It's becoming increasingly tough to squeeze into the tightly-packed puzzle genre in the App Store. With tons of tile-matching, piece-sliding, and color-swapping titles available in abundance -- albeit with challenge and mental stimulation often lacking -- sometimes the only puzzling thing is what is qualified as a puzzle. Enter Cubis Creatures, a game developed by the aptly named FreshGames, which has come to push staleness out of the genre and replace it with smart and satisfying gameplay.

Cubis Creatures tasks players with correcting the mistake of a wizard's poorly-performed magic trick, which has sent all of his friends into a deep slumber. To wake them from this state, players must match blocks in each creature's mouth -- which is still nicer than how most college kids are awoken by their friends after a night of partying. You'll be given four creatures to raise from slumber -- done over the course of 20 stages -- but additional ones can be added on. Add in daily tournaments and there's never a shortage of challenges.

The puzzles that keep these critters asleep take place on a checkered board, which is populated by colored blocks. To eliminate these blocks, you'll launch others into the playing field from the front or right side. Solids stop them, other blocks will slide one square, and contact with two or more that share its color will clear all touching matching pieces. Throw in things like lasers that can eliminate any piece, bombs that shake up the board, and two-toned blocks will require matching both colors before they'll be cleared, and you've got a puzzle game that requires real strategy. Because the board doesn't rotate, there are occasions where blocks aren't visible; but it's luckily never debilitating.

The bottom line. Cubis Creatures takes on the difficult puzzle genre and comes up with highly stellar results. With stunningly vibrant visuals, a quirky story, and lively tunes, the entire experience is just plain fun. There's nothing puzzling about why Cubis Creatures is a blast.

Showing a bit more ambition than its predecessors, N.O.V.A. 3 aims to be slightly more than a shameless clone of Microsoft's Halo, adding in mechs and jetpacks to the sci-fi shooter along with a bit more personality and environmental variety. It's also quite the looker, with the universal app's gloss shining through brightly, especially on the new iPad.

But like most of Gameloft's shooters, it hasn't quite nailed the solo experience. While visually impressive and certainly lengthy for an App Store adventure, the campaign frequently drags thanks to repetitive objectives and enemy encounters, plus missions that stretch on and on. Curiously, the levels also feature irritating bugs, such as botched aiming, faulty grenade buttons, and enemies stuck in walls. It looks nice, but the campaign just isn't much fun, and the bugs don't help matters.

Luckily, as with last year's Modern Combat 3, Gameloft's latest comes alive online, as the 12-player battles capture the essence of a console or PC shooter on a much smaller screen. Whether on-foot, in a mech, or manning a jeep with teammates in tow, N.O.V.A. 3's tense deathmatches and objective-based battles overcome the clumsy controls and occasional spots of lag. Multiplayer combat easily outclasses the campaign, and for $7, you'll get a whole lot of action for very little.

The bottom line. N.O.V.A. 3's campaign is a buggy bore, but excellent online multiplayer saves this slick shooter.

Baseball is the ultimate sport for stat junkies, and Topps Pennant is designed to feed into that obsessive curiosity, serving up 60 years worth of Major League Baseball game and team stats and breaking down box scores into a wickedly attractive little tool. Previously released for the iPad sans the Topps branding, Pennant is back in a brand new universal release that shines no matter which iOS device(s) you rely upon.

Topps Pennant takes the complicated history of six decades' worth of professional hardball and compresses it all down into a slick, intuitive app. Starting up, you'll choose a team -- with separate listings for rebranded squads like the Angels (California, Anaheim, and Los Angeles) -- which then unveils individual seasons, followed by single games and finally a customizable look into each and every play and out from that matchup. It's impressive how much info is packed into such a simple, clean layout, and you can even press play to cycle through the innings' happenings automatically.

On the iPad, the layout is largely similar to what was seen in the now-discontinued original version, with circular representations of games that let you swipe through the plays, as well as a beautiful animated chart that gives each team in the league and division a ball that changes in size depending on win/loss record. The iPhone side of this universal app shakes things up a bit with a portrait-oriented layout and a smaller set of viewing options, but it's just as easy to get to the info you want in a breeze.

Pennant does require an Internet connection, which can be a drag on an iPad or iPod touch, especially if you're sitting at the ballpark without Wi-Fi. Also, it's a shame that the original iPad app has been abandoned and is no longer updated, leaving longtime fans to purchase a second iteration to add iPhone support and the latest seasons' stats. But two dollars is a small price to pay for such breezy access to an ever-updated vault of MLB history.

The bottom line. Topps Pennant stands tall as a triumph of minimalist design with maximum baseball stat nerdery held within.

We're not sure the world needs another offshoot of Pinterest and Facebook, but the new Springpad is just that: the once-private personal aggregator has gone public, revamping its iOS app and encouraging its users to share discoveries with their social circles.

At its core, Springpad is something of a cross between a secretary and assistant. As you go about your day, Springpad collects everything you throw at it -- including bookmarks, article clippings, notes, and photos -- grabbing and sorting your digital paraphernalia via a complementary web clipper. Snapshots of websites are saved (or rather Springed, since every social network needs its own verb) quickly and smoothly.

Inside Springpad, any number of customizable notebooks can be filled with all sorts of things. Web clippings wind up here, of course, and photos and notes can be added, too; plus, a speedy search bar trawls the web for books, movies, TV shows, recipes, and Amazon listings that can be saved for future reference. It's not the most polished interface, but Springpad does an admirable job organizing your digital life.

The social aspects, however, aren't quite as well-thought-out. The general idea is to simply open up your notebooks for public consumption, but that also involves a shift in approach; Springpad is something of a personal experience, so creating a public notebook requires a conscious effort. And the most popular shared notebooks I found were fairly generic lists of things like recipes and movies. Springpad might be on to something, but I'm happy to keep my sliders set to private.

Bugs are fairly prevalent in the current build, and while most aren't too hindering, a couple were very bothersome. The buttons sorting my content were extremely slow to respond (to the point where it was quicker to find things by scrolling through everything I had saved), and Amazon search results often came back with error messages when clicking on an item.

The bottom line. Even overlooking an infestation of bugs, Springpad's coming-out party left me underwhelmed.

Of the couple hundred apps to cycle through my iPhone’s home screen over the last few years, it’s the "visual showpiece" titles that I’ve had the most trouble deleting. And that’s not because I’m a bona fide Infinity Blade fanatic, nor am I a Rage HD die-hard. The truth of the matter is much simpler, and much… well, shallower: I treat many of those games like the app equivalents of fancy, hardcover coffee table books. They’re incredibly attractive talking points, but I too rarely revisit them on my own time.

After clearing Sunside Games' Crow in a little over an hour, I felt like I’d just skimmed through a slick (if not particularly thick) coffee table book. An admittedly gorgeous game, Crow's lavishly detailed environments and haunting audio design earn it plenty of points in the presentation department, but it suffers from stale gameplay that never really gets off the ground.

Propelled by a muddled “there are Ancients among us” plot, the titular Crow is urged across barren, breathtaking environments by a malevolent voice. The actual gameplay is split into two too-similar segments—exploration and combat—that both see your crow flying across restrictive playing fields. The exploration overworlds have you soaring and surveying until you come across your next objective, where the combat portions are “on-rails tapping” missions, meaning you steer your feathered hero into collectibles and occasionally attack baddies with gesture-based Crow Magicks.

But the exploration is too limited to feel compelling, and the combat too repetitive to be fun. There are under-explained “moral choices” after each of the game’s four boss battles, but their impacts are largely insignificant. Now, if you’re looking for a showpiece app to impress friends and family with the visual power packed into your smartphone, Crow could very well be the "coffee table app" that you’ve been looking for. However, for everyone else, there are plenty of other bird-based iOS games that are worth your time.

The bottom line. It’s gorgeous and haunting, but Crow is too rarely fun to recommend.