That, to us, is Zen Pinball’s great attraction; it doesn’t feel quite as right as Real Pinball HD – Vampire, and its visuals aren’t as sharp, but it has some lovely special effects up its sleeve that it shows off fully in Sorcerer’s Lair, its free table. It features ghosts, spooky wormholes, bright strobing bumpers and great animated 3D characters, plus the obligatory sub-table and bonus games.

On the downside it features a lot of really bad – we’re talking Saturday-morning cartoon quality – voice acting, but you can’t have everything. And if you cough up for one of the paid Marvel tables, you’ll discover much more polished affairs.

Download this app: Zen Pinball for iPad

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Review courtesy of Tap!

Timing your shots properly, however, results in a chain reaction that makes aliens rue the day they instated the buddy system as official policy. And yet, all the while, their attack patterns and numbers increase. Some hop. Some run. Some pretend your face is a turtle from Mario. After about a minute, it’s sheer chaos.

Death – and the eardrum-bursting scream that accompanies it – is inevitable. In essence, it’s the emotional arc other action games load with golden guns that fire kitchen sinks, but distilled into a couple of utterly sublime minutes. And it all feels amazing. We don’t leave home without Ziggurat, and we doubt it will ever leave our home screen.

Download this app: Ziggurat for iPad

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Occasional ‘spot the picture fragment’ diversions and lovely graphics rounded out a gaming treat. This sequel is essentially more of the same, but it falls flat. The graphics are pretty, but the game itself feels like a regression, in part due to seemingly claustrophobic boards but mostly because of irritating devices, such as one that demands you constantly chain next to wandering bugs, lest they climb the board and end your go.

A recent update stopped the board shuffling every couple of matches in later levels, but this sequel nonetheless disappoints.

Download this app: Azkend 2 for iPad

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The content itself is superb, even if you watched the BBC series Wonders of the Solar System and Wonders of the Universe from which much of the material is drawn; Cox presents and writes in an accessible and empowering way. Sure, some of the concepts are hard to grasp – and we mean for professional scientists, not just armchair dabblers like us – and the fixed, finite nature of the book compared to, say, Wikipedia, means that developments at the cutting edge of science at facilities such as the LHC won’t inform its conclusions about the nature of matter. You can’t, however, fail to engage with Cox’s draw-some-concentric-lines-with-a-stick-in-some-dirt-to-explain-elliptical-orbits brand of presentation, and his almost schoolboy enthusiasm is utterly infectious.

We’re a little less gushing in our admiration for the Glide Publishing engine that has been used to present the book. Essentially, every section is presented as one long text box, interspersed with in-line photos and movies that you scroll with your finger. The text is clear and usually easy to read, but it’s the way that you view the pictures and movies that rankles a bit. As you’re scrolling the text, thumbnails for images, slideshows and movies that come near the middle of the screen automatically expand to cover the whole screen; in the case of movies, they start playing too. The first couple of times you see this, you’re impressed. It seems fluid, fitting and like a natural and inevitable interaction method for books on an iPad.

The infatuation doesn’t last, however. In order to suppress this move to full screen – which, after all, can disrupt the flow of your reading – you either have to carefully position the thumbnail above or below the centre of the screen, or keep your finger on the screen as you scroll past it. True, none of the sections are especially long, so you’re perhaps not going to be settling in for a long, lean-back reading session, but it nevertheless began to irritate us that we had to devote a bit of our subconscious just to stop the damn thing jumping around as you’re trying to read it.

It also suffers a tiny bit by the content not having been created explicitly with this app. Someone’s worked hard to take two major BBC series and a book and smoosh them together into a coherent whole, but you can see the joins sometimes. What’s more, the app description and marketing materials might make you expect lots of 3D models and interactive graphics; in truth, the 3D is limited to what is essentially the contents page, and the flat, non-interactive illustrations and diagrams – which looked so generous and lush in the printed book – feel mean and a little silly crushed into here.

But take a step back, and remember that you don’t buy an app like this for the app itself, just like you don’t buy a book to collect a few hundred sheets of paper. The content’s the thing, and the knowledge in here is almost priceless. Happily, it’s yours for a fiver (assuming yours isn’t an original iPad; it won’t work on that), a steal when the books and Blu-rays for the two series cost something like ten times that.

Download this app: Brian Cox’s Wonders of the Universe for iPad

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Review courtesy of Tap!

In reality, it’s a series of battles with role-playing overtones. You accumulate a band of assorted characters of different classes – soldiers, rogues, sages and mages – and pick groups of three to fight each battle against great-looking cartoon bad guys and monsters. The basic combat’s easy to grasp: tap one of your characters, tap an enemy to attack and, optionally, tap your other characters to provide support, while defence is a matter of tapping your characters in order to try and block enemy attacks. Each class has an edge on another class, so you plan your assaults that way, and you need to watch not only your characters’ health but also their energy, which is drained by blocking or providing support.

As you progress you can upgrade your characters, earn special abilities to use on the battlefield and buy new weapons and kit – either with gold won in battle or by buying some through IAP. It’s not essential, but the option’s there. And as for the actual adventure bit, it’s adequate but lightweight – and isn’t helped by the game having been haphazardly translated into English from Italian. You can read great chunks of helpful instruction or exposition and then find they’ve fallen out of your brain 30 seconds later because they didn’t quite make sense. My mother!

Download this app: Battlefoot Adventure for iPhone

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The 500px app is just for viewing, commenting on and sharing photos – you can’t upload to your 500px account, even though one is required to access the app. But that’s no bad thing, as the standard of photography is superb. Use it to get inspiration for your own photography, or just as a configurable photo frame as your iPad charges; photos look especially stunning on the new iPad.

You can’t save photos from the app to use as, say, desktop wallpapers, which is understandable in intellectual property terms though disappointing – and a bit silly when you can tap to view the photo in Safari and download from there.

Browsing is simple and logical, and the experience is generally very polished; sharing photos by Twitter, however, always failed in our testing.

Download this app: 500px for iPad

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Review courtesy of Tap!

However, rather than a dreary path of 3D icons, you get tappable dots moving along circular paths while a pulse beats outwards, collisions signifying the right moment to hit the screen.

Successful tappage causes an explosion of colour from under your digits; failure results in a discordant sound that may as well be a sample yelling œyou’re rubbish, you unrhythmic fool.

This is frequent in later levels, which introduce chords (multi-finger taps) and off-beats. But Pulse is short and lacks Game Center support, despite being a high-score game.

Download this app: Pulse: Volume One

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Moving further into the app, it becomes apparent that Savage Interactive is keen to maximise the iPad’s abilities. It’s taken the ‘let’s innovate’ approach into Procreate’s core feature – its brushes. At first, we felt disappointed with only eight, admittedly practical, brushes to choose from, until we tapped further into the editing options. You can modify the way each brush behaves, changing parameters such as Shape, Grain and Speed. What this all adds up to is an adaptable brush set that can create various marks and textures, and with a few tweaks and a bit of practice you can almost overcome the lack of pressure sensitivity on the iPad by linking properties such as reduced opacity and line weight to the speed of your finger gesture.

Procreate’s powerful brush features don’t stop there. From the Brush editing pane you can also import images from your Photo gallery to create customised brushes, defining both the shape and texture of a new brush based on the tonal properties of your selected photos. This takes Procreate into a deeper level of digital painting: brushes can become stencils and texturisers, and you can create a brush that imitates the appearance of a certain traditional media, or something that’s totally abstract. If you’re not familiar with customisable software brushes, we go into more detail in the tip section below. It adds another dimension of fun to creating digital art and is a unique aspect to emerge from painting with pixels.rnrnThis versatile brush set can also be used with Procreate’s Smudge tool, which perfectly complements the Brush tool when painting in software. Used subtly, smudging can help you merge hues and brush marks together, and switching between both will help you build up a smooth and blended finish. Procreate handles the rendering of brush marks and blending very well, with no noticeable lag, and merges colours neatly. While we’re on the subject of colour, the Color pane is also an extension of Savage Interactive’s ‘no fuss’ approach, with a single colour-picker window showing the values of your selected hue, accompanied by three simple sliders to edit hue, saturation and brightness. Once you’ve applied colour to your painting, you can sample from local hues simply by holding your finger over them. Very intuitive.

This release is not without its flaws, though. After the clever move of adding sliders to the interface, why not include one for colour editing? Having one more slider for artists to toggle between hue, saturation and brightness would help maintain momentum, and there’s room within the interface to include one. Also, layers are limited to Opacity only, but again this is where we can’t help but admire Savage Interactive for listening to community feedback – version 1.5 promises to include familiar layer options such as Multiply and Screen, helping to expand on established digital painting techniques. The canvas size is limited too, but the update will include an HD resolution 1920×1408 pixel canvas.

So far it’s impressive stuff from Procreate – its dependable performance and editable nature mean we’ll keep an eye on it as it continues to evolve.

Download this app: Procreate for iPad

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Review courtesy of Tap!

The Prince, having released the Sands of Time from an oversized egg timer, is now being pursued by a beast called the Dahaka. On consulting an expert, the Prince finds that anyone who releases the Sands of Time must die, so the Dahaka must restore the cosmic balance by killing him.
And it looks great. Despite being a port of a six-year-old game, the rich grandeur of the exaggerated Persian architecture looks particularly dramatic on the iPad’s superb screen. Within this environment, you play out a balanced mix of platforming and combat.

The Prince can run, jump, roll, run along walls, climb, clamber and swing his way across almost any obstacle, stringing together moves in spectacular fashion. The same is true of his combat skills. Wielding blades, the Prince can hack, slash and lunge through enemies as well as string complex combos together.

The only downfall is the controls. Acrobatic movements can be tricky to pull off because it’s hard to ‘feel’ the virtual stick. But even with this problem, it’s another great iPad game.

Download this app: Prince of Persia: Warrior Within HD for iPad

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Review courtesy of Tap!

The basics are fine: your lone ship sits within neon geometric shapes, and aliens menacingly advance from the points. Hold and move your finger to rotate your ship and fire, a system that in particular works nicely on the iPad.

But when you’re 20 levels in and haven’t been challenged, you’ll wonder what’s going on. By the time the screen starts spinning back and forth and the rate at which enemies approach quickens, it’s a bit too late.

Download this app: Quantasm

Best iPad apps | Apple new iPad 3 review

Review courtesy of Tap!

Where Apple offers separate apps to create text documents, spreadsheets and presentations, Quickoffice bundles the three together. If you need to use two or more Apple apps, you’ll make a tidy saving by going for this instead. Further, while the latest versions of Apple’s own office tools can export in Microsoft formats, they still default to their own native file types, so if you’re using iCloud to synchronise documents with a Mac for which don’t own the equivalent OS X apps, you’ll have to convert them first. Quickoffice uses industry standard formats from the off, so there’s no extra step to go through when sharing your documents.

It’s up to you where you store your work. When you have no net connection you’ll naturally work locally, but if you have a 3G-enabled iPad or a Wi-Fi connection then you can work directly from a remote server. At the time of writing, the options were Google Docs, Dropbox, box.net, MobileMe, Huddle, SugarSync, Evernote and Catch. Apple has announced that it will be discontinuing the MobileMe iDisk service so we would expect to see this option disappear in an update, but that leaves us with six diverse alternatives offering a range of benefits. Business workers with Google Apps accounts can work directly on documents shared with other team members, while Dropbox subscribers with the desktop client installed on their Mac or PC will enjoy simple integration between their working devices, with documents created on the iPad showing up on their home machine and vice versa. Files can be organised into folders within the app itself.

The editing environment is clean and easy on the eye, with a number of smart navigation tools. Run your thumb down the right-hand edge of a text document and its constituent pages are shown as expanding thumbnails. Work on a spreadsheet and as you switch back and forth between its various pages they’ll curl up and down like pages in iBooks. Equally neat is the way that you align cell data in the spreadsheet app: it presents you with a tic-tac-toe board about which you drag sample text to align it left, right and centred at the top, middle or bottom of the cell. Overly long entries can be wrapped, if you choose.

It’s not a complete desktop replacement, of course. The choice of fonts is limited to seven rather pedestrian options in sizes ranging from 8pt to 72pt, and while there’s a library of 18 shapes ready to be dropped into your presentations, none of the modules has the layout abilities of Numbers, Keynote or Pages. It is, however, more than up to the job of taking a project from concept, through notes to final polished product ready to be emailed or printed directly. At £13.99, it’s nothing short of a bargain – a fact that helps soften the blow of realising you’ll have to shell out an extra £6.99 if you want it on your iPhone, too.

Download this app: Quickoffice Pro HD

Best iPad apps | Apple new iPad 3 review

Review courtesy of Tap!

The problem is that the space yaks are having none of it. As Tsuyu does his dance, yaks move in, trying to butt Tsuyu into oblivion. But while Tsuyu is non-violent and refuses to repel yaks by means of, say, a massive gun, he can at least leap over them; and with cunning timing, he can have them butt each-other, providing extra raindance/tree-growing time.

Despite the game’s Unity Engine-powered visuals (which are very pretty when in motion), the game’s very old-school in feel – run/jump/rinse/repeat – and short. But it’s also quite captivating, so we considered it 69p well spent anyway.

Download this app: Rain, Sand, Stars

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Review courtesy of Tap!

On the iPad, Apple has been similarly innovative, and Numbers is actually the most successful of the three iPad apps. Everything that makes Numbers good on the Mac is here; it’s friendly, easy to use (once you find your way around the necessarily spartan interface) and tries as hard as it can to make the business of entering formulae unthreatening.

This is because the on-screen keyboard changes to reflect what task you’re doing. Enter text, and it’s a standard QWERTY keyboard; tell some cells that they’re for dates, for example, and you’ll get a special keyboard for picking dates; and when you’re entering formulae, it changes again to help you do that. And it’s possible to do some pretty sophisticated analyses with Numbers’ formulae, especially since referenced cells aren’t listed with grid references but are colour-coded and take on the correct names scraped from the column and row headers.

The genius of Numbers on the iPad, though, is its Forms. Tap the + tab at the top of the screen once you’ve created a table of information, and you have the option of creating a form (see screenshot 2) for easily entering information into that table. It turns your iPad into what feels like a big clipboard, with the added advantage that all your data is being recorded in a flexible, analysable way, and we can imagine it being tremendously useful in schools, clubs, sport associations and so on. It’s also a possible competitor to Bento if your database needs are modest.

It suffers from the same infuriating round-tripping process for sharing files with a Mac that bedevils all the iWork apps and there’s no way to email a version of your spreadsheet in Excel directly from the device; you’d have to save it on the Mac version of Numbers. At least Numbers documents seem to be more resilient in the translations when they’re being punted back and forth between the Mac and iPad.

Download this app: Numbers for iPad

Best iPad apps | Apple new iPad 3 review

Review courtesy of Tap!

It boasts an all-inclusive notation span (everything from grace notes to performance markings), but getting it all down can be time-consuming. It rolls the on-screen keyboard back to middle C after almost each entry, the selection crosshair got stuck at times, and there was no way to try out a line before committing it to the score, meaning that composing with no keyboard on hand is slow-going. NOTION is better suited to completing arrangements on the go than composing new pieces.

Instability is a big problem: Notion will crash after just a few minutes and it doesn’t always save your work! Finally, not all of the instruments are included – at least half are 69p IAPs, and having already paid £10.49, this seems a little unreasonable.

Download this app: Notion for iPad

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Review courtesy of Tap!

Noteshelf is such a good balance of polish, power and ease of use that it earns a place in our Tap! Top 10. You can create multiple notebooks, and stack and arrange them on a shelf. Each notebook has a default paper style – lined, squared, and more – but you can mix paper types in one book; yay! Better still, you can import your own templates.

The virtual ink feels natural, and you have lots of colours to choose from, as well as a tray of highlighters. You can select bits of the drawing and move them around, zoom to write smaller, and a clever method of wrist detection means you can rest it down as you write with a stylus. Finished pages can be shared in many ways.

There’s no handwriting recognition, and the option to type as well as hand-write would be nice, but even so: superb.

Download this app: Noteshelf for iPad

Best iPad apps | Apple new iPad 3 review

Review courtesy of Tap!

A case in point: Sid Meier’s Civilization. The long-running series provides fantastic, engrossing gaming, but it’s very complicated, with a huge amount of micro-management. Just a single turn might try your patience, while an entire game can require some serious investment, even if you favour the cut-down Civilization Revolution for iOS.

This is a bit of a problem if you’re wedded to trifling life matters such as eating, sleeping, working or children. In part, we suspect this is why we’re so obsessed with Strategery; you get a quick fix of world domination gameplay without any of the boring stuff. That said, now and again we hanker for something a bit more Civ and a bit less minimalist. Enter: New World Colony.

New World Colony’s hexagonal board isn’t unlike Strategery’s, but there’s a much bigger emphasis on managing and utilising resources. Tiles represent fields, forests, mountains and water; by adding them to your territory, you gain resources that you can use to conquer more territories and also to build structures that enable you to further your goals. A fifth resource, Colony Points, is acquired when you build towns, forts or strongholds, and is boosted by placing structures within regions (groups of similar territories). Colony Points serve a double purpose: in the standard game mode, get enough of them and you win the game, but they can also be used in combination with other resources to invade opposing territories. Further nuances add some extra depth, including special territories (such as orchards), trading and building wood and stone walls to protect against invasions.

A winning start
It’s to New World Colony’s credit that you don’t just end up sitting there, bewildered, while the AI opponent gives you a serious kicking time and time again. After quickly running through the tutorial and perusing the rules (which open in Safari), anyone remotely versed in strategy games should be able to give the easy AI opponent a run for its money. Once you’ve done that, the game’s settings enable you to amend its parameters, such as adding players (up to four, which can be human or chosen from three AI levels), or increasing the map size. You also get some variations on the standard game type, which help to keep things interesting. For instance, there’s the inability to invade in Pacifist, or mandatory elimination in Warlord.

Weaknesses in New World Colony are rare, but they do exist. There’s the occasional bug (hint: if the New Game button refuses to respond, force-quit the game using the iOS multitasking bar and then relaunch it), a slightly clunky (albeit still broadly usable) interface, only a single game save, and the lack of Strategery-like online turn-by-turn. You can play live through Game Center, but we never found any opponents, and New World Colony would better suit the modern equivalent of play-by-mail. The bugs and multiplayer niggles stop the game gaining our highest rating, but all the quirks vanish when you’re absorbed in figuring out how to stop your opponents wrecking your woodland region while trying to save up resources to build a fort and land-grab a mountain.

For fans of board games such as Settlers of Catan, or anyone who wants a game to hit that sweet spot between Strategery’s minimalism and Civilization’s complexity, we reckon New World Colony is £1.99 well spent – it’s deep enough to engage, but won’t take over your life with a single campaign. Even if you’re not an enthusiast of such titles, Asmussen’s creation is a friendly entry into an engaging genre, and comes highly recommended.

Download this app: New World Colony for iPad

Best iPad apps | Apple new iPad 3 review

Review courtesy of Tap!

As you progress further through Eufloria, there’s a constant flow of new things to learn and abilities to use, which are introduced at a perfect pace, meaning you’ll never feel overwhelmed. However, although you’ll be confident in how to use all of the options provided for you, whether you actually need to use them is a different matter. For example, it’s possible to only send certain kinds of Seedlings to an asteroid, here the idea being that in order to take out an enemy’s Defensive Trees, you might want to just use your most potent attackers. But we never found it necessary to do this – simply hurling all our forces at once always seemed to be the most effective way of doing things. The further you get into Eufloria, the more it starts to feel like a game of spamming – even that delicate balance of whether to plant trees or save your Seedlings feels less important, since you’ll often be taking several asteroids within the first minute of a level, or you’ll find it too difficult to get a foothold later. In addition, the actual difficulty curve can feel a bit off at times, with some levels seeming like a huge step up from the previous one, while some presented little extra challenge at all. However, this could be contributed by the fact that parts of the game are procedurally generated.

It’s to Eufloria’s credit that it still had appeal, even after overwhelming force became our tactic of choice. The art style really is beautiful, and only becomes more striking as the game goes on. It’s a smooth and mesmerising game to watch (which can lead to your downfall, if you’re not paying attention), regardless of whether you’re playing the easier ‘Relaxed’ mode, or if you go with the hardcore option. But then we discovered that waiting, as well as actually playing, became an equally important part of the game. Building up the forces for an attack means a lot of jabbing the fast-forward button, and waiting to see Seedlings build up around your asteroids. Of course, the fun part comes after the waiting, as you rampage, bursting enemy Seedlings in flowery puffs. But, for us, it meant that at certain points the game felt like too much of a time investment.

As an ambient game that still presents some difficulty, Eufloria is a great: sink into a sofa, stick a film on and start invading asteroids. But as a strategy game, we think it involves a little too much waiting for a very simple payoff – even if that payoff is fun.

Download this app: Eufloria HD for iPad

Best iPad apps | Apple new iPad 3 review

Review courtesy of Tap!

It starts off gentle, as you push balls around a 3D plane towards goal points, but then it brings the third dimension into play, complete with gravity that’s entirely relative to your orientation. That is, you have to think about where you’re pushing balls in case they fall, entirely correctly, upwards.

Once you’ve got your head around that, it throws fresh complications at you, such as light-emitting blocks that you push around by their light beams. It’s a real brain-batterer that will completely stump you sooner or later; you’ll need some patience.

Download this app: English Country Tune for iPad

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Want to fly over Victoria Falls? Swipe your finger across the screen to sail over the globe, and, when you’re ready to land, double tap on southern Africa. Pinch and stretch two fingers on the screen to zoom in and out, and twist them to rotate the view. Keep zooming in on the Zambia/Zimbabwe border and slowly the majesty of Mosi-oa-Tunya (the Smoke that Thunders) glides into focus. If the site of the Falls gradually revealing themselves doesn’t make the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end, then we don’t know what will. Tap on the yellow marker and you can read about the Falls on Wikipedia, or view photographs and videos of it.

Had enough of Victoria Falls? How about Angel Falls in Venezuela, or Mount Everest or the Colosseum in Rome? They’re all but a few finger gestures away. It’s a breathtaking experience, and the closest it’s possible to come to visiting far flung exotic places without enduring several hours of air travel and a frisking by customs officials. And if you want to see the Great Pyramid of Giza from space, but aren’t sure where to start looking, type a query into the search bar at the top of the screen and wait while you’re transported there in seconds.

Prefer a more recent example of magnificent architecture? How about Sydney Opera House? Zoom out and watch as the pyramids disappear, then spin the globe and descend on Australia. Zoom back in and watch as the Opera House and Sydney Harbour swoop into view.

There’s more. Switch on Auto Tilt and you can change your angle of view by tilting and rotating the iPad or iPhone. And with Show Terrain on, the three-dimensional effect of rolling hills and scooped valleys looks incredible. Like the desktop app, the iOS version has Layers, though there aren’t nearly as many. You can still view road names, panoramic photographs, local businesses, and Wikipedia entries. If you have saved maps in another version of Google Earth, you can access them here by logging into your Google account.

If it all gets a bit much and you start to feel homesick, tap the position marker in the toolbar and it will fly you home. There’s hours of fun to be had just visiting the town you grew up in and looking for your old school, or re-visiting places you once went on holiday. Navigating using gestures does take a bit of getting used to; it’s too easy to fly straight past the place you’re looking for or get completely lost, but perseverance is wonderfully rewarded. An astonishing app.

Download this app: Google Earth for iPad

Best iPad apps | Apple new iPad 3 review

Review courtesy of Tap!

Once in your desired pitch, everything you need is on the horizontal menu at the top of the screen. After you’ve created your player names and squad numbers (this takes a while to set up, but once happy with a starting formation, you can save and import it into a new blank pitch) and chosen your kit colour, you can then drag dots onto the pitch; tap the player name on the left-hand menu, then tap the dot and it will obtain the name and number. Add a ball into the mix and you’re ready to go. Drag the players around, track runs and the path of the ball using the running player and pen icons, respectively. If you hook this up to a projector screen, the kids (and excited adults) you’re coaching will get a kick out of seeing their name up there, as if Sky Sports pundits are discussing them.

If you make a mistake (which is inevitable – dragging the players around is a delicate matter), you can rub out unwanted arrows or players using the eraser. A way to avoid this is using the pitch icon: you zoom in to just one half of the pitch, which is great for detailing defence or attack.

Being able to record moves in separate stages is really handy, because you can pre-prepare a breakdown of exactly how a goal was conceded by tapping the arrows in the menu for each move. You can also record videos (with audio) so you can sit back as the players watch your post-match analysis. The videos are stored on your iPhone’s Camera Roll, so you can do anything you want with them from there.

It’s Universal, but as you can imagine, trying to move 22 dots around on an iPhone screen to the detail you desire is tough. You’ll find yourself doing a lot of tutting when unwanted arrows appear as you try to move the right winger. However, on the iPad it’s a smoother process, but if you try to rush, be prepared to use that eraser tool.

Download this app: CoachNote for iPad

Best iPad apps | Apple new iPad 3 review

Review courtesy of Tap!

The standout feature of Barefoot World Atlas is the spinning globe that you explore. It works superbly; even the music subtly changes as you zoom around exploring the continents, to reflect the atmosphere of your current destination.

The information it provides would be good for a 10-year-old, but it’s generally lacking in detail. There’s certainly not enough depth here to satisfy an adult’s curiosity.

Overall though our biggest gripe is simply the size of the app – at 1.5 gig, it took us two and a half hours to download on our home broadband connection. Therefore, owners of the 16GB iPad probably aren’t going to have enough space to install it.

Download this app: Barefoot World Atlas for iPad

Best iPad apps | Apple new iPad 3 review

Review courtesy of Tap!

So then! Super Base Jumping 2000 has been around for a while on various formats, and it’s a game of leaping off ludicrous floating buildings, showing off as much as you can, while trying to not smash every bone in your body. It’s straightforward (or straight down) enough: start your drop, steer yourself with excellently tuned tilt controls, do stuff (of which more in a bit), and then deploy special parachute fins, before you smear yourself across the asphalt.

The doing stuff bit is key to scoring lots of points; you can steer close to lots of little things to earn lots of what Super Base Jumping 2000 calls kisses, and you can plummet as close as you dare to the side of a building to earn (equally adorable) hugs. You can glance off things, momentarily losing control, but a full-on collision means instant death. Bonus points can be won by smashing through brightly coloured point plates, spraying graffiti on certain buildings, flipping off protestors or giving fans a thumbs-up, birdstrike, and more. It’s very self-consciously wacky and oh so ‘out there, man.’

Once you have a feel for it, the bone-crunching larks don’t quite get the pulse racing as much as they should. It tries hard to evoke a sense of vertigo, but doesn’t quite pull it off; instead, it feels more like flying along a giant, obstacle-infested tunnel really fast, which to be fair, is amusing enough. Also, completing all the levels earns you no reaction whatsoever, which seems a bit off. Maybe it’s waiting for us to five-star them all, but we’re not sure we have it in us.

Download this app: AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! for iPad

Best iPad apps | Apple new iPad 3 review

Review courtesy of Tap!

You can create the scrawlings of a madman, screech random words at the top of your lungs, and sulk when nobody guesses that your blob-shaped sketch is actually meant to be a panda.

And this is much the same, sharing a MS Paint-style interface with your Facebook friends or email contacts. Words range from easy (‘ladder’) to tricksy (‘Rihanna’), and watching your friends’ doodles appear on screen is just as fun as it sounds.

Colour us sold.

Download this app: Draw Something for  iPad

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On the one hand, it’s very pretty, featuring dragons that swoop across varied backgrounds, and shiny gems and power-ups.

The music’s good, too. On the other, the match gameplay is a bit limited and dull, like a stack of mini Zumas/Puzz Loops.

It’s the kind of thing you can lose hours to, but we never found ourselves excited or addicted.

Download this app: Dragon Portals HD for iPad

Best iPad apps | Apple new iPad 3 review

Review courtesy of Tap!

Oceanhouse Media has been busy turning virtually all of the famous doc’s tales to wonderfully – although simply – animated and narrated interactive book apps.

This collection gives you a starter bundle of The Cat in the Hat, One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish, The Foot Book, Mr. Brown Can Moo! Can You?, and Fox in Socks. All of the books are in quality top, we started reading and just couldn’t stop (sorry).

Download this app: Dr. Seuss Beginner Book Collection #1

Best iPad apps | Apple new iPad 3 review

Review courtesy of Tap!