You Review: Nokia Ovi Store games that get physical

In the latest in our irregular series of user reviews, forum regular David Gilson tests out games from Nokia's Ovi Store that use your phone's physical sensors. If you have a review of a product you would like to appear on Crave and you're prepared to put the same care and attention into it that David has, email it to forumsadmin@cnet.co.uk and we'll publish the best.

Nokia phones are able to run ever more impressive games thanks to their increasing processing power and new-fangled sensors. The hottest trend in mobile gaming right now is to incorporate physics, both in creating realistic dynamics, and exploiting handsets' ability to detect changes in their orientation.

Nokia's Ovi Store has a great selection of games that feature realistic physics and sensory input. We hunted around for the  five best games to get you started in the world of physics-driven mobile gaming. If you've played any others, we'd love to hear about them in the comments.

Here's the science part: if your phone can detect how it is tilted, such as for automatically rotating your screen, it's equipped an accelerometer. This marvellous bit of kit tells your phone which direction gravity is pulling from, and how you're moving the phone. A magnetometer, otherwise known as a digital compass, gives you a bearing relative to the Earth's magnetic field, just like a traditional compass. If you're not sure whether your phone has a digital compass, you can check its specifications on Nokia's Web site. 

The Ovi Store application on your Nokia phone will filter content according to what's compatible with your phone. Because of the wide range of Nokia smart phones out there, we've simply given guidance on the minimum hardware required for your phone to run each game. All five games were free at time of publication, but this might change.

Update: A previous version of this article suggested all the games were free, which they were at time of publication. As of 19 March, however, only Bagatelle and Space Impact are free. The rest cost £3, which is still great value, and some have free trial versions.

Click 'Continue' for our first candidate, Edge.