It’s been a while coming, but finally minis have their own superhero. Age of Zombies’ square-jawed wise-cracking zombie head-splatting foul-mouthed heartthrob Barry Steakfries doesn’t just have the best name in the world, ever, he’s such an all-round badass he could probably kill zombies just by looking at them, but instead he chooses to blast them with his boom stick, just for giggles. If Ripley from Aliens and Duke Nukem had a baby, it would probably be Barry Steakfries.

Halfbrick, how we do love you. First you give us intriguing and ethereal puzzle minis such as Echoes, then you give us floaty space stuff like Blast Off, and now you’ve clearly gone stark raving mad with the utter joyous lunacy that is Age of Zombies. A game that not only makes me laugh out loud and shout “Barry Steakfries FTW” at regular intervals (note to self: don’t play on public transport), but is also probably vying with Dracula: Undead Awakening for the best top-down shooter mini.

There are two gameplay modes, the main story mode and Survival Mode. In Survival Mode, you just get one life and have to keep going as long as possible in the levels which have already been unlocked in the story mode to see if your high scores make it to the high scores table.

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If the idea of number puzzles actually makes you feel a bit queasy, if you get headaches simply from looking at the Sudoku pages in the newspaper, if you don’t even know what the heck Kakuro is, well I’m here to say, don’t be scared by this mini! This is actually a fun mini to play even if number puzzles are not your thing. I never thought I’d ever enjoy playing Sudoku or Kakuro (once I learned what it was!), but this mini totally converted me, no mean feat!

Sanuk Games has had a couple of minis out so far, Spot the Differences, which was very “niche”, and Telegraph Crosswords, which comes from the same family as this Sudoku game of course and is another great game for puzzle fans. Clearly, these sorts of puzzle games are what Sanuk excels at, especially in conjunction with the UK’s Telegraph newspaper which is renowned for its crosswords and number puzzles.

What I really like about this mini is that it does the basics so well. If you don’t know how to play either game, the “Instructions” section via the Pause Menu outlines the rules very clearly, explaining that the aim of Sudoku is to fill the grid so that every row and column and every 3×3 box contains all numbers from 1 to 9, and that the aim of Kakuro is to enter a number between 1 and 9 in the empty squares without repeating a number.

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Retro – Cave Flyer is the second of Big Head Games’ iPhone games to be ported across as a mini, with last week’s The Terminator being the first. The two couldn’t be more different though, with Retro reminding me a lot of Halfbrick’s Blast Off. Although it has its limitations, it’s a challenging little game that takes a fair degree of skill and practice to master.

The game is set in the near future, with the sun about to go supernova after being de-stabilised by pesky meddling scientists. Earth is being evacuated, but there are lots of stranded scientists who still need rescuing from science stations carved into moons throughout the solar system.

It’s therefore up to you to float and thrust your way around the moon caves in your spherical space ship, landing and picking up scientists and taking them back to the mothership. As you navigate the narrow passageways and twists and turns of the rocky caverns, you must take care not to bash your ship about too much or you’ll damage the shield, and you must also remember to refuel at the green fuel points.

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They already had us all with the name, didn’t they really?! Gamers love aliens, and they love zombies, so put the two of them together and, well, it’s almost indecent the amount of love in the room. That said, if the game had turned out to be a load of rubbish, the disappointment would have been so much greater. Thankfully, PomPom Games didn’t let us down.

From the moment you load up and start playing Alien Zombie Death, you can’t help but have a big fat smile on your face at the crazy alien zombies and the tongue-in-cheek humour of the whole thing.  Even the How to Play help pages fit in with the generally silly style, describing the game’s hero as “a lone Spaceman doing something or other on a mining platform floating around a random planet.”

To get started zapping alien zombies, there are seven planets that you can select from the main menu, each with a moon, making 14 levels in total. You unlock the planets and moons by earning medals, which are awarded for killing aliens, collecting coins and getting high scores.

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There’s no doubt that the basic idea of this game is very cool, especially as it involves Dark Horse comics, who publish the Terminator book, of course, so you know it’s going to look good. Makers Big Head Games only have one other mini out so far, International Snooker, which was okay but not that thrilling, so it was always going to be interesting to see how they handled such an iconic franchise.

I’m a huge fan of the Terminator films, especially Terminator 2, so I was dying to play this mini, but really there’s not much here to get Terminator fans that excited about aside from the awesome main menu artwork and the brief bits of plot description at the start of each stage in Story Mode. It’s neat to be running around shooting endless T800s as Kyle Reese, but that’s about all you get. Not even any extra artwork from Dark Horse .

Overall The Terminator is really just a straightforward top-down shooter very similar in feel to Chillingo’s Dracula – Undead Awakening, only without as many interesting modes to hold your attention. Also, unlike Dracula, the location is exactly the same throughout, until the very last stage of Story Mode.

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Spaceball Revolution couldn’t be more different from Virtual Toys’ first mini, the award-winning Yummy Yummy Cooking Jam, which was a really silly but fun food-serving game. Spaceball: Revolution is much more of a straightforward puzzler in which the object of the game is to fill in shapes by throwing energy balls, rather than filling up tummies by throwing in burgers!

The game panel where all the action takes place is a nine-square cube with different coloured panels around the outside edges. In the top left-hand corner of the screen you’ll see a replica of the nine-square cube with a specific number of panels lit up. Your task is to replicate the shape in the larger square by throwing energy balls at the panels, all within a strict time limit.

Press X to throw the ball and switch a panel on, and X again at the same panel to switch it off. You can turn on multiple panels at a time by throwing the ball at the line in between them, or in the middle of four boxes to activate/deactivate all four.

Read the rest of  ”Spaceball: Revolution Review – Fun for a Minute, but Hardly Revolutionary” »