$4.99

Leo’s Fortune is one of the most beautiful iOS games I’ve seen in a while. But beyond its good looks, it also has an intriguing story, fun puzzles, and a ton of personality.

And I could stop right there, but then you wouldn’t hear about the cool physics and simple controls and the fact that the hero is a Star Trek Tribble with eyes like a Muppet and an undeniably amazing moustache.

This game basically has everything.

I don’t own a whole lot of Lego at the moment, and that’s intentional because if I did, I’d just sit around building things all day, and none of these reviews would happen.

Building something from scratch is satisfying, and if it has a function to perform and succeeds, it’s even better. Loco Motors plays on this by letting you build your own vehicle and then use it to complete tasks on a test ramp. It’s essentially two puzzle games in one: one in which you build a car that will run, and another where you let it loose on the track to complete specific tracks.

And luckily, it has an interface that lets you do these things both easily and quickly.

We’ve been excited about Tengami ever since we saw it at a gaming conference a couple of years back. The long development time has paid off for developer Nyamyam, as Tengami is by far one of the best games of its type we’ve seen on any platform.

It came out for iOS just this week, and we’ve lost ourselves (and our sense of time) playing through the lushly illustrated pop-up book. The story is told without dialogue, tasking us with moving from one beautiful environment to the next, solving puzzles along the way to keep the journey going.

Here’s a video of some of our play through of the game.

When I was a kid at Showbiz Pizza (back in those carefree days before that upstart rat staged his coup), the Dragon’s Lair cabinet always fascinated me. People would step up, watch a cartoon for about three seconds, and then they’d put another quarter in. They’d watch the same cartoon, and then they’d put another quarter in. And so it went until they said some words that my parents didn’t want me using and went off to play Dig Dug.

I didn’t understand what Dragon’s Lair was until much later; all I knew was that it looked like a movie and annoyed people.

This week, the iOS port of its 1991 sequel, Time Warp, made its way to the App Store, and it’s pretty much here to ruin your day and make you hate your fingers and your slow, stupid brain.

So basically, the old-school experience is intact, and I love it.

Tengami has gathered a bit of a following during its development due to its beautiful, pop-up-book art style and zen-like demeanor. It has relaxing music, a dialogue-free narrative, and puzzles that are clever and occasionally very tricky.

The game is out now as a universal app for iOS devices, and it has a lot of expectations to live up to. Can it live up to the excitement?

It absolutely does, delivering an endlessly fascinating experience in one of the most beautiful packages you have ever seen.

What’s that, you say? You’ve been longing for a retro, old school, three dimensional dungeon crawler to take with you on your iPhone and iPad?

Look no further than Coldfire Keep, a brand new first person dungeon crawler from Steve Jarman and Crescent Moon Games. You’ll have to make your way through this beautifully rendered 3D dungeon, full of monsters, puzzles, hidden secrets and–natch–tons of loot.

It should be in the App Store tonight (February 19) by 11 pm Eastern time here in the US, if all goes according to plan, and it’s looking pretty sweet, if the video below is to be trusted.

It’s been a little while since I reviewed a tank game, so I picked up Battle Supremacy, a new tread-and-turret action title from the developers of Sky Gamblers out today for iOS devices.

Battle Supremacy takes place during World War II and features authentic vehicles and locations. It’ll have you participating in campaigns in both the European and Pacific Theaters. If you can stop firing long enough to look around, you’ll see birds in the sky and fish in the water. And you can run over absolutely anything that gets in your way. It’s an action-packed, detailed game with incredible graphics.

And honestly, I thought it was kind of boring and clunky.

In my review of The Room a few months ago, I said it was the best mobile game I’ve ever played, and I meant it. The Room 2, the iPad-only sequel to the puzzle-box escape title, is out now, and it’s more of the same.

And I have absolutely no problem with that.

It’s really good. It’s really, really good. If you played the first one, you should play this one immediately. And if you didn’t play the first one, you should play it, and then you should play this one, and then you’ll be all set.

So, yes. You could say I am a fan.

Assassin’s Creed IV launched on consoles this fall and offered all the ship-on-ship action gamers required. Developer Ubisoft, not one to let a good idea go un-reused, has now released Assassin’s Creed Pirates, a sidestory about one man’s rise from prisoner to fearsome buccaneer captain. It ditches the main series’ free-running in favor of a completely seaborne experience.

Does Pirates rake in the booty, or does it walk the plank to plunge the briny deep to Davy Jones’ Locker? Could that last sentence have been any more forced?

You’ll find the answers to these questions and more after the break.

Browsing the App Store can be a bit overwhelming. Which apps are new? Which ones are good? Are the paid ones worth paying for, or do they have a free, lite version that will work well enough?

Well, if you stop interrogating me for a second, hypothetical App Store shopper, I can tell you about this thing we do here.

Every week, we highlight some of the most interesting new apps and collect them here for your consideration. This time, our picks include one that’ll help you mix paint, another that will help you keep tabs on your Twitter numbers, and something for the little monsters.

Here you go:

Roman Ruins HD — Reference — $4.99 (special launch price; reg. $9.99)

If you’re a fan of ancient Rome — and who isn’t? — but can’t justify the expense to actually go and look at its old buildings, you might want to have a look at Roman Ruins HD. It’s a new iPad app that collects a wealth of high-definition pictures, virtual tours, and/or 3D overhead shots of over 350 sites. You can read all about the places, and some locations also use the app’s cool Google Street View integration to let you pretend you’re walking through them. But you’ll have to provide your own bored, screaming children, tired feet and sunburn for the full experience.

Roman Ruins HD

True Color — Entertainment — $1.99

True Color is one of those apps that definitely has a practical application but is also just fun to mess around with. Its purpose is to create “formulas” for different hues so that artists can properly mix paints to match and you can easily take samples from your photos. You can also just mess around with the four component colors — red, yellow, blue, and white — to get the tone right before you go wasting all your acrylic on experimenting.

But it’s also good for curiosity. The picture over there, for example, is the exact color of Jake from Adventure Time. Did you know he was 24 percent red? Because I didn’t.

True Color

Followers on Twitter — Social Networking — $0.99 (Pro version)

Alright, maybe it only does that for me, but what Followers on Twitter definitely does is give you a quick look at your follower numbers. In addition to what Twitter will tell you, it also lets you know when people take you off of their feeds, how many users aren’t following you back, and how many you’re snubbing. You can also easily delete multiple tweets at once, and I know a guy who could probably make good use of that feature after some unfortunate late-night drunken tirades.

Oh, you don’t know him. He lives in Canada.

Followers on Twitter

Relaxia — Health & Fitness — Free ($3.99 unlock)

The App Store is full of things that play white noise or some ocean sounds to punch your ticket for the Sleepy Train to Snoozeville, but I haven’t seen one as good-looking and versatile as Relaxia. It has six noise “themes” with about eight sounds in each; you can play multiple files at once and adjust their volumes to make your own custom mix of sleep fuel, and you can set a timer so it’s not still playing in the morning.

Because it would really be awful if you woke up, thought it was raining and then it wasn’t.

Relaxia

Artpop — Music — Free

Are you a creative, psychic Lady Gaga fan with an interest in intergalactic travel? If not, does any of that at least sound like something you’d like to see? Hey, Artpop.

It’s a slick, shiny app that ties in with Gaga’s latest album, which is also called Artpop. It’s also a social-media platform, a music player, an art creation and sharing app, and a chatroom. You create your “Aura” (read: avatar), and then you can make projects using a combination of preloaded shapes and patterns and your own pictures and share them with all the other little monsters on the app.

Plus, it’ll tell you if Lady Gaga actually looks at your creation, so it’s kind of the ultimate super-fan experience.

Artpop

I’ve always loved the Lego suite of licensed games more than most people do. They’ve always been the perfect storm for me: a unique combination of geekiness, humor, and obsessive collection and completion. Every time I pick one up, I don’t stop playing it until I’ve unlocked every character, found every collectible, and beat every secret level.

Needless to say, I am a fan.

The iOS version of developer Traveler’s Tales sweded version of the Lord of the Rings film trilogy is out now; the epic 1.3-gig game contains Lego recaps of all three Lord of the Rings films, over 90 characters, and all the soon-to-be-dead orcs, goblins, and Uruk-Hai you can tap. And while the game is every bit as cute and collectastic as the other ones I’ve played, its easily confused controls bog it down a little.

That’s not to say that it’s unplayable, but you’ll have to muster all of your fandom and patience to really enjoy it.

It’s been a little while since I reviewed a fantasy game with a branching plot, so I picked up Sorcery! 2, a new title from developer Inkle Studios and designer Steve Jackson, co-founder of Lionhead Studios (maker of the Fable series of role-playing games for Xbox and Xbox 360 consoles) and writer of the gamebooks on which this franchise is based. Not the Steve Jackson who created the GURPS tabletop RPG platform, but that’s an amazing coincidence.

Sorcery! 2 is the second (duh) in what will be a four-part adventure series, and it’s equal parts visual novel, RPG, and gamebook. And it all takes place in a beautiful, hand-drawn world with multiple paths and interesting old men to talk to. I mean, I don’t think you only talk to old men, but I spent about an hour with the game, and I did talk to some old men of varying crotchetiness. And a restauranteur who may or may not have been a star-spawn of Cthulhu.

Why haven’t you downloaded this yet?

You can join Frodo, Gandalf, Legolas, and (of course) Boromir as they get the Lego treatment from TT Games, the developer of a ton of other Lego-fied video games, including Lego Harry Potter, Lego Star Wars and Lego Indiana Jones.

Warner Bros. and TT Games announced Thursday the release of Lego The Lord of the Rings to iOS. In the game, the Fellowship travels to Mount Doom to destroy The One Ring and save the land from utter Lego-style destruction. You’ll get to unlock more than 90 different LoTR characters by exploring Middle-earth, solving puzzles, and battling with the bad guys from Lego Sauron.

Roman Ruins HD — Reference — $4.99 (special launch price; reg. $9.99)

If you’re a fan of ancient Rome — and who isn’t? — but can’t justify the expense to actually go and look at its old buildings, you might want to have a look at Roman Ruins HD. It’s a new iPad app that collects a wealth of high-definition pictures, virtual tours, and/or 3D overhead shots of over 350 sites. You can read all about the places, and some locations also use the app’s cool Google Street View integration to let you pretend you’re walking through them. But you’ll have to provide your own bored, screaming children, tired feet, and sunburn for the full experience.

Roman Ruins HD

There’s nothing I like better than a game that charms from the get-go, and delightfully indie Towncraft is one of those games.

Developer Flat Earth Games has created a gentle yet deep crafting game that plays as equal parts Sim City and Minecraft, with hundreds of crafting recipes, super cute music, and adorable artwork.

What’s not to like?

Hidden object games don’t usually catch my fancy, to be honest. I’ve never been a big fan of the mechanics, which typically require you to find objects to then reveal other objects, which can then be combined to become actual useful objects. I’ve also never been too taken by the typical romanticized story lines, either.

Big Fish’s new game, developed by India-based IronCode Games, Pahelika Secret Legends has found a way to convince me otherwise,t hough, and I find myself being drawn back to playing it often. There’s a fairly interesting story, and the puzzles are tough enough to provide a challenge without busting a brain.

If you’re like me and have been ambivalent about trying a game like this out, perhaps this is the one to start with.

Dyslexia is a disability that likely affects 70 – 80 percent of people with poor reading skills, with one in five students having a language-based disability that could include dyslexia.

Many folks with dyslexia have trouble differentiating between different letters of the alphabet, many of which–especially in digital text form–look very similar. Many of the letters in our alphabet, like ‘i’ and ‘j’, or ‘n’ and ‘u’ can be mistaken for each other, especially if someone has a visual processing difference and reverses or rotates the letters when reading.

There’s a new font that aims to help, and a great eBook reader, vBookz PDF Voice Reader, has recently inclded that as a font choice in its iOS app.

EveryThink, an amazing get-it-all-done-and-in-one-place app, has just updated to version 1.3.1, bringing a host of improvements to an already pretty great app.

The new update adds Dropbox to the already existing Google Drive support, meeting invitations from within the app itself, Siri Reminder integration, and Facebook support, which brings contact photos and Facebook calendar events in automatically.

New usability features have also been added, including a guided introduction to the many features of the EveryThink app, as well as landscape orientation, so you can hold your iPhone the way you want to and still use the spatial organization central to the app’s interface.

Mint.com, the slick and extremely useful financial tracking website, also has iOS and OS X apps to natively keep an eye on your finances. The Mac app came out in early July of this year, and was updated to version 2.0 at the end of August. Today, however, it has gone from being a free app to asking for a cool $4.99.

If you haven’t had the chance to play Basion on the Xbox or your Mac, yet – heck, even if you have – you owe it to yourself to pick this game up for your iPad.

Bastion is available on Mac or the Xbox gaming console for around $15. The iPad version was released today at a fantastic $4.99, making this the best gaming deal you can get for a brand new out-of-the-gate game.