I've spent the past few days zapping aliens and maneuvering troops in the iPad version of XCOM: Enemy Unknown, and I'm happy to report that it's XCOM: Enemy Unknown on iPad, which is really all that you need to know.

Thanks to the low price of mobile games, I regularly download new titles without seeing as much as a single screenshot. Many of those sight-unseen games follow the Angry Birds scoring formula — smash, achieve or collect the things you need on each level, earn three stars, gems, flowers, whatever.

A half-hour with FDG Entertainment's Slayin has convinced me that the action role-playing games I enjoyed as a much younger man were woefully inefficient.

The resurrection of Fuzzyeyes Entertainment's steampunk saga Edge of Twilight gains steam (sorry) in Athyr Above, the second playable foray into the split day-and-night world that once seemed lost. The first game, a bad free Temple Run knock-off, left me with the impression that maybe the franchise should have stayed…

As a gamer who has been playing Japanese role-playing games since they've been a thing, the first hurdle to overcome in Cube Roots' Dungeon Hearts was getting used to having my party on the left side of the screen. That's not where four heroes are supposed to assemble.

As promised last month, Paradox Interactive and mobile developer Ludosity have teamed up to deliver a little cross-platform Magicka mayhem for the iPhone and Android. Magicka: Wizards of the Square Tablet is nowhere near as deep and destructively satisfying as its PC inspiration, but it's got the right idea. the…

You could search the iTunes app store for days and not come close to finding a game with the charm and polish of Big FishGames' Fetch. It's an animated movie come to life, an adventure riddled with arcade action wrapped around a warm beating heart. It's the story of a boy and his dog.

Red, green and blue — these are the primary colors, which can be mixed together in varying amounts to create every color of the visible spectrum. I learned this in my grade school art program. At the time I was convinced the teacher made it up to cover for the fact that they only had enough money in the budget for…

Everybody loves quick time events, those timed button presses utilized in today's high-tech interactive entertainment programs to help the user feel a modicum of control over grand cinematic sequences. the problem with quick time events, however, is that the graphical spectacle going on behind the prompts always…

Since the early days of the Cyberpunk pen-and-paper role-playing setting, I've been fascinated by the idea of highly-skilled computer hackers roaming the plains of cyberspace looking for a fight; digital cowboys with their fingers twitching inches away from their plastic 101-shooters. The realization that real hackers…

As a rule, I like sports in video games better than I do in the real world. For someone like me who's never been great on the court or field, taking an athletic endeavor and adding a layer of the fantastic to it is one of the best joys that a sports title can offer. It's a joy that Super Stickman Golf 2 delivers in…

I play dozens of mobile games a week, at least 24 percent of which are puzzle games. From block-matching to word games; physics puzzlers to good old Tetris clones—I've played them all. The last thing I expected to see in last week's crop of new games was a puzzler unlike anything I'd played before. If I'd paid closer…

Magnets, man. They make you go fast.

Up until this week, I hadn't really played a game on my iPad that gave me the creeps. Games that made me laugh? Yeah. Games that challenged my brain? Absolutely. But nothing yet has made me feel as unsettled as Year Walk.

Have you ever played a game that just feels right—a game where the controls and challenge immediately click, making playing it an almost instinctual thing? Rock Runners is that kind of game.

These days, it feels like the phrase "iPhone racing games are a dime a dozen" is an understatement—heck, more than a dozen of these games are free. So when I'm playing a new one, it had better grab me in the first thirty or forty seconds, else I'll just go back to playing Time Surfer.

Whenever I feel like the physics puzzle format is completely played out, Fahey slides me another download code, and the thing turns out to be pretty good. Stick To It, ahem, adheres to the basic principles of the genre, but shows there are still clever ways to challenge players to finish a puzzle with an economy of…

As far as sharp looking iOS games go, Hungry Oni must be one of the most dazzling I've seen all year. And yes, I know it's only February. (It is only February.)

Sure, the venerable kart racing genre revolves around wacky track designs and a rotation of goofy-lethal power-ups. But, no matter how fun the chaos is, I still need to feel like I'm going really fast.

The opening screenshot for this review of Shiny Box's Android action role-playing game isn't very flattering. That's because every time I picked up my Nexus 7 to capture a screen I ended up playing Dungeon Quest for another half-hour instead.