Three of my favorite mobile series recently received updates, so it’s time to revisit them. Angry Birds Space is the new Super Mario Galaxy inspired spinoff of the original bird-flinging game, and Cut the Rope: Experiments expands upon the original Cut the Rope concept with new ideas and 125 levels. Finally, the genius Where’s My Water? has received some new levels since my original review, so I’ll touch on that too.

Laugh if you want, but I really love these games for their quintessential mobile experiences. Levels are short and sweet, difficulty ramps up slowly, and gameplay variety is injected constantly. Each of them have fun with physics and benefit greatly from the touchscreen. Plus, they’re dirt cheap.

My thoughts will hopefully be short and efficient, just like the games I’m reviewing. I played each game on my Android EVO 4G phone.

Angry Birds Space

This is honestly a pretty huge upgrade to the tired Angry Birds formula. Space tosses our favorite birds into space, ditches the flat and familiar plane, and introduces small planets that greatly influence gravity. Those nasty pigs are usually found in structures on the other side of the planet, forcing you to whip your birds around in highly satisfying maneuvers. Similar to how Super Mario Galaxy turned the Mario series on its head, Angry Birds Space successfully performs the same feat.

When aiming your bird, a dotted line is drawn out with its trajectory, complete with influences from nearby gravity wells. It doesn’t extend out forever, so players are forced to deduce the rest of the path and hope for the best. The gravitational physics are excellent and emulate the feeling of orbit decay really well.

The yellow bird (now purple) has been upgraded to target wherever your finger touches exactly, and thankfully the white egg-pooping bird has been eliminated! A new ice bird will freeze anything it touches allowing a blue follow-up bird to plow through normally solid objects with ease. The red and bomb birds seem the same, while the giant red bird has been re-colored green, though he still plows through objects like a champ.

Sixty new levels are packed into the free, ad-supported Android release, with actual boss battles capping off the two current worlds. My one complaint is that you need to really zoom out to get the big picture of most of the stages, mostly eliminating the game’s cute graphics. It really seems that a tablet is the ideal platform for the game. You can also play on Windows or Mac, but what’s the point?

Cut the Rope: Experiments

The original Cut the Rope took a very basic premise: get a piece of candy into Nom-Nom’s mouth, and managed to create 250 very entertaining stages out of it. To keep me entertained that long is kind of a triumph of game design. Experiments is basically what it sounds like, it’s not a true sequel, but simply more twists on the same design.

There are 125 levels in this current pack spread across five sets of stages. The first 25 levels are basically rehashes of the original’s first set of levels, as in get the candy into his mouth without any fancy portals or buzzsaws. After that, however, the game introduces suction cups, rockets, water, and a grappling hook to generate another fun set of challenges. The graphics haven’t changed, and the core gameplay is the same, so you’re basically paying a dollar for another 100+ levels, which will probably be at least another 200 when the updates are finished.

If you liked the original Cut the Rope, I’d say Experiments is definitely worth it, you’re already paying less than one cent per stage at this point and it will only get better. The game is still pretty dang easy, so don’t go thinking that ZeptoLab suddenly upped the difficulty.

Where’s My Water?

I love this game and think it’s the best puzzler out there at the moment, and Disney has delivered a few surprise updates since my review. First off, they gave us the first five levels of Cranky’s Story, basically an in-game DLC expansion. Our new friend Cranky isn’t in need of a shower, but instead requires his food to be cleaned off by purple sludge. The sludge is typically poison in the main game, so it’s an interesting albeit not that exciting reversal. I wasn’t convinced by the demo to pay a dollar for another 40 stages.

But another update to the main game titled “Caution to the Wind” gives us another 20 levels to play in, this is on top of the previous 150 stages, making the one dollar purchase of Where’s My Water? even more worthwhile. Unsurprisingly, the new gameplay concept is wind-based, with fans placed around a level to toss our precious water through the air. It’s a nice addition to the already stellar set of gameplay elements.

Definitely worth redownloading the game if you've deleted Where's My Water?

Hope you enjoyed my look at the recent sequels and updates to some of the most popular mobile games.