The free iPhone game Trawler Report: Bombalaa, Super Blast, 100 Rogues

Welcome to the Trawler Report, where we dredge the App Store seas in an attempt to pick out the best of those delicious free games. The only discards come in the form of our weekly Crap App pick, so no need to get Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall on us.

2011’s free game offerings are looking to be as tempting as 2010’s, judging from the first two Trawler Reports of the year. This week we have a puzzle-adventure hybrid, a quirky brain-trainer, a polished blaster, and a lighthearted dungeon-crawler.

Just about everyone should find something to enjoy here. And to hate, too, thanks to this week’s laughably out of touch Crap App.

Enjoy your freebies, and have a good weekend!

Super Yum Yum: Puzzle Adventures
By Associated Northcliffe Digital
Type Full

While we didn’t go much on Super Yum Yum: Puzzle Adventures when it hit DSiWare a little under a year ago, it feels much more at home on iPhone. Especially when it’s free.

The idea is to get Leon the chameleon to each level exit, feasting on fruit along the way. You can only eat fruit that’s the same colour as you, but you change to the fruit’s secondary colour when you do.

As you can imagine, this leads to a fiendish colour-linking puzzles played out in the style of a simplistic adventure game. Like I said – not bad for free, and it wins bonus points for featuring the line, “Me go fruity poopy now.”

Get Super Yum Yum: Puzzle Adventures here

Bombalaa
By MOTIX
Type Full

Mixing brain-training elements with a zany mini-game structure, Bombalaa plays like a game of Simon Says if Simon was a primary school teacher on some kind of mind-altering substance. But not as irresponsible, obviously.

You have to solve a set of number, colour, shape and direction-related riddles. None is particularly difficult in and of itself, but the added time pressure – along with random twists like all of the numbers being turned upside down – keeps you on your toes.

It’s all rendered in a colourful doodle style (sorry Lima Sky – I meant a colourful sketch-book style) that complements the scattershot edu-tainment vibe perfectly.

Get Bombalaa here

Super Blast
By Phantoom Entertainment
Type Full

A simplistic high score-chasing blaster, Super Blast succeeds largely through its sharp graphics and frenetic action.

You play a helmeted auto-laser-firing… thing, with which you must blast a bunch of nobbly ‘Creeps’ by tilting your handset left and right. Power-ups drop. Things explode. High-scores tumble.

It’s not big and it’s not clever, but Super Blast is just the sort of slick, cathartic action game that makes those post-work/school commutes bearable.

Get Super Blast here

Pick of the week

100 Rogues
By Dinofarm Games
Type Full

100 Rogues grabs the stuffy old dungeon-crawling RPG by the scruff of the neck and forces it to loosen up a little. It even has (whisper it) a sense of humour.

Your trek through a load of randomly-generating dungeons is made as fun and accessible as possible, without sacrificing any of the depth that comes from such titles. As such, there’s a considerable emphasis on character development and fighting clever.

Despite such hardcore elements, 100 Rogues works so well as an iPhone game because the goal is the same as any Doodle Jump/Canabalt wannabe – to get as far as you can before dying and posting your score online.

Get 100 Rogues here Crap apps

Dancing Elf
By Unknown.com
Type Full

This week’s Crap App is a cautionary tale about the value of punctuality and, y’know, knowing where you are in time and space. For while making an execrable iPhone application is one thing, making one that completely misses the slim time frame in which it might actually be considered relevant is quite another.

“It’s Christmastime, and you know what that means…” reads the blurb for Dancing Elf, which was released today. Yes. It means the developer might well have been hit around the head on Christmas eve, and only just woke up from a three-week coma.

That would also explain the sheer awfulness of the app, which sees a cartoony elf jerk awkwardly between two positions when you press the appropriate button, accompanied by a bizarre and awful metallic clanking sound.

Expect a Dancing Easter Bunny follow-up some time in June.