Hands-on with Chillingo’s winter line-up for iPhone and iPad

Chillingo continued its tradition of presenting a huge number of games at once during EA events, demonstrating a good four titles from its winter line-up and a few the company had already released (just for the hell of it, I think).

Ignoring Super Crossfire, which came out last week, and Extraction (which has its own hands-on preview), this round-up takes a look at some of the casual titles the British publisher has in store for us over the next couple of months.

Joe Danger-style games appear to be in vogue on iOS at the moment, but don’t be fooled by the title – Hank Hazard is Chillingo’s latest fiendish casual puzzler designed solely to displace its last fiendish casual puzzler.

No cutting ropes here, though. Instead, the aim is to guide a hamster with aspirations of being a stuntman through the various mazes by popping bubbles, pulling back boxing gloves on springs, and generally solving physics puzzles.

It’s cute, it has a three-star reward system, and the later levels will certainly test your noggin. What I’m trying to say is that it'll sell well.

It doesn’t have the mighty John Williams theme music (boo), but Superman does at least look the part. That is to say, it looks like the comic book: story sections and all.

There doesn’t appear to be that much of a story in this officially licensed game, however, since you (Superman) simply have to knock down punks with your super strength, burn robots with your super laser eyes, and straddle missiles with your - err -super thighs, I guess.

Each level consists of a few waves of enemies or problems (like a building on fire), and you have to dash about as quickly as possible, solving them with a contextual action button and virtual joystick.

There are three medals to earn on each stage, and, yes, you can fly up into space and beat up meteors, which looks as awesome as it sounds.

Alas, I didn’t see any Cold War nukes during my short hands-on, and you can’t fly so fast around the world that you turn back time. Shame.

We’ve had Angry Birds (or Crush the Castle, if you’re ‘one of those people’) which is viewed from the side. We’ve had Angry Birds viewed from a first-person perspective: Siege Hero.

Now, say hello to Angry Birds in isometric view - the angle favoured by Spectrum adventure games and graphic design classes across the country.

The basic aim in Picnic Wars is to help the vegetables knock down the evil (I presume) fruit’s castles via a catapult and a variety of zany characters.

Rather than pull back to fire, you merely position the catapult along the track and tap whichever weapon / vegetable you wish to use.

Skirting over the fact that the designers appear to have made the schoolboy error of putting tomatoes in with the vegetable crew, Picnic Wars didn’t really impress me much.

Its daytime cartoon graphics and incredibly easy difficulty level does suggest it's aiming for a very young crowd, however, so I'm probably not the target audience for this one.