When I play a music game, the most important things I’m looking for are good music and approachable gameplay. Cytus [$0.99] by Rayark manages to nail both of those and even adds a little bit of visual flair on top of it. While Cytus does have a few small issues and miscues in regards to a few elements, it’s still great to play and is a worthy addition to the iOS rhythm genre.

Cytus plays similarly to Elite Beat Agents – note bubbles appear on your screen and must be tapped to the rhythm of the song. An ‘Active Scan Line’ moves up and down the screen to the beat of the song and helps you time the hits on each note. In addition to normal notes, the game also features holds and slides which add some variety to the gameplay. Hits are scored on a system ranging from ‘Perfect’ to ‘Bad’ with a final ranking at song completion dependent on the length of your hit chain and the amount perfect hits.

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Caylus [$4.99] is an outstanding game, consistently ranking in Board Game Geek's top 10. It plays like Ken Follett's The Pillars of the Earth as you take on the role of a master builder tasked with winning the favor of a ruler and building something great. Your world revolves around struggles for resources, money, favor and opportunity. Big Daddy's Creations, the folks behind Neuroshima Hex [$4.99 / Lite], have put together an equally outstanding port - as long as you're prepared to play locally.

It's becoming a bit of a running joke that Big Daddy's Creations puts out great board game ports with shoddy (or no) multiplayer, and Caylus is no exception. You can't play over Game Center, you can't invite friends, and trying to play asynchronously will extend the game length to near-infinite. But if you're down with fighting AI or playing locally against friends, this is a must-buy for any board game fan.

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Numberlys [$5.99] is an interactive story from Moonbot Studios, which is promoted as a story, mystery and game. It started out as a short film, but when the iPad was announced they changed direction and eventually created this lovely visual experience for us to enjoy.

We don't usually review interactive stories or children's games, but Numberlys caught our eye due to it's stylish artistic quality ...and, for the record, it does include mini-games.

In a colorless world filled with numbers, five of the citizens wanted a change and set about inventing the alphabet. The story is told through beautiful black and white animated graphics which are clearly inspired by the classic sci-fi film Metropolis, but with a modern touch.

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Games like Monkey Quest: Thunderbow [$0.99/HD] disrupt the feel-good media narrative we like to tell about the App Store. It's a low-risk way to capitalize on experimental games like Sword & Sworcery [$4.99], a place where Andreas Illiger, the one-man dev team behind Tiny Wings [$0.99], can sell thousands of copies. It's also where a giant corporation like Nickelodeon can sell us an Angry Birds [$0.99] clone to advertise its kid-friendly MMO, Monkey Quest.

It would be easier to find Thunderbow distasteful if it weren't so radical, born out of the same  mid-90s fever dream that brought us anthropomorphic turtles who were also ninjas. The hero of the game is a nameless monkey who carries a bow-and-arrow. After you beat the 30 available levels -- more are, supposedly, coming soon -- you can play a few bonus rounds with a girl-monkey who shoots lightning bolts out of her electric guitar-bow. It's incredible.

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Absolutely nothing about the first five minutes of Darkness Rush: Saving Princess [$0.99] gave me any reason to think it would be a good game. There's that mouthful of a title, for one thing. An absolutely incomprehensible story and translation didn't help, and the Castlevania stylings and scantly clad ladies plastered everywhere just made me nervous. Even the tutorial was off-putting - I mean, seriously, how does it take that long to show us how to use a jump button?

It was a huge surprise when I realized two things: this game is an endless runner, and it's really, really fun.

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You might not have downloaded it yet, but you've played Z-Day [$1.99] before. It's the game you play in your head while reading The Walking Dead; you know, that game where you plot out where you would go and how you would operate during the zombie apocalypse? That one.

Would you take in that stranger you found on the road? Would you mug him instead? Would you break into a police station surrounded by zombies? With moans at your back, three kills to your name and a sledgehammer at your side, would you stop to take a bag of tools from a broken-down car in the middle of the road?

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The first batch of new game releases in 2012 last week was relatively quiet, but Lunar Racer [99¢] from NoodleCake Studios (the makers of Super Stickman Golf [99¢/HD] ) have got things off to a positive start by releasing a new lo-gravity racing game with plenty of jumps, heaps of flips and a couple of weapons.

Lunar Racer starts with a basic driving test, to secure your lunar license. During your rookie training, you learn that tapping the left half of the screen activates "gravity assist" to pull your vehicle towards the ground, while tapping the right side activates nitro boosters for a burst of speed. There's no steering controls, as this game is all about timing your speed-boosts and jumps to beat your opponents.

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We've reached a point in Kairosoft's output where a pattern begins to form. On one side are Game Dev Story [$3.99 / Lite] and Grand Prix Story [$3.99 / Lite], games mostly about teams and what they can achieve. On the other side are five other titles that are more about building the perfect environment, be it mall, town, school, or hot spring. Their newest release, Pocket League Story [$2.99] falls squarely in column A. This time, you're creating the perfect soccer team, and you won't need spreadsheets or a love of soccer to enjoy yourself.

I'd go so far as to say that Pocket League Story is the most approachable game Kairosoft has put out on iOS to date. There are a few tricks to min-maxing the game, but if you do exactly what it tells you to do you'll be fine. For the spreadsheet geeks among us it may be too straightforward, but ultimately this is the perfect game to serve as an introduction to Kairosoft's catalog, or for anyone who loves their games but gets hung up on lists of combos and other arcana.

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While looking at the preview pics for Sleepy Jack [$0.99 / HD], I couldn’t help but recall one of my past favorite titles with a motif that revolved around dreams. That game is NiGHTS Into Dreams, of course, and any other gamer who spent long evenings discovering that magical world will surely feel a bit like Sleepy Jack’s developers might have been fans of it.

In case you have no idea what I’m talking about, both games send you into a universe in your dreams and challenge you to navigate it. In Sleepy Jack, you play Jack, a darling boy who is hurtling through a nighttime world at top speed and needs your assistance to proceed. To help him explore worlds of space, desert and the deep sea, you’ll need to arm your trusty pistol and get your dodging skills ready.

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In some ways, platformers are the toughest to make on a mobile platform. There’s always questions regarding the length and difficulty of individual levels, as well as whether the developer can successfully implement a control scheme to make the game accessible enough for level completion and item collection. Crazy Hedgy [$1.99] from Cybertime is a great example of how platformers should be done on iOS. Not only does it get the basics (like gameplay and replayability) right, but the tilt-based control scheme works very well with the rest of the game. Assuming you don’t mind tilt controls, Crazy Hedgy is well worth it and highly recommended.

At its core, Crazy Hedgy is an adventure-platformer that has you playing through a large amount of levels with the primary goal being to get to the end. There’s not much of a story to go on, other than the fact that the land of Green Hedges has changed (and not for the better) and you need to save it. Along the way you’ll find various types of diamonds that can be collected and act as the currency to upgrade your character in the in-game store (IAP need no apply here). In addition, players are charged with collecting gold coins, which unlock the ability to purchase upgrades and are used as an artificial barrier between worlds (each world has about ten levels). In your way is a variety of different enemies and traps that you can either avoid or take on (extra points awarded if you can toss the enemies into those traps).

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Justin Smith from Captain Games is probably most widely known for sparking off the Enviro-Bear 2010 phenomenon of 2009. The world’s first bear driving a car simulator made a huge splash on the App Store, and proved that beyond the surface of MS Paint quality visuals and purposely awkward control schemes could lie a surprising amount of depth and replay value. Also, you play as a bear driving a car through a forest. Not every video game lets you do that.

Those same principles of low-fidelity visuals, unwieldy controls, and high playability carried through to his next iOS release So Long, Oregon! [$1.99], and they are ever-present in his latest bit of zaniness know as Justin Smith’s Realistic Summer Sports Simulator [99¢]. Don’t let the ironic title fool you, there is absolutely nothing realistic about Summer Sports Simulator. In fact, it’s greatest attraction is just how NOT realistic it portrays the various Olympic-style events it contains.

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If the golden days of Lucasarts adventure titles such as Maniac Mansion, Day of the Tentacle and Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders recall fond memories, there's a good chance you're destined to love any and everything about Kaptain Brawe: A Brawe New World [Free / HD]. After all, who didn't get a perverse joy out of wandering aimlessly and trying to figure out puzzles that were so odd that using basic logic on them meant you would never advance?

Those types of puzzles make their appearances here, but so does a lot of solid gameplay. Kaptain Brawe opens up with an intro to the title character, a big goofy dude who somehow managed to get hired as a space officer despite the fact he's clearly not the brightest bulb in the room. Already, we have a recipe for some laughs -- that's what adventure game fans are used to. You'll start out solo, but eventually meet new characters like Row Boat (a robot of few words) and Luna (a bit of a mystery all around) who you can swap between at different points in the game, offering a bit of new perspective.

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You guys, I had the Worst Christmas Ever this year. No, it’s not because I didn’t get an iPad 2 – I mean, it’s pretty much a job requirement for me to be set in that department – so my (ex-) friends and (former) loved ones are off the hook for that. No, what I can’t get over is the fact that Santa did not leave me a puppy this year. Seriously, I blew up Twitter for weeks with links to dog videos and pet adoption websites and no one picked up on the hints? Collective friends and family, you are dead to me.

Luckily, RagTag Studio's Puppy Panic [$.99] is here to numb my pain. A cute, well-made endless runner, Puppy Panic helped take my mind off of the callousness of those most dear to me by presenting me with a stable of eight (nine, if you count the secret one) puppies for me to race and play with. Each puppy has special abilities unique to their breed that help it in various ways throughout the game’s two modes. When you start with the Beagle, for example, you can double-jump really high, and when you get the Eskimo, you can bark and clear all the obstacles from your path.

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LostWinds [$3.99] from Frontier was originally released for the Wii in 2008 and we've been waiting for the iOS port since it was reported in July.  It's a beautiful adventure platforming game with puzzle elements, which rates highly in almost every way.

The story opens with little Toku asleep on the grass, but once you swipe him awake, there's a lovely layered platform world to explore, with pink trees, waterfalls, caves, villages and other characters to discover. Just tap the screen to walk in that direction, or hold your finger down for a second to keep moving automatically.

On the first level, you discover Enril the wind spirit and gain the ability to generate gusts of wind with a finger swipe. So if you swipe a plant it sways in the breeze, swiping a tree causes it to shake and rustle, while swiping a waterfall splashes water around. You can also swipe at objects - like large rock balls - to move them, or swipe burning fires to fan or direct the flames. These abilities help your search for the evil Balasar, so you can lift his dark curse.

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Normally, I would say "another day, another Chillingo physics puzzle game" as the developer pumps out these high quality iOS titles like it's nothing, but then I had to take a moment to stop. After all, Home Sheep Home 2 [$0.99] is not just any puzzler, it's a puzzler starring Shaun the Sheep from the Wallace & Gromit series, and if you have no idea what that is get off this website right now and go find out. It's that good, and I don't throw such idle threats around lightly.

The first Home Sheep Home title came out in May and earned a BAFTA award (see review here). Not too shabby since it started out as a free Flash game. Like the first game, Home Sheep Home 2 challenges the player to take charge of the three sheep Shaun, Timmy and Shirley and make their way through a series of levels. Fans of the original game that felt it needed more levels should be delighted that there are 40 in total to be explored here, so you should get more time out of it this go round.

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