This is what touchscreen gaming is all about. Cut the Rope is everything we love about the iPad – fantastic graphics, incredible personality, and touchscreen controls that genuinely make you feel part of the game.

Cutting ropes with a slice of a finger, popping balloons with a tap, and in later levels, dragging elements around with wheels and latches somehow never feels old.

Every level has the same basic objective – to feed the candy to a monster (the adorable Om Nom) while also collecting three stars – but the amount of imagination put into the obstacles, together with constant drip-feed of new stuff, stops it becoming dull.

The only slight problem is that the level of precision required can occasionally confuse the game, typically resulting in you popping a bubble rather than cutting the rope that's holding it down. The short levels stop this getting too frustrating, though – even in a worst-case scenario, you only have to replay 10 seconds worth of a level.

Cut the Rope sits in the perfect middle ground of action and strategy, with some levels acting as puzzles, others speed-reaction challenges, and most sitting somewhere in the middle, where pulling off a three-star victory requires wits, skill and sometimes a little luck, too.

If not for the fact that we've now finished all of Cut the Rope's levels, most of them to three-star level, we'd still be playing it now. It easily beats Angry Birds, Air Control and every other game we've played on the iPad so far. All we need now are some more levels to get our teeth into…

As is often the case with Gameloft's releases, Modern Combat 2: Black Pegasus HD is somewhat reminiscent of an existing console title with a similar name. But you won't hear us complaining, because this is the best first-person shooter available on the App Store.

Players expecting an experience on the same level as Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 will be disappointed. Clearly a game that fits into 450MB will come up short somewhere, but although shortcuts have, necessarily, been taken, it's amazing just how complete an experience Black Pegasus delivers.

Criticisms are few, but it would be remiss not to point out the occasionally poor enemy AI, the uninspiring scripting and the patchy difficulty.

Otherwise, MC2 is a superb achievement. Taking place across three major campaigns and in a wealth of exotic locations (desert towns, jungles, snowy wastes and an oil rig, among others) players get to control several different characters in a number of roles.

There are solo missions where it's just you versus the bad guys, but some challenges have your buddies providing backup.

It's thrilling stuff, made more exciting by some well-designed environments, responsive controls and an extremely accessible online multiplayer system.

Championship Manager 2011 boasts all the football leagues of England, Scotland, Spain, France and Italy, although for licensing reasons, not everything looks as it should in the English Premier League.

While the game is easy to pick up thanks to a well-designed interface, there's a lot of management to be done if you dig deep enough.

On a basic level you'll need to read email alerts, accept or decline bids for your players, decide on your squad and choose formations for the matches themselves. And it's perfectly possible to breeze through a season doing just this – you won't get promoted, but you can enjoy a casual experience.

To really enjoy the game, you have to get a little more involved. Consult your coach and decide on training regimes, rest injured players, have one-to-ones with individual players, select tactics – you can even emulate the playing style of a classic European team from the past.

Press conferences are also great fun, as you choose which journalist to speak to and attempt to answer questions in ways that will please them and the fanbase.

Matches are played out on a top-down representation of the pitch, with stats rising and falling followed by animated highlights featuring little dots for players. It's functional, but we need a little more atmosphere frankly.

Oddly, there's no sound in any part of the game whatsoever. Still, this is the best of its type on the iPhone.

Crystal Defenders is a straightforward tower defence game not unlike a million other tower defence games on the internet and on mobile devices right across the planet. The difference here, of course is that it takes place in the Final Fantasy universe and you're defending crystals rather than towers.

There are three levels of difficulty but in each the aim is the same: to stop hordes of enemies getting from one side of each single-screen map to the other. You do this by placing military units alongside the pathways of the level so that they attack the enemies as they pass by.

Some units, archers for example, can attack enemies from a distance whereas warriors have to leap into an enemy's path and get stuck in. Magical characters can launch devastating attacks, but take a while to recover so need to be used carefully.

Also, some enemies are resistant to magical attacks so you'll need to level up the regular units to compensate. The further you get, the more complex the strategic options.

Final Fantasy fans will love the familiarity of the multitude of characters and creatures that inhabit the game. What they won't be so keen on is the fact that it's prone to frequent crashes and graphically looks little better than the iPhone iteration of the game.

Instability and lacklustre looks are two faults that we're not used to levelling at Square Enix games.

One last word of warning: as you progress the game becomes relentlessly tough and you will always, always fail at some point.

But if you're into open-ended, points-based challenges, this is a pretty good tower defence game… just not a particularly good Final Fantasy release.

After their World Cup victory, now is a particularly great time to be a Spanish football fan. But things are looking brighter for footy fanatics everywhere thanks to the debut of Konami's beautiful Pro Evolution Soccer franchise on the iPhone platform.

Always the preferred choice among critics in its console incarnations, PES on the iPhone also delivers a slightly superior game to EA's rival FIFA franchise – but only just.

As well as the flowing passing and shooting gameplay you'd expect from a PES game, this version is also notable for the implementation of the control systems. A directional pad and simplified single tap for passing and shooting is the preferred option, but even the accelerometer control works remarkably well.

Chuck in UEFA tournaments, league games, quick matches and proper player names and you have a pretty pleasing footy experience.

It lacks the finesse of its console counterparts but as a pick-upand- play footy fix, it's unbeatable.

Alchemy's a fickle thing. Adding stuff together to make other stuff is generally a doddle.

A bit of oxygen here, a dash of hydrogen there… water. Chuck some copper and zinc together and you have brass. Combine cocoa, flour, butter, eggs and sugar, and a chocolate brownie appears. Turning base metals into gold, though? Not so simple.

Despite all the pseudomystical, alchemical goings-on in the game's back-story, This is, at heart, a physics puzzler, which features the manipulation of solids, liquids and gases.

The idea is to funnel the elements to their relevant receptacles, transforming them into various states, according to their properties. For example, you might start with a green liquid, so you use wood to create a platform that guides it along.

Next you use an evaporating device to turn it into a gas, then a condenser collects the gas, turns it back into a liquid and deposits it at the collection point.

However, things get complicated when more than one type of matter is introduced and the tools at your disposal get more complex too.

It's clever stuff and what seems like a rather repetitive activity during the first few levels soon evolves into a highly rewarding puzzle-solving experience.

We Farm is a casual game, the point of which is to dip in and out, tinkering about with it and showing off all your achievements with other farm owners online.

You start with a patch of land that's bare save for a ramshackle house, and from there it's up to you to use the available tools to build up a thriving business.

Lay down a couple of plots and start growing corn, once it has grown you harvest it, sell it and use the money to buy more gardens. As you make more money and level up, you can unlock additional items or build coops to raise birds, pens for raising livestock, milking sheds, barns and more.

In fact, building and upgrading is the real payoff of success as you can improve your farm and its surroundings to an impressive degree, ending up with a massive agricultural operation.

Online integration

And that's where the online stuff comes in. You can invite friends to join you in the fun. There are a couple of problems though.

The social aspects aren't as interactive as they could be, communication being limited to just comparing stuff. Even the shared activities are never entered into – a couple of mini-games would have been nice.

Also, if you want more units of Gro to speed up your progress, you have to buy it with real money and it costs a fortune. And finally, there's a bit too much tending to be done, especially when planting and harvesting faster growing crops.

It's not a game you can leave alone for several hours without loads of stuff dying and your farming ending up in a right old state, which runs counter to the casual premise of the whole thing. Even so, We Farm is irritatingly moreish.

Your farm looks great, it can be endlessly tweaked and messed about with, socialising – while limited – is undeniably enjoyable and, of course, it's free to play.

You'd be daft not to try We Farm, just don't expect too much from it.

Osmos is a new entry in the small but growing genre of organism games. Like the early stages of Spore and the Mac game Tasty Planet, the idea here is to move your organism (or mote) around the play area absorbing other motes in order to grow.

You can absorb only motes smaller than yourself; touch one larger than you and it'll absorb you. Game over.

In order to move you have to fire off little bits of your mote to achieve opposite thrust. In doing so you have to deal with momentum and be careful not to overuse this means of propulsion or your mote will end up very small again and vulnerable to attack.

You'll encounter motes of varying types, some of which repel you, others having a gravitational effect – all of which radically change the challenge and the approach required to ensure victory in mote world.

Osmos is fascinating and frustrating in just the right measures, and with its cool visuals and ambient soundtrack, it's an experience not to be missed.

So it's just another typical day in suburbia – the sun is shining, your neatly mowed lawn is a resplendent shade of green, and hordes of zombies are about to invade your home. Wait, run that last bit by us again?

This is, in fact, a typical day in suburbia as put through the slightly deranged PopCap Games filter. Therefore, instead of pruning your shrubs, you must think fast and place plants with special powers on your grid-like lawn (and, later, roof) to combat the undead.

Plants vs Zombies is a new twist on the classic tower-defence genre. Essentially, the zombies attack (slowly) and you have to stop them by laying plants in their path.

Before you can plant anything though, you need energy. You get this from suns that descend from the sky or are generated by the handy sunflowers you plant. The more energy you have, the more deadly varieties of plants you can grow.

The little horrors can fire seeds or present traps to foil the lumbering zombies, who swarm in ever-increasing waves towards you. As levels progress, new and interesting plants and zombies are added to the mix, as well as more challenging environments.

As you might have gathered by now, this game doesn't take itself entirely seriously – zombies send you hand-scrawled notes and come in many varieties, one of which happens to moonwalk while a spotlight shines on him.

There's no doubt the humour and stunning graphics are what draw you in, but it's the gameplay that grips you, cunningly revealing new features and occasional mini-games throughout its 50 levels.

It's testament to the quality of this towerdefence game that while we're thoroughly sick of the genre (what with the billions of examples out for iPhone), Plants vs Zombies HD has nonetheless managed to become our favourite iPad game.

You may never have heard of an odd, electronic musical instrument called a Tenori-on, but – ta-daa! – you can now get a kind of fake, unlicensed, and not-quite-as-good software version for your iPhone. (Which is just as well as a real one costs £750.)

It presents you with a grid of squares; tap them to light them up. It 'plays' in a loop, from left to right, sounding a note when the playhead hits one of the activated squares.

John Williams's job is safe for serious composition, of course – and anyway, though you can save creations within Melodica, there's no way to export them – but my, it's fun.

It's almost impossible to create a tune that doesn't hang together and sound great in a quirkily.