Plants Vs Zombies is one of the latest releases from the quality famous company PopCap, known for their small, quirky and addictive games. Previous games which you may have heard of include Bejewelled, Book Worm, Zuma and many more, all of these games are extremely high quality and completely addictive because they are so much fun and have so much to offer. Plants Vs Zombies is no exception; it takes the tower defence game genre into a whole new league with unique weapons/characters and so many extra features. All with a liberal dash of humour.

The Plants Vs Zombies game made its debut on the PC but since then has been released on the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Android, iOS, Windows Phone 7 and more! The game has been a huge success due to its casual game play style and standard PopCap low price.

The latest release of Plants Vs Zombies has been on Microsoft’s new Windows Phone operating system, dubbed PvZ in the marketplace, the game costs £3.99 and is described as follows: “ Get ready to soil your plants – Plants vs. Zombies is coming to Windows Phone 7! A mob of fun-loving zombies is about to invade your home, and the only defence is your arsenal of plants. Use peashooters, wall-nuts, cherry bombs and more to mulchify 26 types of zombies before they reach your front door. The fun never dies!”

The Windows Phone version features the same 50 Adventure levels as in the PC version, battling through day, night, fog, in a swimming pool and on the rooftop. With 49 powerful plants at your disposal you can use to take down 26 different types of “fun-loving zombies”. Hey- they only want to eat your brains- give ‘em a break people!

Along with the standard campaign/adventure mode the game also includes 20 Mini-Games, Puzzle mode and the relaxing Zen Garden mode where you can tend to the plants you find to earn more money. One feature missing from the mobile version compared to the PC version is the Endless game mode feature, which features standard levels which are harder which you must complete until you finally unlock the endless mode where the fun doesn’t end till you get taken by the Zombies! This game mode was a great feature on the PC and console versions so it’s a little disappointing to see it left out, likely due to the hardware constraints of mobile hardware today.

Even though the standard Endless move has been left out of the mobile version, Endless modes of the two fantastic Mini-Games “Vase Breaker” and “I Zombie” are included which will keep you entertained for ages, even after the main adventure mode is complete.

The main concept behind the game is you are defending your house from Zombies, you cannot let any zombie get past your defences otherwise they will “Eat your brains” and you lose! The standard levels are on your houses front lawn which is split up into 5 rows which the Zombies attack from horizontally. You soil your plants in each of the rows to defend against the Zombies.

In order to place your plants you need to collect sun which will fall from the sky in the day time levels but the main source of your sun will be from placing sun flowers which emit sun tokens periodically to allow you to plant. The more sun flowers you plant, the more sun you’ll get but the lawn is split up into a grid so you don’t want to fill it all up with sun flowers which cannot attack the zombies!

As you progress through Adventure mode you unlock new plants, Zombies and areas where you must plant to fight off the Zombie such as the back yard which has a pool in it and even the roof!  It’s a great campaign that keeps you coming back for more! Once you have completed it you can go through it again to collect more money or plants for your Zen garden. If you do this then 3 plants for each level you play are chosen automatically to make it a little more fun and different the second time round.

The Zen garden feature is a place to store the plants you collect where ever you play Plants and Zombies, you feed and tend to your plants as they grow bigger and bigger at which point they start spitting out money from time to time. Having lots of plants can easily keep your bank full in the game! Alternately you can sell them whenever you want, selling them when they are fully grown will give you a hefty lump sum!

Money you earn throughout the game can be used to buy new plants and awesome power-ups for existing ones bringing new strategies into the game. Supplies for the Zen garden can also be bought here.

Overall Plants vs. Zombies for Windows Phone is a fantastic game, if you haven’t played it before then it will keep you entertained for hours on end as it will keep you coming back for more. Even if you have played it before the portability is a big plus meaning you can take it anywhere you want an play casually! At the end of the day though, this game has won numerous awards for a reason and everyone should get a chance to play it.

Hate fruit? Like ninjas? Then Fruit Ninja is the perfect game for you. Fruit Ninja is a touchscreen game for mobile devices where the main object of the game is to slice fruit! You earn points by slicing the fruit and gain bonuses for multiple slices of fruit. There are different game modes available to suit everyone’s play style. It is a fun all-round addictive game that will keep you entertained for hours. Is this a successor to the Angry Birds throne?

The basics of all the game types have fruit being hurled up from the bottom of the screen and then gravity pulling it back down and off the screen. The idea is to slice the fruit in half with a swipe of your finger on the screen before it falls off.  So dang  simple yet so dang addictive addictive!

The three game modes:

• Classic: In classic mode the game is potentially endless as there is no time limit but with time it gets progressively harder. Along with fruit being hurled into the air there are also bombs which you must avoid hitting at all costs as slicing one of these bombs will end the game! You have three lives in this game mode too,  you lose a life every time a single piece of fruit falls off the screen without being sliced. It is probably one of the most challenging game modes since there is a lot to concentrate on.
• Arcade Mode: This is a quick fire game mode which you cannot fail at because there is no life to be lost. It lasts for 60 seconds and the object of the level is to get as many points as you can. This game mode does include bombs like in classic but instead they deduct 10 points from your score rather than ending the round. What’s great about this game mode though is the addition of special bananas which give  special powers such as double point modes, slow motion and frenzy modes which hurls huge amounts of fruit at the screen resulting in huge point bonuses. Grabbing a combination of these perks will guarantee you lots of points. Challenge your friends!
• Zen Mode: This is another time limit game. You have 90 seconds to get as many points as you can, the differences from the Arcade Mode are: No bombs or special power bananas.  Just fruit. Plain and simple.

The three game modes are all fantastic, but my personal favourite is the Arcade Mode (my high score is 464, can you beat it?) The smoothness of the whole game is consistent and great and complements the game play wonderfully.  The animations of the fruit being sliced are great and makes you feel like you’re really slicing it! The splat of the sliced fruit on the background is a great little asset. There’s also  fun facts about fruit at the end of the games which I found pretty interesting!

You can use up to three fingers to slice fruit on the game but I found it pretty challenging to control two fingers accurately while attempting to slice fruit. One finger can yield great results but perhaps you could play it with a friend and get them to help slice. It also depends of course on the size of your touchscreen!

There are lots of ways to customise the game as you unlock new material from achievements such as different knives which make a different slicing pattern to different backgrounds. They don’t add any tactical advantages to the game play but can make it look nicer, and stop the game from getting visibly stale

Overall Fruit Ninja is a brilliant game, it’s fun and addictive and you should definitely download the demo to see what it;s like. The game is available for IOS, Windows Phone and Android on phones and tablets. Playing the game on a tablet screen is amazing  so if you have a choice  then definitely try it on that. At £1.99 its a great price that will give you hours of fun gameplay.

If you have any kind of touch screen smart phone, chances are you will have come across or heard of a game called “Angry Birds”. It is an extremely popular laws-of-physics game based on a very simple idea but such a good one.  I’ll be looking specifically at Angry Birds on the upcoming Windows Phone 7 mobile operating system since Rovio (the Angry Birds Developer) has recently released it to the marketplace.

For those of you who don’t know how Angry Birds works, basically the aim of the game is to destroy all the pigs on a given level by hurling angry birds at them with a catapult. Why? Well the pigs have stolen the birds eggs, silly! The pigs are usually defended by different types of  equipment, clothes, walls and buildings and it’s your task to break through them and destroy the pigs by knocking them off from a height or hitting them with either your bird or debris. There are many different types of birds available in the game, each having its own special attributes.

• You start out with a standard red bird which has no special powers which you just hurl at the Pigs defences to destroy them.
• The next bird you encounter is the blue bird which are smaller than the red bird so don’t pack as much punch but when you click on screen once you’ve launched it, it splits into 3 separate birds.
• Next is the pointy faced yellow bird, when clicked in mid air it instantly accelerates to a really fast speed and changes to a straight course. Really good for smashing through wood!
• The White Bird is a fat and plump bird. When tapped in mid air, an egg will come shooting out of it at high speed vertically downwards and explodes when it hits something and the white bird goes flying off into the sky! It is basically a bomber bird!
• The Black Bird is the best in my opinion! Once it touches an object it will start a timer and explode in a few seconds causing massive devastation! Alternately you can tap on the screen to decide when to detonate it. A heavyweight in the bird arsenal.
• The last bird is the Boomerang one which ones pressed will basically try and return to its original position. Good for getting in from behind!
• There are also a few other special ones such as the Big Brother bird which is essentially a bigger version of the red bird.

There are literally hundreds of levels available currently with more on their way. It is a really addictive and fun game. At the end of a level, once all the pigs have been cleared you get a star score out of 3 depending on the points you earn. It is a good feature because it allows you to have a good reason to go back to old levels and improve your technique and use less birds to gain more points. One thing you will definitely notice if you play this game is that luck plays a big part! You can be stuck on a level for ages but sheer luck usually pulls you through but the nice part is you feel as if you’ve accomplished it so it’s all good. That’s not to say that the game itself “cheats”. As I said at the start it’s based on the law of physics- velocity, kinetics and all that guff. In other words when you hit something it behaves as you would imagine in the real world.  It is also consistent, so if you find a winning way of toppling that pig in one game, then it should work again in other games with similar situations.

The game runs as smooth as it does on any other Smartphone so you know they have definitely put the work in to get it running really well. There are no signs of lag, even on some of the really big levels. The WP7 (Windows Phone 7) release currently has all the latest updates but one, the “Mine and Dine” level pack which is currently available for many other platforms. So the game is lacking in that area currently but within time an update is likely to come. There are still literally hundreds of levels anyway and it will take you a while to get through them all and by that time the update will have likely arrived.

The thing that makes Angry Birds unique on Windows Phone 7 is the addition of Xbox Live achievements within the game, from which you can earn gamerscore! So this adds new challenges to the game as you try and get all the achievements. A total of 200 G’s are available and the achievements are as follows:

• Ice Picker (10 G): 5000 Ice Blocks Destroyed
• Seeing Red (5 G): Big Brother Bird Unlocked
• Green Baron (10 G): Episode 3 Finished
• Woodpecker (10 G): 5000 Wooden Blocks Smashed
• Return To Sender (5 G): Boomerang Bird Unlocked
• The Mysterious Escape (10G): Episode 2 Finished
• Pig Popper (10 G): 1000 Pigs Smashed
• Defeat of The King (10 G): Episode 1 Finished
• Mother of All Bombs (10 G): White Bird Unlocked
• Boom Boom! (5 G): Black Bird Unlocked
• Just Getting Started (15 G): World 1 Finished
• Speed Is The Essence (5 G): Yellow Bird Unlocked
• Spit It! (5 G): Blue Bird Unlocked
• Episode 1 – Total Destruction (15 G): Episode 1: Get three stars in all levels
• Episode 2 – Total Destruction (15 G): Episode 2: Get three stars in all levels
• Episode 3 – Total Destruction (15 G): Episode 3: Get three stars in all levels
• Smash Maniac (15 G): Smash 250 000 Blocks
• StoneCutter (10 G): Smash 5000 Stone Blocks
• Block Smasher (15 G): Smash 50 000 Blocks
• Egg Hunter (10 G): Find 10 Golden Eggs

Unlike other Smartphone platforms, unfortunately there is no free, ad based version of Angry Birds available which so if you want the full version you’ll have to pay for it but at £2.29 it’s a small price to pay. Angry Birds is Rovio’s first game to be released on the WP7 marketplace and we look forward to new additions to the Angry Birds family in the future such as “Angry Birds Seasons” but Windows Phone 7 is a fairly new OS though so the developers are having to catch up a bit!

Conclusion:

At £2.29  how can you turn this game down? You are guaranteed to get hours of playtime out of it. There is a reason it is one of the most popular mobile phone games out there to date so if you’ve just bought a Windows Phone then definitely get it! Although it is lacking some content, the addition of Xbox-Live achievements definitely makes up for it and adds new life into the game once all the levels are completed. If you’re still sceptical about the game then a trial is available once you try that out you’ll see how addictive and fun this game really is.