Each of these games maintains fidelity to the originals, while offering players the option to play in modes that take full advantage of touch screen devices. In addition to Classic and Casual modes of play several of the games offer control options such as auto-fire and different button arrangements. Each game will also feature leaderboards so players can see how their skills compare against players from around the globe.

The full slate of winners at tonight’s ceremony also includes Pokemon Go by Niantic for Best Mobile/Handheld Game. The procedurally-generated universe of No Man’s Sky earned developer Hello Games the Innovation Award, while Naughty Dog’s Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End earned the award for Best Technology. The virtual reality game, Job Simulator: The 2050 Archives, received the award for Best VR/AR Game. The Audience Award is chosen among the entire selection of GDCA finalists using a public online voting process, and was presented to developer EA DICE for Battlefield 1.

Fire Emblem Heroes comes to smart devices
Nintendo launches its next adventure when Fire Emblem Heroes arrives soon on mobile. Fire Emblem Heroes is an original strategy RPG about two warring kingdoms in a bitter clash. As a summoner, players build their army by calling upon Fire Emblem heroes from worlds that span the breadth of the series. Players will wage tactical battles streamlined for on-the-go play and level up a mix of new combatants and legendary heroes. Some familiar hero characters will become allies, while others will become enemy generals. Players can enjoy the full majesty of tactical role playing on bite-sized maps designed to fit nicely on a smartphone screen, even when playing in short bursts. Players lead their armies with easy touch-and-drag controls, including the ability to attack by simply swiping an ally hero over an enemy. If they manage to defeat every enemy on a given map, victory will be theirs. The heroes are depicted in new art hand-drawn by a variety of illustrators, and their voices have been newly recorded. Beyond the main story mode, players can engage in other modes to strengthen their army or to compete against others. Free and timely updates will add new characters and content for additional hours of gameplay as well. Fire Emblem Heroes will be available as a free download with optional in-app purchases available. Visit the Fire Emblem Heroes website for details about pre-registration.

To prepare for the launch of Fire Emblem Heroes, today Nintendo kicks off the Fire Emblem Heroes: Choose Your Legends event. Fans can visit https://events.fire-emblem-heroes.com/vote to browse through characters from the Fire Emblem franchise and select the ones they’d like to see make an appearance in Fire Emblem Heroes. The global community’s top-ranked hero and heroine will then be featured in Fire Emblem Heroes as Choose Your Legends event characters. Nintendo Account holders will receive a Platinum point bonus for voting.

Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia
In 1992, the second game in the Fire Emblem series, Fire Emblem Gaiden, launched exclusively in Japan. Now, for the first time, fans outside of Japan will get a taste of this classic game on the Nintendo 3DS. Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia is inspired by the 1992 original, re-imagined on a grander scale. Every aspect of the Fire Emblem Gaiden game’s presentation has been updated, along with the game being fully voiced. Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia recreates classic Fire Emblem gameplay with a modern twist, mixing in exploration of dungeons crawling with enemies. Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia will launch on the Nintendo 3DS on May 19th. Characters from the game, Alm and Celica, will be available as amiibo figures in a two-pack, also on May 19th.

Fire Emblem meets Koei Tecmo’s Warriors series
Fire Emblem Warriors is coming to both the Nintendo Switch and New Nintendo 3DS. It’s being developed by the team that created Hyrule Warriors, and is scheduled to launch this fall.

Fire Emblem is coming to Nintendo Switch
For the first time since Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn on the Wii in 2007, a new mainline game in the series is being developed for a Nintendo home system, with the ability to also be played on the go. The new game is scheduled to launch in 2018.

Super Mario Run is compatible with iPhone, iPad and iPod touch devices running iOS 8.0 or later.

Fans can pre-register for Titanfall: Frontline and receive in-game rewards at launch via the official website: www.titanfallfrontline.com.

Titanfall: Frontline, the first title in the multi-game, multi-year partnership between Nexon, Particle City and Respawn Entertainment to exclusively publish Titanfall mobile games, will be available as a free download this fall on the App Store for iPhone and iPad and on Google Play for Android devices.

Phones and tablets are now the most popular game platforms. Although ownership and game play on video game consoles has remained steady since 2014, 41% of Canadians reported playing video games on mobile devices most often. That’s a huge jump from 2012 when only 6% reported playing on mobile devices the most often.

What’s more, the mobile games phenomenon has captured the attention of new audiences, particularly the female demographic. Female gamers are now playing 9% more on a daily basis with their mobile device than their male counterparts. Mobile has become the leading platform to play video games among the female demographic.

Many Canadians do not even consider themselves to be gamers even though they regularly play on mobile devices. When asked if they considered themselves a “gamer”, a modest 38% of Canadians self-identified as such, when in fact, 52% of Canadians have played a video game in the past 4 weeks – the threshold by which ESAC measures game play. Among those who did not consider themselves to be a “gamer”, 79% reported actually playing games on a mobile device in the past 4 weeks, highlighting the role of mobile games in bringing new players to the medium as a whole.

Choosing between Rayman and the viking Barbara, you’ll go through different stages that focus on combat, classic platform puzzles or collecting lums. The controls themselves are simple to grasp. Rayman, and I’ll use Rayman as that was the character I chose, will continuously run in one direction until you swipe to change his direction. Tapping makes you jump. Swiping towards enemies and obstacles will launch an attack. Unfortunately the swipe to attack and change of direction are the same, which can cause confusion sometimes when you’re trying to do both actions in sequence. You can, however, play the entire game with one hand, which is a boon when you’re on the go. As far as I can tell Barbara controls the same although I got the feeling she’s slightly larger than Rayman on the screen.

Speaking of gaming on the go, Rayman Adventures is paced well for short spurts. Each adventure contains around three stages and the stages themselves can usually be completed in a few minutes. As you finish each stage, you’ll work towards acquiring an egg which hatches into an Incrediball. The Incrediballs are useful in two ways. They are sidekicks that will help you in the game. Some creatures help point out where the bonuses are. Some creatures will absorb damage so they’re useful in combat stages. You can play stages without a sidekick though. Freeing Incrediballs also enables them to contribute in ten meter spurts to the growth of a tree.

You might ask where this tree came from and why. Unfortunately, there’s not much explanation why. Exposition is kept to a bare minimum – usually on the adventure campaign map as subtitles. Why am I saving lums? Why am I freeing teensies? Why is there a tree? At best this is basic Rayman lore that eludes me, or at worse just a gimmick to keep the game going. With the completion of each adventure, you’ll open up one or more adventure areas. Once you put your egg in incubation and decide to move on, you can’t go back to that adventure. In fact, you don’t know where you’re progressing towards either but I assume this is how the game will be infinitely extensible since you’ll get additional adventures as the developers continue to update the game. Should you choose the adventure at the top of the map or on the right of the map? It doesn’t seem to make a material difference other than giving you different stages to complete.

The main currency in the game is the gem. Gems can help you buy food to feed your Incrediballs so they can become your sidekick. Gems can speed up or enhance through potions what Incrediball you’ll get from your incubating egg. Gems can come from completing stages, achieving daily reward milestones and from golden tickets; scratch-able lottery tickets. Simply watching an advertisement is considered a milestone too. Once you run out of gems, though, you’ll have to spend money to acquire them or replay older stages in your current adventure. Otherwise, you’ll have to wait for the eggs to incubate in real world time, which may be a half hour or an hour wait. The game is free so you expect there to be some catch to it.

Now, the worst part of Rayman Adventures is not the free to play mechanics. It’s actually the incessant need to connect to a server to play the game. I don’t know what server Ubisoft is using, but it needs an upgrade pronto. My experience with the game was playing on an iPad on Wi-Fi so I can only imagine the frustration playing on an iPhone on a mobile network where you may lose signal. That’s because the initial download of Rayman Adventures is quite small – at around 90 MB. Was this tailored for people who have the iPhone 16 GB mobile? When I first started the game, it asked to download some additional levels with the message “Connecting to server…” That’s okay as I’ve encountered this in other games like Modern Combat. When it finished downloading additional levels, I must have been very lucky because the game then asked me to go back to the App Store and download a new version and repeat the same process. Finally, I got to play through the tutorial adventures until I got past adventure three and the game needed more downloads. The “connecting to server” message appears again. Now as I finish the third adventure and move on, practically every stage requires a “connecting to server” message. I then started going to the store to claim my rewards and the “connecting to server” message comes up. At its most frustrating point, I finished all the stages in an adventure and wanted to move the egg into the incubator, which involves dragging an egg into an egg cup. Even that required “connecting to server” and I wasn’t able to complete the adventure. I tried closing everything on my iPad and rebooting the device but to no avail. During the next day, I tried Rayman Adventures again and it’s working. It appears losing connection to the Internet will also ruin the auto save process as well. I’ve heard of games operating on the cloud but this is taking it to the next level.

Rayman Adventures is not a deep game. You have to treat it as a collection of standalone adventures rather than a full fledged sequel that advances the Rayman franchise. In mobile play, that might not be a bad approach. You can easily get an hour of play from the game without putting money into it. Getting starter packs or extra gems will enable you to play longer. The biggest shame might be sinking money into the game and being unable to play it because of the dreaded server connection issues and that’s why in its current state, Rayman Adventures is difficult to recommend.

Reviewed By: Lawrence Wong
Publisher: Ubisoft
Rating: 60%

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This review is based on a digital copy of Rayman Adventures for the iPad from the iTunes App Store.

At its core, Freeblade is a rail shooter. You don’t control the movement of your knight nor do you even control where the knight is facing. Enemies will pop up and you use your finger to touch and drag your gatling gun whereas a two finger swipe will fire the secondary weapon. Double tapping will fire missiles. As each weapon has a reload or overheat period you have to balance between all three weapons against the multiple targets that show up on your screen. Eventually you’ll get a shield that only applies against the targets you tap on in the game. Melee is a timed challenge where you have to tap based on a countdown timer. Melee ended up being the easiest part of the game unless you’re playing on a bumpy subway or bus.

In the beginning of the game, combat is relatively easy as you’re mostly up against infantry and the odd armoured vehicle. Missions are no more than a few minutes in duration and then you’re shuttled back up to space to reload and refit. You’re effectively pulled off the front line as often as players are in a hockey game. As the campaign progresses, things get progressively more difficult. The Orks will swarm you with tiny buggies and switch it up with heavier weapons and some melee robotically enhanced Orks. There is never a dull moment in the game.

As a free to play game, Freeblade begins bogging down when the usual free to play mechanics show up. After the tutorial, I made great progress in the first handful of missions getting to the point where I was a known VIP to be targeted by the enemy. I felt like the rise of a great war hero on the front lines. At the conclusion of each mission, you salvage ore and weapons that can be used to upgrade yours or mixed together in a forge to produce better items. Thankfully, the developers have some auto-equip and auto-forge buttons that do the thinking for you. However, as the game progresses, you salvage more and more common items that produce weapons that are less effective. When I finally hit my wall, I had to chip in gold that I didn’t have to produce something satisfactory that would allow me to get past the next campaign mission.

The developers of Freeblade obviously planned for this so there are a few ways to increase your chances at getting enough resources and material to proceed: side missions, bonuses from watching video advertisements, salvage runs, and finally spending hard earned money for in game gold and items. Daily and weekly missions are offered outside of the campaign. The hope is that you get through these missions without too much wear and tear so your loot will equip you better for the main campaign. These missions fall outside of the storyline and are typically generic patrols where you kill everything on sight.

You can watch video advertisements at the head of a battle to get more bonuses. For example, a bonus may increase your chances at collecting rare loot. Periodically each real world day, you get to do a salvage run on the planet that will open a crate full of weapons or ore you can use. For me, even the extra missions weren’t allowing me to make a profit in my salvage to get me past the campaign. The video advertisements ended up being more annoying than anything. There’s one advertisement that is thirty seconds long for a patrol mission that could have been no longer than two minutes. The payoff simply wasn’t there and I ended up just waiting for the real world clock to advance so I can try my luck at a new salvage run.

Of course, all of this frustration is mitigated by spending money in the game. From a technical standpoint, Freeblade is impressive. The mechanics of the rail shooter, though simplistic, work well and fit a pick up and play motif. You can play it in short spurts and I can see someone trying to do this on a mobile phone even if I was reviewing on an iPad. It’s worth spending some money, and I found myself wondering what Freeblade would be like as an actual paid product. Tragically named, Freeblade proves the old adage that no iTunes or Google Play app is truly free. You’ll need the starter pack if you want to make serious head way into the campaign.

Reviewed By: Lawrence Wong
Publisher: Pixel Toys
Rating: 68%

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This review is based on a digital copy of Warhammer 40,000: Freeblade for the iPad from the iTunes App Store.