Stuart Dredge 

20 best Android apps and games this week

Acompli Email & Calendar, Angry Birds Stella, Premier League Away Days, Reddit Ask Me Anything, KittenTaxi and more. By Stuart Dredge
  
  

Acompli Email & Calendar for Android.
Acompli Email & Calendar for Android. Photograph: PR

It’s time for our weekly roundup of the best new Android apps and games to have emerged on the Google Play store.

As ever, prices are correct at the time of writing, but may have changed by the time you read this. (Free + IAP) means in-app purchases are used within the app.

Want more apps? Browse previous Best Android Apps roundups on the Guardian. And if you’re looking for iOS apps, browse the archives of Best iPhone and iPad apps roundups instead.

APPS

Acompli Email & Calendar (Free)
Acompli is one of a mini-flurry of apps trying to make your email life more organised (and, indeed, less stressful). In this case, it’s also a calendar app and tool for sharing files with colleagues. Everything works together well, and there’s a Gmail-esque feature that tries to sort important from less-important emails.

Premier League Away Days (Free)
One for football fans in the UK, this: an official Premier League app that aims to make away matches less of a slog. Expect stadium guides; recommendations for hotels, pubs and restaurants; travel information and ticketing details, as well as digital vouchers.

Bring! Shopping List (Free)
My search for the perfect shopping list app has been going on for a few years now, with Bring! one of the likeliest contenders in recent times. It’s easy to use to set up a list then mark items as they go into the trolley, with clever features for shared households, and even Android Wear smartwatch support.

Ask Me Anything (Free)
This is an official app from Reddit for its Ask Me Anything (AMA) interviews, which have a habit of teasing interesting answers out of celebrities of all kinds. Well, most of the time. You can read existing AMAs, with their question-and-answer threads helpfully reformatted for faster browsing. And when an AMA is taking place, you can ask questions via the app too.

Nimbus: travel with sound (Free)
This is certainly the first app to make a selling point out of “the inside of a zebra carcass as it is being eaten by vultures”. It’s a really interesting idea though: sounds recorded by natural historian Chris Watson as he travels the world, and now turned into an app with 14 audio tracks and three related games.

Boxer (Free + IAP)
More email: Boxer works with a wide range of webmail services as well as IMAP and POP3 accounts, while linking in with social networks and cloud storage services too. The idea: a fast, efficient email app that helps you reduce your inbox to gleaming emptiness (hopefully) while keeping a to-do list of tasks.

HomeTube (Free + IAP)
Many children love YouTube, and many YouTube videos are distinctly unsuitable for children. Several apps are tackling this problem, with HomeTube the latest. It serves up child-safe videos only, with parental controls to help you fine-tune its recommendations, and set it as a homescreen replacement if desired.

This Is All Yours (Free)
This app is one for fans of Alt-J, the Mercury Prize-winning band who are returning with their second album This Is All Yours. The app is a way to unlock and listen to its songs from specific locations in the real world: a musical treasure hunt, of sorts. Fans are encouraged to leave messages about the tracks for others to find too.

Castround with Twitter (Free)
It’s been possible to browse tweets from people nearby for a long time, through various apps, even if it seems like a bit of a novelty feature for day-to-day use. Still, Castround looks like an interesting new spin on the idea, with its map-based interface good for local Twitter activity, or buzz from any location you want to check in on.

Blinkist (Free + IAP)
The most thought-provoking app on this week’s list: Blinkist promises 15-minute snapshots from non-fiction books: doing for longform writing what aggregation apps like Yahoo News Digest are doing for news. Here, the summaries come from actual humans, rather than algorithms.

GAMES

Angry Birds Stella (Free + IAP)
Grease’s Pink Ladies now have competition in the form of Stella and her fellow new Angry Birds, in this latest game from Rovio. It’s the usual bird-slinging action with some new twists in the heroines’ superpowers, and some excellent level design. Is it an ‘Angry Birds for Girls’ though? Read Rovio’s views on that.

KittenTaxi (Free + IAP)
There are many things to love about KittenTaxi: its plot (bank-robbing cats); its inventive idea of viewing a racing game from in front of the car; and its pencil-drawn graphics style. A real breath of fresh air.

Spider-Man Unlimited (Free + IAP)
Publisher Gameloft’s latest Spider-Man game is an endless runner, although predictably it throws in some web-slinging and leaping too. The game is presented in a stylised comic-strip form, and structured into “issues” that come with a different supervillain boss each time.

Appointment with F.E.A.R. (£1.99)
More superheroes in this “interactive graphic novel” from publisher Tin Man Games, which has made a succession of similar apps. This one is based on Steve Jackson’s Appointment With F.E.A.R. game-book, which perfectly suits its new form as a digital product.

All Star Quarterback (Free + IAP)
We Brits have been going gaga for New Star Soccer’s mix of sporting action and off-the-field career progression for some time. Now American Football is getting a similar game, albeit with much more 2014-style visuals. You play a quarterback, charged with getting game-time, winning matches and splashing your cash.

Diamond Digger Saga (Free + IAP)
The latest Saga from Candy Crush maker King: this sees you matching colourful diamonds, creating gaps for more colourful diamonds to fall down into. But there’s also water flowing on each level, with your job being to make matches to guide it to the exit. It’s pretty fun to play.

Wolfblood - Shadow Runners (Free)
Here in the UK, the CBBC channel is airing a new series of teen-wolf (note, adults, not Teen Wolf) drama Wolfblood. It’s got its own spin-off game: an endless runner that sees you dodging and smashing obstacles. In a clever touch, new levels will be released to synchronise with the weekly TV episodes.

Block Fortress (£1.23 + IAP)
Block Fortress looks a lot like Minecraft, on the surface, but layered on top of its blocky building is a proper tower defence game, as you build your base then defend it from onrushing monsters. If you ever wished Minecraft was a bit more... killy, then it’s worth a look.

CounterSpy (£3.05)
The latest game from PlayStation Mobile – yes, that PlayStation – CounterSpy is a mobile spin-off from the PS4, PS3 and PS Vita game of the same name: a sneaky side-scrolling action game with impressive graphics. More than just promotional fluff.

Super Monkey Ball Bounce (Free + IAP)
As someone who has loved Super Monkey Ball on various consoles and devices down the years, its reinvention as a free-to-play Peggle clone is distinctly worrying. Still, I can see how it would appeal to some players: bouncing monkeys through screens of bananas and platforms.

Those are our picks, but what have you been enjoying on Android this week? Post your recommendations (or feedback on these) in the comments section.

40 best Android games of 2014 (so far)

 

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