Lara Croft And The Guardian Of Light, PC, PS3 & Xbox 360
Lara Croft returns, this time without the Tomb Raider subtitle, in a lightweight downloadable format that does away with most of the plot so you can get down to blowing away whole rooms full of monsters, both supernatural and on one occasion prehistoric. In the style of aged arcade hit Smash TV, you evade multiple waves of enemies using the left joystick and direct your stream of fire with the right, until Lara's the only one still running around, then scavenging artefacts and power ups to enhance her abilities. Although secondary to the action, its simple, satisfying puzzles – some of which take up entire halls – crop up frequently enough, and while the game's forced 3D perspective sometimes gets in the way, the deaths it causes rarely set you back far. Played either solo or with mirror guardian Totec in cooperative mode, this is quite a different if undeniably Lara-flavoured game.
Square Enix, £10 download
SimCity Deluxe, iPhone & iPod Touch
Your job in SimCity Deluxe is the same as it's always been in this venerable franchise: build a city with as large a populace as you can. To do that you zone land for housing, commerce and industry, supply power stations, water works, roads and public transport, then levy taxes to keep building. Unfortunately for iPhone owners, rather than recreate the game or interface around a very small screen, Electronic Arts has, with a few tweaks, simply shoehorned the entirety of SimCity 4, a PC game from 2003, on to iPhone. The result is an awful, fiddly mess in which the act of building roads that actually join up with each other becomes a wrestling match of gorilla-sized fingers versus microscopically small tasks. While just about playable blown up to twice its normal size with an iPad, on its intended iPhone and iPod Touch, the fumbling undermines any sense of fun.
Electronic Arts, £3.99
Link'n'Launch, Nintendo DSi
In Link'n'Launch, you connect a cheerfully plump cartoon rocket to blobs of fuel to make it fly as high as possible. To do this, you use Pipe Mania-style tactics, connecting differently shaped blocks to form a conduit between fuel and rocket. Divert fuel to the right hand engines and the rocket veers left, making it possible to engage in crude steering as you complete each puzzle, as well as directing the fuel line through time-extending clocks and spare parts, three of which add an extra stage to your ship, enabling it to fly higher. With each level lasting three minutes, time pressure is central to the rising panic that ensues, but with an essentially repetitive nature, Link'n'Launch is more a mild diversion than a classic.
Nintendo, 500 DSi Points (£5)
