Our favorite iPad arcade titles, including retro games, pinball, slice ’em ups, multiplayer party games, and innovative touchscreen creations.
Giant Dancing Plushies
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($5.99/£5.99/AU$9.99)
Giant Dancing Plushies is a rhythm action game that features colossal cuddly toys rampaging through a city, like a child-friendly take on Godzilla. Your job is to make them dance to the in-game soundtrack – or to your own music, once that feature’s unlocked.
Wisely, the controls and timings are simple, demanding you swipe (or do nothing) on the beat. But as you work through various challenges, you can unlock weapons triggered by step combos akin to those from fighting games, enabling you to unleash furry fury on your aggressors.
The entire thing is wonderfully silly. And although there’s freemium-style grind within, there’s no IAP – the system merely stops you wanting to gulp down the game’s candy colored treats all at once.
Vectronom
($3.99/£3.99/AU$5.99)
Vectronom is a psychedelic world of dancing geometric shapes. Your particular shape – a beat-nodding cube – is charged with getting from one point to another, across a constantly shifting obstacle course packed full of spikes and holes.
The key to this iPad game is to recognize the choreography before you, and swipe to partake in something that’s part rhythm action, part slalom, and part dancing. You often swipe into empty space, safe in the knowledge a platform will appear on the beat – assuming you get things right.
Each of the game’s zones has a distinct personality, from Autobahn’s sea of marching squares to the psychotic Spike Jump. All the while, Vectronom’s soundtrack shifts from thumping electronic ear-smashing to relatively gentle waltz numbers. Aside from a few overly frustrating moments (again, Spike Jump), it’s a hypnotic, tantalizing experience.
Witcheye
($2.99/£2.99/AU$4.99)
Witcheye is a platform game without the platforming. The platforms themselves still exist – and the usual enemies roam back and forth, occasionally chucking things in your general direction. But rather than hop about, you take the form of a floating eye. (This is apparently what happens these days when a witch wants to get her belongings back from a kleptomaniac knight).
The controls are simple: swipe to move and tap to stop. What really makes Witcheye, though, is the level design. Sometimes, you can dart to the end, but if you want to grab all the collectables, you’ll need to carefully maneuver yourself to smash your foes. This is even more apparent in the frequent, entertaining boss battles.
On the iPad, Witcheye works especially well. There’s plenty of space for your swiping digit, and the old-school pixel artwork looks superb.
Pulse: Volume One
($3.99/£3.99/AU$5.99)
Pulse: Volume One is a rhythm action game that comes across like a futuristic piano. The instrument – such that it is – comprises a neon pulse that expands across concentric circles.
Notes travel along those circles, like planets orbiting a star, and you must tap them at the exact moment the pulse reaches them. Miss and there’s a sickening crunch.
That likely all seems pretty simple – and it is at first. The early songs offer a kind of mindless noodly entertainment. But the compositions quickly ramp up in complexity, testing your dexterity and sense of rhythm.
This is the kind of game that can only really work on the iPad’s acres. It’s an engaging and tactile title that offers a unique spin on rhythm games.
Jumpgrid
($2.99/£2.99/AU$4.49)
Jumpgrid is a twitch arcade game that pits you against a psychopathic abstract obstacle course dedicated to making you fail. Your only means of escape is to leap to another spot on a claustrophobic three-by-three grid, munch all of the spinning cubes, and then make for the teleporter that will take you to the next – tougher – test.
It feels a lot like a minimal Frogger/Pac-Man crossover smashed into Super Hexagon with a hammer - and then that hammer mashes your ego as any sense of smugness you may have enjoyed regarding your gaming prowess quickly becomes a sticky pulp.
But this white-knuckle ride is one to stick with. Commit the clockwork patterns to memory and you can start to string together speed runs that will make you feel like a gaming genius. And when you crack all 100 levels, there’s a furiously addictive endless mode to try your hand at.
Helix
($2.99/£2.99/AU$4.49)
Helix has the appearance of a rough-and-ready 1980s arcade game. Your character, a chunky blinking eye, scoots about as adversaries rapidly appear from screen edges. The aim is survival, but fortunately you can do more than dodge (albeit less than shoot).
Move around an enemy and a line begins to encircle them. If the line is closed, the enemy explodes, giving you some breathing space. Some enemies require more orbits, or for you to encircle them in a specific direction, and that’s about it.
But Helix’s simplicity isn’t to its detriment. This is a focused, brilliantly conceived arcade blast that’s ideal fodder for iPad. The touchscreen controls are responsive, the lurid visuals are captivating, and the hard-as-nails gameplay has that one-more-go factor that will have you clamoring for more.
Alto’s Odyssey
($4.99/£4.99/AU$7.99)
Alto’s Odyssey is a one-thumb side-on endless survival game. It features the titular Alto, who has a thing for sandboarding on huge dunes, hurling himself into the air, performing all manner of tricks, and then trying to not land (i.e. crash) in a manner that results in a face full of sand.
This is perfect iPhone fodder, and perhaps not the kind of game you’d usually associate with iPad. But like its predecessor – the similarly impressive Alto’s Adventure – Alto’s Odyssey is a gorgeous game that’s deeper than it first appears.
Visually, it’s a treat, with arresting weather effects and day/night cycles. As you complete challenges, you slowly unlock new goals, environments, and abilities, but if at any point it all feels too much, you can switch off with the zero-risk Zen Mode, which leaves you with a serene soundtrack and endless desert.
FROST
($4.99/£4.99/AU$7.99)
FROST is a thoughtful, tactile game that feels like a living piece of art. Across dozens of scenes, sparks and barriers scythe across the screen while you direct flocking neon creatures towards orbs. Once the orbs fill, you can move on to the next challenge.
Ultimately, FROST is a path-finding puzzler. You use logic to understand the conditions before you, and how to meet your goal. But FROST feels very different from its contemporaries. The abstract visuals are exciting and fresh, but also it really wants you to play, experiment and discover.
Most of the puzzles tend to be simple, and you could probably blaze through the entire game in a few hours. But doing so would miss the point, because FROST is an iPad experience to bask in and savor.
Osmos for iPad
($4.99/$4.99/AU$7.99)
Osmos for iPad is an ‘ambient’ arcade game, and although it started life on PC, it’s a game that only really makes sense on a touchscreen.
Across eight distinct worlds, you control a tiny ‘mote’, propelled by ejecting pieces of itself, its direction of travel determined by your taps. Collide with a smaller mote and it’s absorbed. Your aim is to ‘become the biggest’.
When other motes are stationary, victory’s relatively easy – although very crowded levels require careful taps and judicious use of a time-warp slow-down feature.
But when levels feature ferocious motes intent on your demise, or the game shifts from microscopic warfare to motes speeding around a central giant – like celestial bodies orbiting a sun – brains and fingers alike will suddenly find Osmos a much sterner test.
At every point in the journey, Osmos is magnificent. Convince a friend to buy the game and engaging multiplayer arenas await too.
INKS.
($2.99/£2.99/AU$4.49)
Pinball games tend to either ape real-world tables or go full-on videogame, with highly animated content that would be impossible on a real table. INKS. tries something different, boasting a modern 'flat design' aesthetic, and having coloured targets on each table that emit an ink explosion when hit with the ball.
Each of the dozens of tables therefore becomes a mix of canvas and puzzle as you try to hit targets while simultaneously creating a work of art. Neatly, as the ball rolls through ink splats, it creates paths across the table, which is visually appealing and also shows when your aim is off.
Because each level is short — usually possible to complete in a minute or so — INKS. manages to be both approachable enough for newcomers and different enough for experts to get some enjoyment out of.
Badland 2
($0.99/99p/AU$1.49)
The first Badland combined the simplicity of one-thumb 'copter'/flappy games with the repeating hell of Limbo. It was a stunning, compelling title, pitting a little winged protagonist against all kinds of crazy ordeals in a forest that had clearly gone very wrong.
In Badland 2, the wrongness has been amplified considerably. Now, levels scroll in all directions, traps are deadlier, puzzles are tougher, and the cruelty meted out on the little winged beast is beyond compare. Still, all is not lost - the hero can now flap left and right. We're sure that comes as a huge consolation when it's sawn in half for the hundredth time.
ALONE...
($1.99/£1.99/AU$2.99)
Because of the nature of touchscreen controls, there's a tendency to slow things down on iOS. ALONE… throws such caution to the wind, flinging you along at Retina-searing speed as you try in vain to save a little ship hurtling through rocky caverns of doom.
This is a game that's properly exciting, and where every narrow escape feels like a victory; that all you're doing is dragging a finger up and down, trying in vain to avoid the many projectiles sent your way, is testament to you not needing a gamepad and complex controls to create a game that genuinely thrills.
Power Hover
($3.99/£3.99/AU$5.99)
It turns out the future will involve hoverboards, only it'll be robots piloting them. In Power Hover, all the humans are gone, but so too are the batteries that power your robot village. So you hop on your flying board and pursue a thief through 30 varied and visually stunning levels.
Whether scything curved paths across a gorgeous sun-drenched sea or picking your way through a grey and dead human city, Power Hover will have you glued to the screen until you reach the end of the journey. And although it's initially tricky to get to grips with, you'll soon discover the board's floaty physics and controls are perfectly balanced.
