by Popcap for Mobile, BlackBerry, iPhone
Match-3 puzzlers are the bread and butter of mobile gaming. Even if you've never played one, you can probably guess what they entail. You're given a grid full of symbols, whether they're jewels, fast food items or motherboards and CPUs, and have to switch them around to make horizontal or vertical lines of the same type of symbol. Bejeweled 2 is royalty within the genre, testament to Popcap's casual gaming nous.
As the title suggests, you're matching jewels in this game. The key to Bejeweled 2's commute-friendly nature is not only that you can play it for 40 seconds or 40 minutes, but also that its breadth of modes offers you an easy-going endless mode for when you're feeling barely conscious as well as more challenging Action and Classic modes.
Whichever mode you choose though, Bejeweled 2 remains hypnotically entrancing.
California Gold Rush by Digital Chocolate for Mobile, BlackBerry, iPhone
We all have to trudge through the commute to earn our daily crust, but California Gold Rush harks back to a simpler time when you could just grab your pickaxe and head down to the nearest gold seam whenever funds were running low. Okay, so maybe it's a simpler long-gone time that never existed, but that's not really the point.
In California Gold Rush, you play as a plucky female gold digger - one more concerned with canaries and oil lamps than wags and shopping bags. In each level you have to dig underground in search of treasure, helped along with a pocketful of explosives.
When it was released back in 2008, California Gold Rush convinced us there was life yet in mobile gaming - having already been smothered by the iPhone. It's simply one of the best mobile games ever made. Since then, it has of course been released on iPhone, re-instating the status quo. Ho hum.
Puzzle Quest by THQ Wireless for Mobile, BlackBerry, iPhone
Puzzle Quest is a dynamic evolution of the sort of gameplay seen in titles like Bejeweled 2. At its core a match-3 puzzler, Puzzle Quest takes the symbol-matching dynamics of the genre and splices it with a fully-fledged adventure game.
If you're new to gaming, jumping straight in with Puzzle Quest might be a bit of a leap, but it's sure to make your train journeys drift by in a flash.
The story is very much about beards and broadswords, with a fantasy kingdom in peril. It's all just a device to hook together the great match-3 levels, which represent battles between yourself and a wide array of fantastical nasties, but we found ourselves getting hooked into it.
