2012 was another stellar year for iPhone gaming, with quite literally thousands of titles released on the App Store. Some of them were brilliant. Some of them weren’t.
This annual round-up of iPhone software is here to highlight the former and shun (in the nicest possible way) the latter.
While Punch Quest sparked an outbreak of high score fever in 2012, and Anomaly Korea easily lived up to its “most anticipated iOS sequel ever” billing, which were the best-reviewed games?
To answer that very question and the similarly themed ‘Which were the best reviewed apps?’, here’s the iPhone Quality Index(Qi) round-up for 2012.
Aggregating the reviews from the world’s best websites, such as 148Apps, Pocket Gamer, and Gamezebo, the Quality Index uses a unique metric to create a single definitive score for each iPhone title.
Without further ado, here are the best of the best, the cream of the crop that made it into the iPhone Quality Index of 2012…
Qi Top 10 iPhone games of 2012
1 Bastion Warner Bros. 9.4
2 Beat Hazard Ultra Cold Beam Games 9.4
3 Interlocked Armor Games 9.4
4 Punch Quest Rocketcat Games 9.3
5 Word Wonders: The Tower of Babel dreamfab 9.3
6 Stone Age: The Board Game Campfire Creations 9.3
7 Reckless Racing 2 Polarbit 9.2
8 Pizza Vs. Skeletons Riverman Media 9.2
9 Final Fantasy IV Square Enix 9.2
10 Wimp: Who Stole My Pants? HD Flexile Studio 9.2
Qi Top 10 iPhone apps of 2012
1 Fitocracy Fitocracy 10
2 1-800-Therapist patient conversation media 10
3 Smile Me – Glam your smile! LeadFeeders 10
4 FitGirl App The Body Studio Corp 10
5 Dr Shrink TappyTaps 10
6 iRemindU Redwood Apps 10
7 Remodel or Move – Interior Design RemodelOrMove.com 10
8 instahiet Adel Abdullah 10
9 Where is my Little Square Bear? InteractBooks 10
10 Post Secrets – Share Your Secret Epic Apps 1 0
According to the Qi chart, Bastion was the best-reviewed iPhone game of 2012. This lush action-RPG with an ambitious story started life on the Xbox 360 console, but it works beautifully on the small screen, too.
Down at #4 in the chart, Rocketcat Games’s Punch Quest impressed a whole host of iOS app critics with its novel mash-up of the modern endless-runner and old skool beat-’em-up.
In seventh place, Reckless Racing 2 – from Polarbit – followed up the success of the original with a tighter, sharper, and altogether more generous top-down arcade racer.
Finally, in tenth position, Wimp: Who Stole My Pants? HD showed that it was perfectly possible to craft a slick and engrossing platformer for the all-touch iPhone – with added head scratchy puzzles for good measure.
Topping the 2012 iPhone Qi app chart, meanwhile, is Fitocracy, a motivational exercise app that turns achieving your fitness goals into a game.
Continuing the gym theme at #4, The Body Studio Corp’s FitGirl App provides a number of helpful exercise plans specifically designed for women.
Down in sixth place, iRemindU is a reminder app that enables you to send tasks and reminders to your friends and family as well as to yourself.
Further down the leaderboard for the year, we have Where is my Little Square Bear?, which represents one of 2012’s key app trends: interactive pop-up book apps for kids.
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