Mobile Games Roundup

Trialz! Death! Ozone! Pac! Cordy!

Review by Kristan Reed Contributor

Updated on 23 May 2011

Cordy

Android - Free
Full version £1.31

Android users have been cruelly denied a decent exclusive to lord it over their smug iPhone-owning chums of late. But not any more.

Welcome Cordy, a "little robot with a big job". He's a Sackboy tribute act who demands that you "harness the power of pure fun", which essentially involves bounding hell for leather around bright and breezy 2.5D levels collecting energy particles, powering up a 'thing' and getting to the newly opened exit. As you do.

Despite its obvious stylistic debt to LittleBigPlanet, Silvertree Media's classy effort will charm the arse off anyone who rips through the opening quartet of freebie levels. Yeah, it's boring to harp on about a game being good for the price, but this is one that will have you clicking on the buy button in record time. £1.31, you say? Sold.

Like any platformer worth its collectibles, it keeps the interest level high through new toys, new challenges and most importantly, consistently good level design.

Cordy also succeeds by being blessed with tight controls, and has recently been considerately optimised for the lucky Xperia Play owners out there, meaning that you can play it with all the precision of a normal console platformer.

It's also important to point out that Cordy is easily the best-looking game to hit Android to date. Let's hope for everyone else's sake that its position as an Android exclusive is a brief one.

9/10

Pac-Man Championship Edition DX

Windows Phone 7 - £5.49 (free trial available)

You'd have to be feeling particularly curmudgeonly not to appreciate the genius that was Pac-Man Championship Edition DX on 360 and PS3. Perhaps you prefer gardening, or peeling the labels off jam jars in preparation for your insect traps. Not everyone wants to mainline on adrenaline for the duration, admittedly.

If Namco had just ported the whole show over to Windows Phone 7, its legion of owners would have had their (much-tested) patience rewarded after months of Game Room nonsense and Johnny-come-lately ports of 2008's finest iOS games.

Instead, you get approximately one-third of the content of the original, with only three of the nine courses making the transition (Championship II, Manhattan, and Dungeon), and three visual variants per course.

If you can live with that, there are still five modes per course to quietly obsess over, with three- and five-minute Score Attacks, Ghost Combo, as well as the long-form Time Trial and 10 short Time Trials to ace per course.

Whether you'll want to play it on a mobile phone is another matter. When the game's not running like the clappers, the swipe-based controls work well, and the pinch-based bomb-dispensing system is a neat solution. The faster you go, though, the more room there is for involuntary cursing.

If Namco get around to releasing a full-fat port of Pac-Man CE DX on the Xperia Play, it would be well worth the £5.49 it's currently charging. But right now, in its needlessly curtailed form, it feels a little cheeky and more than a little overpriced.

7/10

Bonus round: Out now on Android

A lot of you have requested that we cover more of the Android sector. The problem tends to be that many, if not most, of the new releases on the platform have appeared elsewhere, and naturally it's more interesting to cover new releases than keep going over old ground. Sometimes we come across ports that we never reviewed the first time around, so it's good to highlight those wherever possible, but most go under the radar. So here's a solution: a handy list of interesting ports out now on Android.