Despite the toxic landscape, i’m a big fan of mobile gaming. Sometime you just want to play something and all you have is your phone. I’ve had a great time with the mobile ports of Balatro, Vampire Survivors and Into the Breach
On the “made for mobile” tho things get a bit more complex. I find that i no longer have the patience to deal with games that interrupt you with ads, and neither do I care to deal with f2p overwhelming UIs. This is a f2p problem of course, and I know that some games are either premium and so avoid it (Balatro), or entirely free without ads (Unciv)
Although I am personally more interested in those two categories, considering everything avaiable on a phone, what are some of your favorite mobile games, and why?
I think my favorite overall is Balatro, it’s such a great game to play on the phone. I also love some puzzle games like Hashi. Recently been itching for something more action oriented, but never found one that is not on the toxic scale of mobile gaming.
I’ve really enjoyed the The Room and The House of DaVinci games. Gorgeous tactile puzzle boxes and intricate devices that feels better playing with your fingers than it would a mouse.
Part of the problem is the closed store fronts are awful and constantly push the deluge of scams, making it near impossible to find anything of any worth anymore, not helped by the policies of those stores constantly punishing smaller developers (Winter Wolves used to make a lot of money with mobile ports until Google randomly threw the hammer on him and required frankly ridiculous amount of updates).
It’s so bad that the few examples I can think of are also on Steam now because they have to be if there’s any hope for people to find them (like The Room series) - along with some of the gacha garbage, because greed.
So, I would recommend browsing itch.io. Some devs there do have things like android versions of their games, which would never have a chance on official stores.
I am trying to think of stuff to point to exclusive to mobile but the google play store is so bare in the section where you just pay for a game and own it that I don’t think I have examles that aren’t ports or on steam. Maybe Wonder Flash, if that’s still up, that was a fun puzzle game with a cute fairy tale, quilted look.
The only mobile game I can think of that I really liked (that isn’t like, a port of a PC game like Balatro) is Smash Hit, which is a rail shooter game where you shoot steel balls to smash glass objects.
It’s been a while since I played it (actually re-downloading it as we speak) but I don’t recall it being aggressive in it’s monetization, I think you have to pay to get some extra modes and stuff but other than that the main game is pretty much free.
I think we’re in a weird period now where a lot of mobile games still end up getting console (or at least Switch) ports, and mobile hardware is mature enough now that there’s a ton of console ports to mobile, so the distinction is starting to fade as well.
They even got Red Dead Redemption running on phones somehow.
I don’t play it much any more cos I got really hooked on it but Threes felt like the perfect mobile game for a while - easy to have a quick go and if you’re interrupted, not difficult to jump back in.
I also managed to 100% Motorsport Manager Mobile 3, though it’s so much easier than the desktop version I’m not sure that’s an achievement .
Used to have a lot of games collected on iOS that got nuked when Apple made them obsolete. Big shame cos a lot of them never got updated and weren’t available anywhere else. Stuff like Monsters Ate My Condo Monsters Ate My Condo - Wikipedia that only really existed in that brief period where mobile gaming became viable but didn’t yet become the F2P hell that swallowed up the industry. I really miss that era, it made having an iPhone special.
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