In The Lighthouse HD, you take the role of an all-seeing lighthouse operator helping ships get across hazardous waters. Tap anywhere on the screen to shine a light on that area. If you shine the light near a ship, it’ll alter direction towards the direction of the light (and will then continue straight on its new path). The game plays somewhat similarly to line drawing games like Harbor Master [$1.99 / HD / Free], with the difference being that you can’t directly alter the course of your ships and instead must use the light to indirectly manage your shipping lanes (rather than drawing routes).

The goal of each mission is to accomplish various objectives (which include goals like getting ships from one point to another and leading fishing boats to giant schools) before losing all your ships. In addition, you’ll encounter barriers such as rolling fog, ship-seeking sharks, and giant krakens looking to trap your ship. As expected, a lot of multitasking, coordination, and precision are required to pass missions and hit the highest scores. Overall gameplay is executed well enough, although I would have liked an option to speed up the map when I’m working with slower boats (considering the game is on a timer, I could see why this wasn’t on the top of the list).

The areas that The Lighthouse HD does a really great job with are its visuals and presentation. The game succeeds in conveying a moody, dark atmosphere at the onset of each mission. Weather effects such as rain, lightning and fog add even more to the general feel of the game, although there were a few times when the various effects made it hard to see some of the baddies swimming underneath the water (call it part of the cruelty of the sea, I suppose). As you get towards the end of each mission, the sun begins to rise, the music starts swelling and the whole map gives off a sense of seeing a light at the end of the proverbial tunnel. I rarely see a game succeed at achieving a play on emotion, but The Lighthouse HD does a good job of getting there.

Unfortunately, there are several areas in The Lighthouse HD that feel rough around the edges. Specifically, the game is filled with a lot of frustrating gameplay nuances that just seem out of place. For example, there are no on-screen notifications when ships are about to come into play on the map. Considering that several levels charge you with taking ships from one end of the map to the other, with both entrances also posing as exists, it can be very frustrating when you get close to an exit and a ship appears out of nowhere and collides with your existing ship, making you lose both in the process.

Another example deals with actual gameplay mechanics. One of the items available to you to make guiding ships easier is buoys, which force nearby ships to divert course automatically. The problem is I could never get the buoys to work correctly – I’d place one in a certain location thinking ships would divert one way and they end up going another way. Considering there doesn’t appear to be a way to remove them once they’re placed. This ends up being a waste of resources and can make or break a level.

Another concern is in regards to content. The Lighthouse HD offers 30 total missions, making the game good on content for at least three or four hours (depending on whether you like collecting objective medals). However, I imagine that most gamers will clamor that the game could use more missions, particularly at its current price point. The developer has stated in the forums that additional levels are coming, and I hope they arrive sooner rather than later.

Despite these shortcomings, The Lighthouse HD should appeal to fans of vehicle management games and line-drawers. Its nuanced changes to the standard gameplay and overall visual presentation do a decent job of differentiating itself. Assuming you can get past the relative lack of content and occasional strange gameplay missteps, I’d recommend The Lighthouse HD .

Order Up!! was first released for Wii in 2008, and is due to come out soon for PS3 and 3DS at full retail price. I haven't played the console version of the game, but it sounds as though To Go is essentially the same game. For the mobile outing, Supervillian Studios has added advertisements, removable with IAP, and taken away certain goals to encourage players to purchase currency. Aside from that, it looks like everything else is intact. Intact, and downright entertaining.

Just one catch: you've gotta like grinding. Every day you buy meals in preparation for your customers, and those you sell give you a small profit. That profit goes toward buying spices and special meals, cleaning your restaurants, unlocking new recipes and working your way into new locations. Eking out a living this way takes time, and nicer restaurants are pricey. Originally this was handled by letting players unlock new restaurants once they met certain goals. In this freemium version, you have to earn the cash - or buy it.

If you're down with grinding, though, Order Up is great. It looks like Cooking Mama at a glance, and I'd be lying if I said there weren't similarities. But Order Up goes deep, ending up with as much focus on the management elements than the chopping and stirring.

At the highest level, you're responsible for caring for your restaurants. As I mentioned, this means, amongst other things, earning enough money to open them up and keep them running. Each day you pick out the menu based on a randomly selected special, a descending list of popularity and a daily customer total. Say you expect 14 customers in a day. 6 might order the special, 5 the most popular item, and 3 the second most popular. Or maybe 12 will order the special. You don't have those numbers, so you have to balance buying enough stock to cover all your customers' potential desires with your rather slim profit margin.

One you open up for the day the customers start to stream in. You send out your server to take their orders one table at a time, and she or he brings them back to you to cook up. Take too long and customers will start getting unhappy, which will cut into your profits. You're given up to a handful of orders to handle at once, and you have to time your preparations to keep anything from getting cold, doing as much as you can at once to keep things moving but holding back some steps to send your orders back out piping hot.

Preparing food is very hands-on. To make a burger and fries, for example, you have to drop meat onto the grill, then gesture to flip it when it's at the perfect temperature. You drag fries down into the oil and then up when they're cooked. You pull the leaves off a head of lettuce by swiping, and chop a tomato by tapping at the moment its guidelines meet. As each part is finished you tap it onto the tray, and once everything is ready you hit a bell to send it off to the table. Each meal is ranked by how well you complete each of its steps, and your profits depend on that rank.

The game's setting, Port Abello, has six restaurants currently, each with its own unique theme and a slew of recipes. You work your way through a greasy spoon to a Mexican joint, up to a slightly swankier Italian place, through Asian fusion and finally into fine dining. Each setting has thematic decor, recipes and servers, and each of those servers has several lines of dialog with which to compliment your work and butter up your customers.

Port Abello also has a few characters of its own that show up at your restaurants as special guests. They too have voiced dialog to express their spiciest seasoning desires. If you've purchased the right spices and figure out their hints in time to add the right one to their dish you'll earn a hefty bonus, something every struggling restauranteur can appreciate.

Assuming you manage to keep on top of everything else, you can put your coins toward upgrading your kitchens. There are currently a few options available for faster food prep, but it looks like assistants and mini-games are en route as well. You'll also want to keep your kitchens clean with regular payments to the cleaners. If you don't, you'll end up dealing with tedious mini-games like flicking away rat infestations or showing the health inspector that you can, in fact, wash lots of plates.

Other than its sheer grindiness, the only real problem with Order Up is that you're going to be doing a heck of a lot of gesturing. Each recipe you pick up increases your daily customers, increasing the length and complexity of your day. By the time you've grilled your thousandth burger it starts to lose its charm, and days dragging on longer and longer doesn't help. But that's just a sign that it's time to take a break. Give your wrist a rest, have some real food and come back refreshed and ready for another day at the grill. It's hard to fault a game for having too much to do.

Really, it's hard to fault Order Up!! To Go for much at all. It's virtually free, though it would probably be hard to live with the ads for long. It's filled to the brim with a variety of tasks and locales. If not for the damage done to the game's pace by its freemium elements it would be a nearly flawless casual restaurant management title. It's a shame that the best way to monetize the game was to make it frustratingly slow, because that will undoubtedly turn away many potential players. Don't make their mistake. Slow and steady wins the restaurant race, so take it easy and cook up something nice.

Gameplay-wise American Settler generally plays like most other freemium town builders. Players chop trees for wood and grow crops for food with the intent of building houses and businesses to make cash. You then use that cash to build bigger and better businesses to make more coin, and so on. Each action rewards you with experience for leveling up, which subsequently unlock better things to build. Folks familiar with freemium building games should feel right at home. In addition, the visuals in American Settler are quite colorful and look very similar to those found in the recent iOS remake of the original Oregon Trail. In other words, if you were able to accept the cartoony graphics of the remake, you’ll be fine with American Settler.

Where Gameloft somewhat deviates from the norm is with the sheer amount of things you can do simultaneously from the start. Being in the frontier, a lot of time will be spent clearing your plot of land and chopping down trees, which both earn experience among other items. Also, a lot of businesses will require base commodities (such as food) before they can eventually spit out gold. In addition, American Settler features a decent amount of crafting, with advanced items requiring simpler items (that can be made at the same workshop) and so on. I thought Gameloft did a decent job of the wide variety of items you could make, particularly with the interplay of items that could be used as prerequisite ingredients.

Gameplay and graphics are all well and good, but when it comes to freemium games, the most important question is in regards to how much can a person play before they have to wait or pay. Like most freemium games, American Settler has the usual assortment of timers that players will have to deal with in order to grow crops or craft items. Accompanying the timers is the usual ‘premium’ currency that can thwart said timers (and is conveniently offered as IAP). It’s a standard system that offers very little surprise.

However, Gameloft has taken timers one step further with the ‘Energy’ system. Similar to Let’s Golf 3, energy is required to do nearly anything in American Settler. While actions can randomly reward additional energy (thus giving you essentially a free act) you will eventually run out, and you will have to either wait, or use your premium currency to instantly restore your energy. While I’m certainly not a fan of additional timers, the truth is energy doesn’t really affect the game much outside the first few hours, as the gameplay will inevitably devolve into waiting decent amount of time for items or crops to be ready (and your energy will most likely have recovered by then).

Where I do have a problem, however, is with the randomized events that occasionally occur which threaten the timers of your businesses or crops unless you shell out some premium currency. It’s as if multiple timers and IAP were no longer enough and the developers had to throw in yet another method to try and coax IAP out of the common gamer. Sure, these events hide behind the general theme of Oregon Trail (bandit attacks and natural disasters, for example), but it still amounts to an uncouth business practice.

In the end, despite the colorful visuals and deeper gameplay, American Settler is still a freemium game. There are undoubtedly gamers out there that will simply turn their nose up and not bother simply because of that classification. However, for those that enjoy this type of genre, American Settler can offer enough actual content and gameplay to make it a freemium title worth pursuing. I just really wish that ideas like the random potentially timer resetting events and the energy ‘gameplay’ mechanic didn’t make the choice harder than it already had to be.

The apps have a lot in common, you see. Both of them are fantastic at bringing back the properties we know and love. Both flawlessly emulate the look of the classics. Both are missing a few key features. And both are cripplingly tied into IAP and grinding mechanics.

Snoopy's Street Fair does a particularly good job of cranking up the nostalgia machine. As you build up your street fair to help Charlie Brown go to the baseball tournament, you'll be flooded with memories. The game is filled with familiar sound bites that were either pulled from the Peanuts TV specials or are excellent impersonations. All manner of beloved characters pop up -- Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Woodstock, Peppermint Patty, Linus, Lucy and a huge roster of B, C and D-listers.

But more than that, nostalgic features are peppered throughout the experience. As you level up, you unlock classic comic strips that you can go back and read freely. After unlocking a certain item, you can take Peanuts photobooth pictures and send them to your friends. There are Snoopy trading cards to collect. These sweet little Easter eggs really elevate Snoopy's Street Fair to something occasionally special.

It's almost enough to make you want to use the app to, say, introduce the Peanuts gang to your kids. I'd recommend against it. To its credit, Beeline Interactive does a very good job of pointing out that the IAP costs real money, and warning players that there are real world purchases to be made. But that hasn't stopped the developer from making this game's argument for IAP very compelling. You can earn everything in-game, it seems, but it would take an extremely long time. You only earn a couple Snoopy Dollars each level, and many of the items and characters can only be bought with them -- for 20, 50, even 75 Snoopy Dollars a pop. The minimum purchase is 50 for $4.99, so be prepared to dig deep.

This wouldn't be so irritating if the game surrounding the IAP was more compelling. I've fallen in love with a few freemium games with simple grinding mechanics, but this one is just a bit too brainless. You can tap each of the stalls and features of your fair once in a while - 30 seconds, 24 hours, or somewhere in between. You get coins and experience when you do, and occasionally random rewards pop out to try to hit the part of our psyche that loves that kind of thing. The grinding is oversimplified, as is the decorating. It's all just rather bland.

There are a few mini-games that round out the experience, but they're pricey and straightforward. You can twist lemons for lemonade, or marshmallows for campfire roasting, and you can play with paints. But you can only do these things occasionally, because you could otherwise earn too much experience or have some kind of fun.

Rounding out the flaws, on the other hand, are a pair of familiar issues. While Snoopy's Street Fair lets you add Game Center friends, it doesn't have any other Game Center integration. Worse, it doesn't make any attempt to save your progress to the cloud. Delete the app for any reason and you'll have to start over from scratch. It's a bad call for a game with its hands so deep in your pockets.

If Snoopy's Street Fair is a game for nostalgic adults, it's not interesting enough to hold any attention. If it's a game for children, the aggressive focus on IAP is distasteful. Still, if you have fond memories of Charlie Brown and crew, it's worth your time to poke around briefly and see what charm this game has to offer. Just don't get sucked in -- unlike Peanuts, wine, or cheese, Snoopy's Street Fair doesn't get better with age.

Now, while we aren't allowed to get into to many details as far as the storyline goes, just yet, I can tell you that the rooms you will be defending (and cleaning) are, this time around, spread throughout time. From the local museum, which serves as a kind of time-hub, you will be traveling to medieval castles, ancient Egyptian crypts, Viking halls, and ancient Japanese dwellings -- all riddled with zombies that make terrible stains when dispatched.

Some of the tasks that must be completed involve several stages set in different locations and / or times. For instance, one of your clients, Vlad the vampire, has given up drinking blood and moved over to milk. So you must travel through time to get him a glass of milk by milking a cow in a zombie-swarmed barn. Each of the temporally far-flung locales features its own mini-boss that appears and drives the zombies into attack frenzies that make the task of keeping the rooms clean and zombie-free quite a challenge.

While the original release featured four locations, four weapons, and five types of zombies, Zombie Wonderland 2 delivers 25 locations, 25 weapons, and 22 types of zombies, as well as a mega-boss zombie. Some of the weapons available are special bullets, medusa bullets, gnawers, turrets, lightning bottles, killer grass, the brain toy -- even a Roomba(-like robotic vacuum). Weapons can be damaged by zombies, but can also be repaired. New weapons can be quickly bought via in-app purchases or unlocked through dedicated gameplay.

Some areas of the town's museum are visibly under construction, and serve as placeholders for additional areas that will arrive in updates, down the road.

We'll take a closer look at Zombie Wonderland 2 when it arrives sometime before Christmas, but, however we rate it, it's sure to is sure to take the crown as far as number of genres represented. This survival cleaning, time management, tower defense zombie shooter will be priced at $0.99.

Tiny Farm [Free]  is the latest offering in this popular genre, and I'm just gonna say it right off the bat so I don't feel like I'm holding back: It looks a billion times better than FarmVille. It trades in the deformed character style that makes you feel like you've stumbled into an avatar generator for a clean cartoon look, and I admit it made me like the game ten times more right off the bat. The cute little sounds the animals make when they get all swoony over you for feeding them in pretty great, too.

As far as gameplay goes, it will be very easy for any person who has played this type of sim before. You start off simply with a small plot of land, a shop to buy things from, and a basic tutorial which will show you how to grow crops and adopt animals. You'll start off with a few sheep, learn to breed them, and soon enough you'll be a regular master, mixing breeds and so on. One mentionable here is the menus, which are just as clean as the gameplay and make it a pleasure to play Tiny Farm. Since these types of games rely so heavily on menu interface, this gives the game a little boost and makes you want to keep on playing.

So how do you make your farm bigger and better than anyone else's? Well, by doing things such as upgrading your house, breeding bigger and better animals like pigs, cows and fancy roosters, and expanding your land. To do these things, you'll need to spend time in the game -- there are some processes you can hurry along with items like Bells, which make animals instantly level up, but other things you'll simply just have to wait out. The good news is, while you wait you can fill your land with all sorts of decor, from trees to statues.  By the time you're done, you can harvest some crops and check on your animals, and you'll be well on your way to expanding your universe.

Part of the allure of these types of games is sharing your country with your friends so you can brag about how vast it is. Since Tiny Farm is Game Center enabled, people can check there to see how fast you are progressing. You can also use a message board to leave messages for other visitors to your farm, or you can also back into the world map and use it to invite friends using the game's built in system. Just like FarmVille, there will be certain quests later down the line you'll need help with, so you're best off making some pals so they can come over and water your lawn or whatever it is people do in this crazy world where people just tend farms and build things for fun. I'm kind of jealous, honestly.

Tiny Farm doesn't do a thing to break the mold here, but what it does do, it executes expertly. This is a fun game to play, and it's absolutely adorable, which means any gamer with a soft spot for cute things is going to fall in love with it instantly. It doesn't cost a penny to play, although you can spend money in-game if you want to hurry up certain processes. The game's website tells us to expect themed events as well, so expect fun stuff to come up around Halloween time. All this for the big fat price of ...free. Call me crazy, but I have a sneaking suspicion it might end up being popular…

Obviously, the premise in Harbor Master differed by having the player direct boats into docks rather than planes onto landing strips, but it went a bit deeper than that. Boats that were destined for particular docks came in various sizes and speeds, and you’d need to wait for the ship to unload its cargo before directing it out of the dock to make room for a new ship. This small change added a whole new level of strategy and frantic gameplay, and Harbor Master has remained a favorite in the line drawing genre around the TouchArcade headquarters since its release.

Over the past couple of years, Harbor Master has received a good amount of update love from the developers, adding in Retina Display graphics, a separate iPad version, Game Center integration, and a novel rewind feature that let you back things up if you made a mistake.

Now, for the first time ever, the price of Harbor Master has dropped to free for the day. If you’ve somehow managed never to pick up the title yet, now is your chance to jump on it for zero dollars. There’s also the iPad version Harbor Master HD which has always been initially free and is supported with additional premium features through in-app purchase. No matter which version you end up with, make sure not to miss out on one of the best line drawing games in the App Store during this limited free promotion of Harbor Master.

So the big day has come - does Tiny Tower live up to the hype? Yes, with one suitably tiny caveat: this isn't the second coming of Sim Tower. Let's just get that out of the way up front, because the early screenshots gave some people that impression. That aside, yes, Tiny Tower is a fantastic, adorable successor to the Pocket Frog empire and it's just as hard to put down.

Here's how it works. Upon starting the game, you're greeted by a fresh new tower and a simple lobby. Working through the tutorial, you build your first residential floor and your first production floor, move in your first Bitizen and give them a job. The Bitizen gets to work creating items to sell, bringing in coins. Spend those coins on building more floors and eventually your tower will reach up into the sky.

Each floor has three items to stock, and each one is on a different timer. When an item's stock sells out, its your job to tell your Bitizens to order more, a task that takes anywhere from a minute to a few hours depending on the item. When that timer fills up, you also need to order them to put the item up for sale again. When you're overseeing a few production floors, this means checking in occasionally. When you've got a 40 story tower, on the other hand, this production cycle will quickly take over your life—if you let it.

The game uses local notifications to let you know when the first item is available to restock after closing the app. This is a great way to stay on top of your towers' needs early on, but with enough production floors it might just make you crazy. I turned notifications off pretty quickly, and discovered something cool—unlike most of these "appointment gaming" types, I can peek into my tower at any time and find something to do. There's always something ready to stock, or someone waiting to ride the elevator. So Tiny Tower fits perfectly into any little gaps of time you have for it. And with no spoilage mechanic, the only thing to lose by ignoring it is the coins you could have been earning in the meantime.

If this all sounds like a lot of managing timers and pushing buttons, you'll be happy to know there's a bit more to it. The Bitizens are really the heart and soul of Tiny Tower. Their comings and goings will occupy a lot of your attention. For starters, they each have their own set of talents. There are five categories of production floor, and individual Bitizens are stronger working at some and weaker at others. They also have their own little dreams. Bitizens working in their dream jobs are better than their counterparts, and you get a tidy bonus for putting them there. Want to see what they're thinking? Hit up Bitbook, a virtual social network for your virtual workers that's filled with quips and little hints.

You're also in control of their literal comings and goings, because you control your tower's elevator. Ferrying Bitizens to their destination nets you tips, both in coins and Bux, the game's premium currency. Occasionally, VIPs show up to add a bit of strategy to the game. They have special abilities, and where you drop them off can make a big difference to your production.

For the creative types, you can customize your tower to the nines. You can't pick which floors are built, just which categories you're creating, but you can move your floors around and paint them to match any color scheme you can imagine. You can also dress up your Bitizens with a palette and outfit randomizer. It took a bit of persistence, but I've got all my employees dressed smartly in per-floor uniforms. The adorable pixel art makes this extra satisfying.

The premium aspects of the game are more than fair. You can buy Tower Bux with real money, but you can also earn them as tips or as bonuses for fully stocking a production floor. A Where's Waldo-style mini-game also awards them. You can exchange them for coins or as timesavers to build a floor faster, finish stocking it, upgrade your elevator or move in a Bitizen. If you're really keen to get ahead, purchasing Bux will help. But if you just play regularly you'll always have lots to do and plenty of chances to expand. Nothing is locked out for players who don't want to pay.

Other than a nitpick or two (it would be nice to toggle the elevator-style music off and keep the sound on, for instance), my only real concern is the lack of social integration. These games are always better with friends (many of whom you can find in our forums), but the only thing you can really do with your buddies in Tiny Tower is compete with them on the Game Center leaderboard and for achievements, and look at their towers. Maybe we'll see more social options in the future, like something to exchange with friends or something to do in their towers.

But enough talk. Tiny Tower is another great, free game from the guys at NimbleBit, and you should definitely check it out. Just try not to get too caught up in the lives of your little Bitizens - it's important to put the game down once in a while.

For those somehow unfamiliar, Flight Control turns you into an air traffic controller, routing helicopters and airplanes of various sizes and speeds into the proper (color coded) airports -- hopefully without incident. It's game that should handily dispel any aspirations you have to become a real-life air traffic controller.

Flight Control has been extremely well maintained since its release and now features leaderboards, achievements and online multiplayer via Game Center, local WiFi / Bluetooth multiplayer and, specific to the iPad version, shared (same device) multiplayer, both cooperative and competitive.

Flight Control brings a great balance of easy pick-up gameplay, ramping difficulty and that "just one more time" draw. If your iPad lacks Flight Control HD, now's the time to take care of that.

App Store Link: Flight Control HD, $0.99 (iPad Only)

In each of the whopping 70 levels in Airport Terminal you are faced with a variety of different customers from all walks of life. Basketball players, movie stars, snotty kids; each have distinct needs that must be catered for. Firstly, this involves delivering them to their respective First, Business or Coach class check-in, before sending them off to a number of different amenities and services invariably found in an airport terminal.

What separates Airport Terminal from other time management games on initial observation, is the dual-screen challenge presented by the check-in and boarding process. If you manage to incur the wrath of a patron or incur delays at check-in, expect these patrons to be equally sour and tardy come boarding time. This is especially so when faced with the endless customs queues that we're all so fond of.

Activities are different between the two screens (though some actions are shared, such as hitting each customer up twice at duty-free) and comprise events such as passport stamping, customs scanning, restroom stops and even a chow-down while waiting for your plane. As seems to be the trend with the better time management games, sending a customer to a facility triggers one of 8 mini-games that require your immediate attention. These range from fun to effortless (read: mindless) but all importantly add up to further time sinks and distractions that compound the frantic pace of the game.

Besides its huge number of levels, spanning 7 different airports, each with individual setups, customers, assortment of minigames and strategies; Airport Terminal also features 70 individual upgrades to customize and improve your terminal. These include upgrading the light rail between areas, increasing the staff at various service points, and increasing staff competency levels (to name but a few). Though these upgrades promote bettering your score (and thus earning more money to spend) even the most expensive items never seem too far out of reach.

Airport Terminal is an endearing time management game that will hold your focus for hours as you coordinate the activities and improvements of each world famous airport. Though not as complex as titles such as Mystic Emporium [$2.99], Airport Terminal still offers enough frantic timely tapping to satiate any fan of the genre.

Each level in Virtual City sets you up with an impending crisis, supply-line hiccup or urban restoration to resolve (to name but a few scenarios), giving you the tools as chief transport contractor (and budding city planner) to address them directly. The central hub for each of your cities is therefore your garage, from where you can deploy a range of vehicles to transport goods, transport civilians or collect garbage-- all vital instruments to achieving a happy, productive city.

Initially, Virtual City starts you off slow, holding your hand through some of the basic functions, such as earning income by shuttling civilians to malls, or creating a simple clothing supply line. Supply lines are comprised of different production centers which require a number of inputs to function. Transport therefore plays a pivitol role in fuelling your economy. Eventually you'll be introduced to how environmental concerns have an impact on happiness (and thus population) and how a healthy city is a clean city. Yes, you'll be taught to take out the garbage.

Moving on, subsequent levels will open up trade with neighboring towns and more difficult, interconnected supply lines. Eventually factors like sickness, fires, disrepair and income concerns will emerge to boost the difficulty of levels encountered. If there's one thing that Virtual City gets right, it's that it has an excellent sense of progression and learning curve; only dropping you in the deep end when it has provided you with the tools to stay afloat.

The following levels, of which there are a total of 50 spread across 5 different states, are given an interesting context selected from a possible 18 scenarios. With only the help of a hint or two, you are sent on your merry way to make things right. These scenarios can get quite complex, so it is fortunate that Virtual City features an easy to understand interface that clearly delineates end goals and interim goals to work towards to complete each level. Menus are easily navigated, and holding down on each item will reveal a tooltip detailing its cost and other information (something that may not be apparent while playing).

Virtual City's difficulty is further compounded when demands on supply ramp up; forcing you to upgrade your production structures and vehicles to boost their output and carrying capacity. This places an enormous toll on your finances, and often you'll spend much of your time devising ways to first fill your coffers. If your scenario dictates the construction of a complex landmark such as a Space Shuttle launch pad, then the entire process needs to operate as a well-oiled machine. Virtual City is no walk in the park, demanding considerable efforts in both attention and organisation of your city and structures.

Virtual City currently has a blanked out Sandbox mode on the main menu, a feature meant to be arriving in the next update. We'll let you know when this goes live. In the meantime if you're looking for help or reader reviews, check out the thread in our forums.

But with the latest updates, they've also added a clever rewind feature that lets you restart the game right before that last fatal mistake:

We've also added a really cool feature - rewinds. With rewinds, after you crash, you can choose to rewind (or undo) the crash, and continue playing where you left off. You can only use ONE rewind in a game, and you get a limited number of rewinds total. When we launched the update, we gave people 5 rewinds, and then they could earn 1 rewind for each 1000 pieces of cargo they ship. So they more you play, the more rewinds you earn, and therefore you can use a rewind more often.

You start off with 5 rewinds and can use one in any particular game. Rewinds are then earned for longer play time or can be purchased via in-app purchase ($0.99 for $2.99 for 20, $4.99 for 40).

Balancing in-app purchases is always a challenging problem for a developer. On the one hand, in app purchases need to offer a legitimate value in a consumable product. But that product can't be one that gamers feel is a necessary component of the game. I feel like the rewinds fill this sort of niche well, and I'd expect we'll see it more often in the future. As an added bonus, I've always thought the compelling feature of these chaos management games is the "oh no!" last second regret when death comes suddenly. Now you get a second chance.

Time management games invariably adopt a similar formula-- impatient, fussy patrons, frantic table-to-table action and an upgrade system that assists you in serving even more impatient and fussy patrons. Though Star Wars: Cantina doesn't deviate far from this mould, when the subject matter concerns a spark from Lucas' brain matter, you just know you're in for something special. In this case a humorous back-story of an indebted bartender ties the gameplay together with an intermittent comic strip filling in the details.

The stars of this Star Wars saga are undoubtedly the customers though, who start off as mere moisture farmers, but progress over the 16 levels of the Campaign to introduce Jawas, Bounty Hunters, Gamorreans, Twi'lek Smugglers, Stormtroopers and even Hutts! Each of these archetypes have different personalities, framed in terms of levels of patience and their generosity. It wouldn't be a Star Wars Cantina without a bar brawl either, an event that easily results if you leave some of the more volatile patrons waiting-- much to the chagrin of your property.

As each level is completed you are able to retrofit your bar with equipment that helps soothe your clientele, and assist you in preparing drinks all the more promptly. Controlling Nia (our hero) is effortless, and despite the the initial tutorial being somewhat confusing, you will quickly be zipping around the bar sending patrons to their tables, taking their orders, and cleaning up after them too. The challenge comes in taking the right drinks to the right patrons and ensuring you manage their moods-- for example, moisture farmers can wait all day but Stormtroopers had better be served pronto. The gameplay isn't all that complex-- you don't have to manage prices or supplies of drinks -- but we think Star Wars: Cantina actually benefits from adopting a more light-hearted approach; placing the difficulty on the customer types and numbers instead.

Star Wars: Cantina has an enormous amount of personality instilled in it by its excellent artwork and the hallmark (and very familiar) Star Wars tunes pumping through the bar. A particularly nice touch was how all our favorite Star Wars tracks have been jazzed up to suite the bar environment. With a Career mode and an Endless Shift mode, where your current upgrades can be put to use to see how long you last before any patrons up and leave, there's also quite a bit to do in Star Wars: Cantina too. For high score seekers, both modes have leaderboards that can potentially add even more replayability to what is already a game of reasonable length.

Without a doubt, the biggest thing that Star Wars: Cantina has going for it is how successfully it captures that Star Wars charm-- from the music to the background art and the notorious characters you encounter-- you almost expect Luke and Han to walk through the door next. So if you're a Star Wars fan and have even a remote interest in time management games then Star Wars: Cantina is very easily recommended. Hardcore fans of the genre though may feel it skimps on the traditional micro-management of products due to its simplistic formula. We understand too that this is a niche genre and not even the Star Wars licence will change people's opinions of a play style that has remained largely unchanged since Lemonade Tycoon.

App Store Link: Star Wars: Cantina, $4.99.

Megan Fox, if you are reading this, you should give this one a try. And it's not because I think Megan Fox is a hottie (perse), it's just that she was a huge fan of the previous iPhone game that came from this designer -- Sally's Spa. Dan Kratt and Craig Rushforth previously worked at GamesCafe where they designed and produced Sally's Salon and Sally's Spa before breaking out on their own with BlueUnit Studios.

Hottie Hookups is the first product from that studio and is worth a look if you like time management or chaos management games. While the game is very well executed and delivers a lot of character, I was never sure I was personally sold on the gameplay. However, a free version was recently released so you can give it a spin.

App Store Links: Hottie Hookups, $0.99, Hottie Hookups Lite, Free

Meridian has released a new game in the App Store which is a departure from their recent games such as Alive 4-Ever and Against the Fire. This time they've returned to the time management genre with a nice doctor-themed game called Are You Alright?.

Chloe is a brilliant doctor that strongly believes the medical machines invented by her dad will bring great benefits to a lot of patients around the world. She continues to work at hospitals in different countries to demonstrate the machines so that they can be widely used and recognized.

Like most time management games, you are tasked with keeping your customers (well, patients in this case) happy as you direct them from station to station. The story mode for Are You Alright takes you across 70 levels with 50 additional Time Attack levels.

Are You Alright? keeps things interesting by adding station-specific mini games such as X-Rays, Bacteria Testing, Plaster Casting and more. You need to take the time to properly complete each task before moving on.

As you earn money during levels, you can upgrade your equipment and hire additional help that will help keep the flow of patients moving. But, take too long with one, and they might not make it out alive.

This gameplay video shows an early level:

We've only spent a short amount of time with the game so far, but we've found it to be a fun and well executed time management game.

App Store Link: Are You Alright?, $0.99