#6 - Pocket God

Game: Pocket God

Price: £0.59 / $0.99 | App Store |
Genre: Simulation, Adventure
Developer: Bolt Creative Inc.
Rating: 9+

Design: 9/10
Sound: 8/10
Gameplay: 9/10
Overall: 9/10

Their Future Is In Your Hands!
Welcome to the island. Situated in the middle of, er well... nowhere really, and inhabited by a small tribe of people called Pygmies, you play the role of their God and have complete control over their everyday life, or should I say death? What will happen to the Pygmies and their picturesque island today? That's for you to decide and implement *insert evil laugh here*.

Design
The game looks amazing and is crammed full of vibrant colours, exciting locations and fun features. There are loads of ways for you to impact on the Pygmies lives including volcano eruptions, tidal waves, lightning storms, giant spiders, deadly ants and angry dinosaurs! Discovering new methods is all part of the adventure. There are numerous island locations to interact with including the sacrificial mountain, haunted woods and snowy retreat as well as a number of fun minigames that could easily be stand alone app games themselves. To date, there have been a staggering 35 updates to the game, each adding a new feature, minigame or location. Game design does not get much better than this.

Sound
The soundtrack to the game is left wanting a little, but it's pleasant enough and adds to the fun nature of the game. It is easily made up with a large selection of great SFX and character mutterings though. The SFX are not only triggered by your actions, EG erupting a volcano, but also automatically as the Pygmies go about their day on the island. It all adds to the fun atmosphere and allows you to truly lose yourself in the game.

Gameplay
There is a huge amount of things that you can do in Pocket God. There must be upwards of 40 different ways that you can destroy the Pygmies with at least another 20 ways that you can interact with them and yet more ways that you can interact with their surroundings. That's added to by a number of minigames that can be accessed through your interactions EG the cloud jumping game is triggered by dragging a Pygmie up into the sky and dropping them on a cloud. There are no scores per say but everything you do can be linked with Openfeint to unlock achievements and share progress with friends. You can also customise your experience by tagging the Pygmies with names or downloading new themes. The developers add content at a ridiculously high rate ensuring fresh content more than once a month on average. I doubt there's a game that's updated more often, making the £0.59 price tag an absolute steal.

Conclusion
Pocket God is by far one of the greatest games to ever be released on the iPhone and at £0.59 is one of the best purchases that you can make. There are hours and hours of entertainment in this game and with regular updates you are sure to need a space for this app on the front page of your phone as you'll be revisiting it very regularly. Additional content is released often and though it started out very light on its feet back in the day, it has now become a vast game packed full of features. Give it a go now, you won't regret it!