Sonic the Hedgehog 2 of yesteryear was the Chaos Emerald bonus stages. You remember those, don't you? The camera jumped behind Sonic's shoulder and he hustled forward all on his own while you wove him from side to side to collect rings and dodge obstacles.

Those stages unwittingly created the template for the droves of endless runners available on the App Store today, so the logical next step for the spiky blue hedgehog was an endless runner built around ye olde bonus stages, don't you think? Enter Sonic Dash [Free], a fun runner plagued by the same problems that plague most endless runners.

Sonic Dash is all about swerving around enemies, rocks, pits, and other hazards to collect rings. Swipe the screen left and right to switch lanes, swipe up to jump, and swipe down to perform Sonic's trademark roll, which you can use to clobber the enemies puttering around the environments. You can change direction in midair, drop straight down into a roll to treat enemies in your path like bowling pins, and weave around pillars and rocks on a dime.

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Considering the large amount of physics-based puzzlers that get continually released on the App Store, it takes a special kind of title to differentiate itself from the pack. Little Bit Games' The Seed [$0.99] does so in a variety of ways. Its emphasis on minimalist (but beautiful) presentation combined with approachable gameplay is a great mix and is executed well. In addition, its subtle narrative and reflective visuals lead to a game that's only sullied by its shortness.

As you might imagine, The Seed tasks players with guiding a magical seed through a variety of barren locales on a quest to regrow the land. This is accomplished by guiding the seed through a variety of stages with the goal of each to land the seed on a flat of fertile ground which allows it to grow a plant and move on. Sounds relatively simple, but the simple act of guiding and moving the seed (which is done via water droplets) is an adventure in itself.

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It's time to take a bite of the reality sandwich. At the end of the day, office worker bees can only put out so many fires and circle back to so many tasks before they need to table their workload and develop a more synergistic flow. What I mean to say, I think, is that you need to loosen your white collar, grab a foreign object, and smash your office to smithereens or risk becoming a lifer who goes postal or, worse, stares mindlessly while muttering about a stapler.

The prototypical office drone you play in Smash the Office [$0.99] has done just that. Reduced to a gibbering mess by unrealistic time tables, micromanagement, office jargon, and conversations that no doubt began with "Workin' hard or hardly workin'?", your character takes up the nearest blunt instrument and sets out to raze his workplace to the ground.

Each level drops you in a standard nine-to-five office setting replete with cube farms, servers, computer, and other office gear. With a club in hand, you have exactly one minute to earn a high score by smashing and bashing everything in sight. Once you've, uh, taken the meeting offline in one room, break down the door to move on to the next room of breakables.

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Trauma [$2.99] gives us few concrete facts. There is a hospital, a woman in a bed, a doctor offering an uncertain prognosis. Beyond that, a series of dreams pieced together from photographs and memories, narrated by the woman, a victim of a traumatizing accident.

Taken on its surface merits, there isn't much to it. As with its original desktop release, Trauma is a tiny game, an experience of no more than an hour or so at most. There are a few ways to explore its virtues, but only so much to discover. What's there is, however, interesting to examine in a way that few mobile games manage.

The goal is to work through four dreams, each with a specific challenge: a teddy bear crushed under a large weight, a ghost that cannot be caught, a road that must be followed, and path that must be found.

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There's nothing I love more than a well-executed iOS RPG but there always seems to be an issue of balance in regards to presentation. On one hand, an emphasis on exploration and side quests (as well as the grind) act as throwbacks to the roots of the genre. Meanwhile, streamlined gameplay  and simplified battle system are seen as an evolution towards the current mobile scene. BoxCat's Nameless: The Hackers [$3.99 / Free] is squarely in the latter camp. Eschewing a lot of the standard tenets for an RPG, Nameless focuses primarily on grinding and cutscenes, leading to a somewhat monotonous overall experience despite its decent battle system.

Nameless follows a group of ragtag hackers as a few innocent jobs turn into the unraveling of an increasingly complex tale of worldwide control by the corporate machine. Unfortunately, the actual weaving of the tale in Nameless isn't as interesting as my synopsis makes it out to be. The story is told through anime-inspired cutscenes with a lot of the actual advancement of narrative taking place between a load of fetch quests. While the story itself should be compelling, I found the actual writing to be a bit bland.

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I've been golfing before. The first time I tagged along with my dad. He hit a ball just off a slope. We hopped in the buggy to retrieve it, he told me to lean out and grab it as we rumbled by, I fell out and tumbled down the slope. The second time, I actually played! Just one hole, though. Why? Because golf is boring when you have to, you know, fish your ball out of sand traps and actually walk around. Yep, that's golf: boring at best, painful at worst. Thanks, Dad.

Super Stickman Golf, however, is neither boring nor painful. It is awesome. If you enjoyed developer Noodlecake's golf-slash-physics-puzzler, you'll be happy to hear that Super Stickman Golf 2 [$0.99] is loads better, and available at the same impulse-buy price point.

Super Stickman Golf 2 challenges you to complete courses at or under par. Sounds a lot like golf, right? Well, instead of straight shots from tee-off to the green, each hole in Super Stickman Golf 2 plays out like an obstacle course. There are pits, sand traps, water traps, moving platforms, lasers that vaporize your perfectly-aimed shots, and portals inspired by Valve's popular spatial puzzler: smack a ball through one portal and it pops out the other.

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Like many gamers, my three best friends and I have a long-standing gaming tradition. Every holiday, we gather for our perennial New Year's Eve LAN party. In an ideal world, we tear down our gaming rigs on New Year's Eve, drop them off at one friend's house with plenty of space, go to dinner at our favorite Tex-Mex place, and then ring in the New Year over a good 8 to 10 hours of gaming nirvana fueled by salty snacks and sugary drinks.

The reality usually played out differently. After several years of frustration caused by out-of-date drivers, lost game discs, forgotten Steam passwords, and bizarre network anomalies (what exactly is a network bridge, and why did it only appear on my Win98 machine?), we threw up our hands and downsized to Nintendo DSes and Mario Kart. This past weekend, the gang got together ahead of schedule and downsized even further.

Armed with our iPhones, we listened to the ranting of one friend who insisted we play some iOS game called Spaceteam [Free]. In preparation for the meet-up, I downloaded the game and perused the list of features. They included teamwork, shouting, confusion, and four-stroke pluckers. Being a big fan of three-stroke pluckers, I could only imagine what fun it would be to tinker with four. I was not disappointed.

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There are very few motifs out there that haven't been beaten nearly to death by a deluge of games crafting variations of the same story. Zombies. Pirates. Ninjas. And yet, I've somehow maintained a soft spot for the story of the well-meaning robot caught up in something bigger than itself. Whether it's a brilliant point-and-click adventure like Machinarium [$4.99 (HD)] or the frantic puzzling of Robot Wants Kitty [Free], I can't say no to the task of taking care of something cute and artificially intelligent. So it's no great surprise that when I heard Teotl Studios was bringing their well-received head-scratcher Unmechanical [$2.99] from PC to iOS, I had my download finger at the ready.

Set in a mysterious, subterranean expanse, Unmechanical follows a plucky propellor-equipped robot on a mission to bring life back to a place long-forgotten. Armed with only one ability - the power to emit magnetic rays that allow you to carry objects, lift latches, and power switches - you zip through a series of interconnected rooms and pathways, slowly coming to understand what you're doing, and where you are. What stood out immediately for me was the way the game's vague narrative leant itself to a mobile port.

Scenes are shot in a purposefully limited field of view, forcing you to fly slowly outward to the walls of a cavernous room too understand its scope, take in its many machinations, and gain a sense of your surroundings. Looking down on the scene as it rests between your hands within the confines of a phone or tablet screen helps immerse you in the unknown, giving off the sense that you - like your spinning protagonist - are under the microscope.

This oscillation between a sense of both discovery and ambiguity is maintained in the puzzle structure, where Unmechanical truly shines. What seem at first like tenuous, disconnected elements of a sprawling space soon give way to a clear goal, albeit one that seems massively difficult. Yet by testing, investigating, and probing the scene, you see see a small, simple first step. When you take that first step, suddenly the path forward seems a little clearer, a little less uncertain, and a bigger picture takes shape: one that you couldn’t see before. Clever, tangible puzzles based around levers and switches soon take their place in larger, multi-part mind-benders that reveal their scope as you progress. Watch out for a particularly satisfying sequence that seems like it begins with a one-off test of refracting lazers, which comes full circle to deliver a hugely satisfying challenge many screens later.

The whole experience is tied together with controls whose simplicity have me torn. On one hand, the boiling down of the Windows version of the game - complete with its controller control option - to two key gestures, is hugely admirable. Resting your finger on the screen and dragging it where you'd like to go handles movement, while tapping the character turns its magnetic function on and off. The massive diversity that Teotl Studios eeks out of that combination serves as a compliment to the game's overall elegance, and very rarely feels forced. Things do, however, feel occasionally spotty in ways that can frustrate. A demand for precision when it comes to the magnetic field, and some imprecise hit boxing for turning it on and off all result in actions being repeated, or solutions being botched needlessly.

To that end, not all of the game's smaller challenges fall down on the right side of that divide between logic and experimentation. A handful of sequences feel altogether too rote, and the ensuing "puzzling" amounts to a lengthy sequence of carrying and dropping. Meanwhile, a couple roadblocks seem to lack any rhyme or reason, and fall down on the side of tiresome trial and error. Make no mistake: Myst [$6.99 (HD)] junkies will enjoy whipping out a notepad to do some detailed cataloguing, but the sparing nature of these types of puzzles makes them feel out of place and at odds with the game's otherwise consistent tone.

That, ultimately, is what helps Unmechanical rise above the kinks in its own machinery to stand out as a deep, satisfying experience: a tone and game world worth exploring. On a platform focused so misguidedly on "replayability," the game's gorgeous setting, subtle story, and (mostly) wonderful puzzles make it something better - deeply playable. Huge kudos to Teotl for flexing their acrobatic skills with Epic's Unreal Engine here on mobile as well, where even an iPad 1 is able to clunk its way through the entire game without crashes (though it's not advisable given the graphical dip!). Fellow robot sympathizers, players looking for a mental workout, or anyone bitter their iPad still can't play Machinarium: don't let this one pass you by.

Does anyone remember The Conduit? That ambitious Wii shooter that combined mystery and lore with with action fundamentals, and made a run at carving out a core niche on the system? Its developer High Voltage Software seemed primed to make a name for themselves on the back of that game and its sequel. After the tepid reception of Conduit 2 a couple of years ago, however, the talented studio all but disappeared into the contract work they were doing, with big name brands like Toy Story and Star Wars burying their recognition. Now, of all platforms, it seems like it's iOS that has given them a new lease on life.

From first-person shooter to endless runner, High Voltage's Le Vamp [$0.99] puts you in charge of the safety of what may be the world's cutest prince of the undead. Having just escaped from his crypt, the titular character charges headstrong out into the big wide world, obliviously looking for someone to play with amidst the dangers of sunlight, other monsters, and enraged townsfolk. Naturally, it falls to you to keep him out of harm's way...unless you're the real monster, because seriously: who wants to see this adorable baby vamp bite the dust?

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With its large screen and multi-touch controls, real-time strategy titles have had somewhat of a resurgence on iPads (and its smaller iOS brethren, to a lesser extent). Bitmen Studio's Galactic Conflict RTS [$5.99] is the latest such title, with a focus on tons of spaceships on-screen and the requisite massive scale of dogfights. While Galactic Conflict certainly succeeds in that regard, the rest of the game is relatively benign, leading to an otherwise standard real-time strategy game.

Following the last remnants of Earth across space, Galactic Conflict's campaign features a dozen missions that put you in control of the Terran Confederation as they strive to defend themselves from attacks by the Pyros race. Narratively, what little story that exists in the campaign is told through standard in-mission cutscenes. While I found the campaign a good way to get introduced to all the ships and upgrades, from a story standpoint it was relatively bland. Thankfully, a skirmish mode and decent multiplayer offering exist for folks that just want to get into the battle.

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Hacking isn't much of a competitive sport. There are certainly competitions out there like Pwn2Own, but they don't look much like Hollywood's idea of hacking—you know, the bright colours, trippy graphical interfaces and sexy music (and people).

But what if they did?

PWN: Competitive Hacking [$1.99] imagines just such a competition, a tournament that pits Hollywood hacker against Hollywood hacker. They style themselves in cyberpunk accoutrement and have names like Axiom and Cipher. The neurally augmented, the leader of an underground army of hackers, the government agent-turned freedom fighter—these are the sorts of characters that enter the tournament, and that's about all you'll ever know of them.

The colorful cast is a campy treat, but it's just window dressing for the main game: a head-to-head battle for digital territory. The game is played on a grid of linked cubes called nodes. Both players have one node to begin with, and the first to leave the opponent with nothing wins. This isn't a game of manual dexterity—you only need to tap a node to capture it. The time it takes to be captured is dependent on a couple things, namely the number of connected nodes you've already captured and which power-ups you and your opponent have in use.

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