Welcome to the weekly iPhone Quality Index (Qi) games round-up, giving you the LOWdown on the HIGH scorers every Friday on these illustrious pages.

As you may already know, Qi trawls the web for iPhone game reviews from the world’s most respected online and print sources.
Qi then applies its own magic formula to each site (such as 148Apps, IGN, and AppVee) to establish a single definitive Qi score for each iPhone game.

Dead or alive

Blasting onto the Qi charts this week with a take-no-prisoners attitude comes EA’s survival shooter Dead Space, which simultaneously frightened and charmed its way to a powerful 8.9 Qi rating from 10 reviews.

In what is unquestionably the highest profile release in January from any iPhone app vendor, you must decimate and disembowel the ravenous Necromorph hordes in an atmosphere so chilling you can cut it with a knife. Or a plasma saw.

Gesture-based controls for movement and firing help you ease the tension in this high class console conversion, the sprawling, varied expanse of the space station posing a menace all of its own.

The audio visual experience of Dead Space is terrifyingly real, a point elaborated on by AppGamer: “If you don’t jump while playing this then you aren’t paying enough attention to the game. The music and sound effects are perfect for keeping the player on their toes during long jaunts down dark corridors.”

Everybody walk the dinosaur

Switching tack, time, and dimension, Donut Games’s prehistoric physics pursuit Cave Bowling rolled up Qi’s venerable alley this week into a creditable tenth position.

A trio of striking critiques – bowled over by the original level design, 60 challenging stages, and wacky flourishes - from around Planet iPhone knocked down a host of App Store challengers and guaranteed the cavemen a place on the Quality Index scoreboard.

Water geysers, chutes, and turtle shells propel your bowling ball across the platform and towards the pins, with bonus points awarded for the collection of floating bones en route.
Cave Bowling's straightforward mechanics drew praise from Gamezebo, described thus: “Using the touch screen, you set the angle of the throw by moving the arrow near your bowler’s head, and the strength of the throw using the meter on the bottom. Tap the throw button and see how well your shot flies.”

You can get up-to-date information about which games are reviewing best over at the Quality Index.