iPhone and iPod Touch Games Round-up 6

Trivial Pursuit

Developer: EA Mobile
Price (as reviewed): £2.99 from the AppStore

From a well-known game we’d never heard of, to a family favourite everyone is familiar with; Trivial Pursuit is a faithful adaptation of the board-based classic that translates rather well to the iPhone.

If you’ve not played Trivial Pursuit before then, rest assured, it is the general knowledge quiz game. Players are representing as small circular pieces who move around the board according to the roll of a die, answering questions as they. The topic you’re made to deal with depends on the colour of the square you land on, with the aim being to land on the squares that give you a wedge of that colour. Get a wedge of each colour and retreat to the centre of the board for a final question to win!

The iPhone version of Trivial Pursuit expands on this classic game mode with a few additions though, letting you customise the game by swapping out easy and more difficult questions to cater to your skill. As with most EA games on the iPhone there’s premium DLC available too, which in this case lets you download more questions or packs based on specific themes.


There’s a new game mode too, called Pursuit, which is basically a singleplayer quiz that sees you trying to guess correct answers as fast as possible. It’s a nice addition and well-suited to when you just have a few minutes to kill, but the Classic game mode is obviously where the main interest lies. There’s even four save slots so that you can have multiple games on the go at once.

Playable in both a singleplayer mode against the AI (where you can thankfully skip enemy turns to avoid intolerable waiting) and in multiplayer (WiFi or hotseat), Trivial Pursuit is an excellent adaptation of the boardgame that makes for a great family game on long car journeys.

Verdict: A simple and satisfying port of the classic boardgame.

Finger Physics

Developer: PressOK Entertainment
Price (as reviewed): £0.59 from the AppStore

A slightly more forgiving and varied physics-based game, Finger Physics features a range of different game modes and challenges for players to complete, each of which are slightly different. There’s the obligatory tower-building game mode, of course, but there are some original additions too – such as an underwater challenge where you have to keep your buoyant bricks submerged and steady for a set time.

Like Geared, Finger Physics has few little problems that can make it a slightly frustrating game to play but on the whole it’s much less of an issue. Not being able to easily pan up and down the screen when you’re building towers can be a pain, but it also works as part of the challenge and prevents you from juggling bricks as a cheap exploit.

Finger Physics doesn’t just limit itself to simple building puzzles either, with later levels bringing in magnets and glass building blocks to play around with, as well as new game modes based on them. The ‘egg levels’, where you have to destroy a tower of glass blocks in an order than delicately drops a gold egg into an unmovable basket, are especially fun and oddly troublesome.

The magnets on the other hand can be a real pain in the arse and are the one area of the game where the game physics regularly falter, creating spasming blocks as you stick repelling blocks too close to each other or in a way which allows movement. The fact that you can’t separate magnetic blocks that have joined often means you have to repeat a level too – one wrong move is all it really takes.

On the whole though, Finger Physics is definitely one of the best building games we’ve yet seen on the iPhone and it’s made even better by the fact that it has a fairly large set of challenges to get stuck into and a medal system that encourages you to replay levels you haven’t perfected.

Verdict: Easily one of the most accessible and enjoyable physics games we’ve played in a while, Finger Physics is highly recommended.

Check out our past iPhone game round-ups – one, two, three, four and five - for other great game suggestions and let us know what your favourite games are in the forums!