If the Old West is anything, it's a giant myth, and one that the Call Of Juarez games have always embodied. What The Cartel replaces this with – a mishmash of 
The Shield and conspiracy theories – is a much less substantial vision, played out within a world with no real resonance to it.

Old hands will still find much of the personality and singular vision of the franchise intact, but it's the newcomers, ironically, who might find Insect Armageddon a jarring mix of old-fashioned thrills and modern gameplay trends.

Ms Splosion Man might have done little to fix the 
first game's flaws, but it confidently follows up on its raucous appeal.

This is a game built from great art and clever mechanics, but it's an adventure born of both deeds and words.

Tiny Tower's ongoing tick-tock of cash and happy bitizens is a fantastic toy.

Pac-Man's rotund physique and the millimetre-perfect tilt controls make him a delight to bounce up and down and around the edges of the screen, while a forgiving drop distance encourages a cavalier attitude.

No one thing ruins Cavorite, but its pile of minor faults eventually overshadow its charisma. The levels can be ingenious, and Dr Cavor's quirky animations and great gimmick feel fresh, but the experience soon devolves into attrition rather than a challenge.

What Level-5 has created is a Frankenstein's monster. It's half singleplayer and half multiplayer, and both of them are half good: a compromise that leaves much of this game feeling soulless. To give WKC2 its due, it certainly improves on the original. But in trying to fix a poor template rather than start anew, it was probably doomed from the beginning.

Once again, Volition delivers exceptional tech, but fails to shape it into a truly engaging and sustaining experience.

As an experiment in making a genuine retro game, and as a tribute to a forgotten title of yore, Forget-Me-Not is brilliant. But as a 2011 release, even with rose-tinted spectacles firmly applied, it's much harder to recommend.

While it's far from being one the most mechanically refined or polished apps available, Titus is nevertheless distinct amongst the clone-saturated masses, with plenty of charm to fill out its bare bones.

You have expectations when you see Capcom's logo as a game loads up, particularly with its flagship titles. Shoddy workmanship isn't one.

The plot may be filled with sub-Lynchian fumbles, but it weaves an intriguing story, while the charismatic muddle of awards that accompanies each solution goes some way to wiping away the grey memory of what you're actually being congratulated for.

DaWindci's a sedate, slow burning thrill.

A lender and borrower with a few ideas of its own, Kami Retro's not quite perfect, but is worth a hundred more generic clones.

Sonic And Sega All-Stars Racing is the most fun karting game on iOS, and an update taking care of those online hiccups can only make it more essential.

Shuggy's a clever game rather than a truly smart one – a smart game wouldn't do half as much to undermine itself along the way – but it's still worth sticking with to its bitter and infuriating end.

Reveals that the series can be both a chaotic toy box and a lattice of fantastical set-pieces that unfold meaningfully. [July 2011, p.126]

It can't entirely compensate for the lack of depth, but wading together into a throng of the undead, guns blazing and fists flying, leaving a trail of dissolving bodies in your wake, is without question a grisly pleasure.

We hate its impotence, its utter lack of a scare beyond an aversion to getting shot. And with its market-led features and Skinner-box mechanics, we hate that a series that began as a lesson in horror – of the B-movie kind, admittedly – now feels so afraid of the competition.

It's simple, simple enough that a Bishi Bashi Special minigame had the basic idea years ago, but Match Panic does brilliant things with it. Every time you think you've got a handle on its workings, something changes up and confuses you for just long enough that the wrong thumb falls. It's a one-trick pony, but you should really see what she does with it.

The finely tuned platforming lays solid foundations for a leaderboard racer, and the custom leaderboards are well implemented, but this just doesn't feel like something you'll be playing in a month, never mind three years. You can't fault its ambition, and it may yet transform itself into an essential title, but presently, 1000 Heroz falls short of its lifespan.

What Dynamic Hunting captures is the back-and-forth rhythm of Monster Hunter fights, the swings between danger and all-out attack, the wounds and the frenzies.

It's a game built from pluck and resourcefulness, in other words: thoughtful when it can afford to be and stoically reliable – for the most part – when it can't.

Accentuat[es] Suda's often over-indulgent scriptwriting and accelerat[es] Mikami's brand of horror into a hyper-gothic, shock-free world of bright lights. With a little more restraint and focus on the core experience, Shadows Of The Damned could have been the action thrill ride Garcia Hotspur thinks it is. Instead the game – like Hotspur himself – is all talk.

It gets far more laughs than it should, and special mention to its credits song: perhaps the finest ending on the App Store. Original, funny, and intense: for a game based on Snake, not bad at all.

Its nonsensical charm – cartoon aliens, sweeties that make planets, and a robot T-Rex – as well as a winning extra mode (which basically makes planets into timebombs) after completion rounds off an original and deep hybrid.

Has enough in that expertly-pitched control system to keep you replaying the same courses over and over, relaxing into a groove before smashing through the score barrier on one perfect run. It's an iPhone game you'll come back to for the controls alone – and that's not something you can't say every day.