Fresh iPhone Games for Feb. 1: Pac-Man Battle Royale, Paladog!, Swap This!

I assume we’re all familiar with Pac-Man, the arcade classic about roaming through mazes, eating things to score points, with evil ghosts hot in pursuit. But you probably aren’t familiar with Pac-Man Battle Royale, which has four players fighting to eat one another, with the last player standing declared the winner. It’s the freshest of our Fresh Games today; read all about it and more below.

Pac-Man Battle Royale (iPad) Free

Challenge up to four players in Pac-Man competitive action with this iPad game, which is free to celebrate the launch of an arcade title of the same name. It’s just like other version of Pac-Man — use a joystick to control a puck-shaped character that eats pellets in a maze and flees from pursuing ghosts — except there are up to three other players racking up points along the way.

But you don’t just all share in the maze: grab a Power Pellet, the special big kind of pellet, and you suddenly gain the ability to eat enemy ghosts — and other players, eliminating them from the game. The last Pac-Man standing is the winner. It’s Pac-Man like never before, with an old-school feel and the kind of tense multiplayer action that only newer online games can offer.

Paladog! (iPhone) $0.99

As Paladog, a leader among critters, it’s your job to lead animal warriors against the undead forces that threaten your world. You do some fighting on your own, but this strategy-action role-playing game is more about rallying your forces and managing them in battle. As you strike forward across 2D battlefields, you’ll call on swordsmen, archers and mages to fight alongside you, and give them bonuses with your skills and magic.

Over the course of several battles, you’ll upgrade your units and gather new abilities, both for Paladog and for his forces. Stand among your troops and fight with them, or stay back and send them into battle, you’ll have 120 stages to perfect your strategy, as well as decide on which of the 20 magical items and nine friendly characters best complement your play style.

Swap This! (iPhone) $0.99

Developer Two Tribes has teamed with EA Mobile to create Swap This!, a game in the match-three genre (think Bejeweled) that’s built for speed and intensity. Your job is to quickly swap colored fish around the grid-based screen, with the goal to make as many combos as possible, as big as possible and as fast as possible.

Swap This! includes three differnet game modes: “Minute Match,” which gives you only a minute to see how high your score can get; “Puzzles,” in which you can work through 45 different challenging swap puzzles; and “Fish Fight!,” in which your matches are used to hold a giant evil fish from reaching the surface of the water. The game features Facebook and Twitter connectivity so you can challenge your friends, as well as Game Center leaderboards to see how your matching matches up.

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