Top 10 Samsung Galaxy 5 (i5503 a.k.a. Europa) Games Review

November 5, 2010 201011 3:35 pm | In Tech | 1 Comment

After a week of playing around with the phone, here comes my games review. But first, let's see the performance of the Samsung Galaxy 5 (i5503 a.k.a. Europa a.k.a. SG5) compared to other Android phones:

As you can see from the graph, this phone with a score of 471 beats the more expensive Sony-Ericsson X10i's performance and is close behind the HTC Desire/Nexus One (I assume it's with Android 2.1 Eclair, 2.2 Froyo boosts its performance phenomally). In fact, after abit of probing, I found out that the SG5 shares the same Adreno GPU as the HTC Desire/Nexus One! So this means you should get similar 3D performance in the SG5 as the Nexus One, considering the SG5 has a smaller screen resolution!

So now that you know the capabilities of the phone, let's explore the games that I've tried out this week. But before we start, let's install the AppBrain apps first which I highly recommend. AppBrain allows you to browse apps on the internet with your PC/laptop with all relevant reviews, etc and then with just 1-click instructs your phone to download the apps wirelessly! You can of course browse through the apps 1 by 1 on the phone, but you know the screen is not that large and I still prefer to browse on a bigger screen and just tell the phone to go download the games I want automatically. So, for this to work you need the following 2 apps:

AppBrain App Market

Fast Web Installer

Now, I'll review the games and show you the snapshots of how it'll look like on the SG5 itself so you can decide for yourself if they look playable or not on your own SG5!

1. Raging Thunder 2 Lite

First up, Raging Thunder 2 Lite – a 3D racing game where you control it using your phone accelerometers. It's alot of fun and you can adjust the sensor settings to suit your style of driving and I can tell you the SG5 can handle this game with no choppiness & no lag. Also, the races are short so it's perfect for casual phone gaming!

2. Robo Defense FREE

Robo Defense is Android's answer to iPhone's Fieldrunners tower defense type games. In fact, it has similar weapons as Fieldrunners with some improvements but all in all, it is highly addictive and you can spend quite some time on this game!

3. Angry Birds

Angry Birds is the most popular Android game because it's easy to play and the sound of the angry birds really get to you..lol. Basically, you slingshot a bird to a fortified structure by the pigs with the aim of destroying the pigs under them! There a few different types of birds which give you a few attack options like cluster bomb, mid-air acceleration, etc to add variation to the game.

4. City Jump

City jump is where you play a superhero who jumps from wall to wall, trying to gather more power-ups and destroy enemies. It's fast-paced and the graphics are quite nice!

5. Tower Raiders FREE

Tower Raiders is another tower defense type game where you attempt to guard your resources. This is 3D-based, and it seems you can only upgrade the mini-guns but the enemies have health & armor and you need different weapons to destroy the armor and then the health. Also, another variation is that when the enemy steals your resources, they need to escape and you need to defend both the entrance and exit!

6. Dante: The Inferno

Dante: The Inferno gives you a very nicely-packaged game with really nice graphics. It's basically a top-down action game which relies on an on-screen joystick to play. With 121 levels, it gives you very long game play!

7. WordUp!

WordUp! is Android's answer to the iPhone Bookworm game, where you match the words like in a crossword puzzle within a time limit, but it can be diagonally as long as each letter is linked next to each other!

8. Paper Toss

Paper Toss is the perfect toilet game. You basically try to curl-toss a ball of paper in the rubbish bin with a fan blowing at different speeds!

9. Unblock Me Free

Unblock Me is a puzzle game, where you move the blocks of different sizes around to free the red block!

10. Jewellust Lite

Jewellust takes a different spin on the Bejewelled game by requiring you to solve a jigsaw puzzle within a time limit. In order to get the jigsaw puzzle pieces you have to destroy the jewels which fall below the jigsaw puzzle pieces so that it'll fall to the lowest part of the screen to solve the puzzle!

11. Brain Genius Deluxe

Yes, I said 10 but this is just a bonus. Brain Genius Deluxe is a brain training game that is similar to the ones pioneered in the Nintendo DS a couple of years ago. This uses some of the phone's sensors like accelerometers to make it abit different. It's kinda fun but takes up alot of memory space so it's up to you if you want to install this.