The 3 best Android games this week - Atomic+ and more

Every Friday, Pocket Gamer offers hands-on impressions of the week's three best new Android games.

Imagine a version of Plants vs Zombies, where both sides were the undead. And now imagine that instead of cartoon corpses, it's Civil War soldiers and clunky steam-powered automatons.

Congrats, you are now picturing Ironclad Tactics: the cute new strategy game from SpaceChem inventor Zachary Barth.

The game uses a deck of cards for your moves, and those let you deploy more units and also tell robots and soldiers to sidestep into other lanes for tactical manoeuvres or to dodge mortar fire.

These feisty battles are sandwiched by cute a graphic novel-style story about steampunk inventors and the outbreak of the war. And you're never charged for cards or booster packs: there's just a one-off £2.46 / $3.99 IAP after the demo ends.

Hellraid: The Escape
By Shortbreak Studios - buy on iPad (£1.99 / $2.99)

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Hellraid: The Escape is ostensibly an advert for an upcoming PS4 and Xbox One game. It's actually a top notch game in its own right, though, with hints of The Room but with its own puzzles and ideas.

Your job is to escape a series of crypts and catacombs by solving puzzles. That might involve lobbing rocks at levers, finding hidden messages, or even leaving your body and possessing a monster.

I'm not entirely sure why there's a piano or a chess set in a dank underground torture chamber, but we don't play video games for logic. We play them because they massage our brain in a jolly nice way. And that's why you should get Hellraid.

Atomic+
By Ahmed Khalifa - buy on iPad (£1.49 / $1.99)

Atomic+ is a cocktail mix of a handful of twitchy arcade romps. It's got the fiendish box-nabbing of Super Crate Box, the dodging and weaving of a bullet hell game, and the minimalist style of Super Hexagon.

The goal is to expand and contract your orbit around a white planet to avoid danger and run into boxes. But every time you grab a box your direction changes.

It's manic and tense, making for - as Harry said of the iOS edition - "a great twitchy arcade blast, which strikes the perfect balance between accessibility and challenge".