Games belonging to the match3 genre work extremely well on the Apple handhelds - because the immediacy of the touch interface is much better than using a mouse pointer or a joypad. It's no surprise to anyone that this type of game has proliferated through the App Store, and therefore it's incredibly difficult to stand out. Smiles sees to outlast it's competition by being the best one on the Store in terms of feature packed gameplay.

Simply put, this game is huge. You know when you have a big game on your hands when you don't know where to begin - and Smiles doesn't disappoint. There are two main types of game - Zen and Drop - Zen is a more thoughtful puzzler in which you must light up the whole board by making matches, and Drop has you making matches that clear the board as new tiles drop in. It also has two spinoffs, Drop+ (which has a greater number of tile colours), and Avalanche which encases all new tiles in ice. More on that later. Each mode has it's own difficulty options - listed below:

• Zen Easy, Zen Medium, Zen Hard, Zen Master
• Drop Easy, Drop Hard, Drop Long Play
• Drop+ Easy, Drop+ Hard, Drop+ Six, Drop+ Long Play
• Avalanche Easy, Avalanche Medium, Avalanche Hard

That makes fourteen different options to pick - with statistics and high score leaderboards for each - 140 achievements in total.

Both games use the same basic formula - you have a tile outside the board which you can swap with any tile on the board, as long as it creates a match. Zen is simple enough, with the four difficulty modes and endless puzzles to complete. But Drop is where it gets interesting. As aforementioned, later levels have ice tiles which fall into place. Ice can be matched, but it cannot be swapped - but another twist is that ice can be broken depending on how far it falls down. Eventually, rocks start appearing - they cannot be matched and have to be dropped pretty far before they break. And this is where the accelerometer comes into play - once you start reorienting your iPhone, you can change the flow of new blocks, and therefore the drop direction too. What's also great about the Drop mode is that pace is completely freeform - you can choose to pick one match and see what that does, or chain them up for huge combos - the game doesn't pressure you either way. You can still have a great game by keeping your iPhone held upright, or you can be more strategic. Either way, it still plays very well.

Not only does Smiles play well, it looks great. Really great. The playful visual style will appeal to just about anyone - when you're having trouble making a match, some jump up and give you a cheerful grin to let you know there's a move available. You can also change the visual style any time in game - there's two different character sets, and also a more traditional blocks set. There's no music, but thankfully the game layers in your own underneath it's sound effects (a series of chimes, getting progressively higher pitched as your chain extends).

Packed with features, Smiles may just be the swiss army knife of the match3 genre. It's cute atmosphere, decisive, non pressured gameplay, multiple modes, achievements, statistics, and high score tables make it utterly essential to fans of this type of game. If you're looking for the best match3 title on the Store right now, this is it.

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