3D Space Tank, Nintendo DSi
With a title that could scarcely be accused of being allegorical, 3D Space Tank has you trundling around different planets meting out 3D space justice with your tank's cannon and occasionally taking to the air for quick dogfights. Collect power crystals, activate a warpgate to your next destination, fly down a retro-styled launch tube and repeat the process – all in 1980s, Tron-style colour schemes. From the same people who brought you the superb Starship Patrol late last year and bearing a more than passing resemblance to the classic Nintendo shooter and grandfather of 3D console gaming, Starwing, its artful learning curve ratchets up the difficulty without ever feeling unfair. Comic relief, meanwhile, is supplied by your mildly sassy support-bot, who's constantly on hand to issue instructions and plot exposition. The summer release schedules are a virtual void, but this craftily hidden, old-school cracker arrives for under a tenner with no marketing fanfare or hype bandwagon.
Q-Games, 800 DSi points (£7.20)
Helsing's Fire, iPhone
Dr Helsing and his hapless assistant Raffton are pursuing Dracula. To help them, you position a torch in each of the game's rooms so that it illuminates as many monsters as possible, before emitting a pulse of light to incinerate them. Naturally, rooms come with increasingly tortuous columns, divisions and scatterings of beasts, who themselves get shields only permeable by a specifically coloured light. You also need to be careful not to fry any stray humans or get your torch extinguished by a flailing member of the undead. The puzzles become gradually more testing, although never to the point of being hard, and there are against-the-clock survival modes to play with once you've spent the hour or two it takes to defeat the Count. Witty, fun, cheap and throwaway in exactly the manner of a good mobile title, Helsing's Fire is a puzzle game that fits perfectly into life's previously entertainment-free interstices.
ClickGamer.com, 59p
Osmos HD, iPad
Osmos HD is a game about absorption. You control an organic blob, which you steer by firing off little pieces of it to provide subtle propulsion and to direct yourself towards smaller blobs to assimilate. Collide with enough to get very big and avoid hitting any larger than you, which digest you in a heartbeat. Like classic ambient eat-'em-up, Fl0w, in which your predatory microscopic worm ate other multi-cell life forms while swimming through fluid, this has a distinctly watery feel, with strong currents in some levels threatening to sweep you into large enemies. Using simple instructions like "become huge", Osmos also has some twists with anti-matter orbs to avoid; "repulsors" that magnetically bounce away from you, and a sentient "ovarium", which merrily swims after you until you get too big, when it runs away. Complete with beautiful, trance-inducing music, it's an almost meditative experience.
Hemisphere Games, £2.99
