Mobile games usually get a bad rep as they’re usually asset flips and/or MTX-ridden and/or ad-filled, etc., and I’m sure this is actually the case for most games on the app/play store. But are there any ones that are actually good, maybe just something to pass the time with?
Balatro. Be warned though, it’s digital crack. One time payment though, no mtx
I couldn’t agree more. I bought it, on a whim, just to see what everyone was talking about…and now I’m hooked!
I haven’t gotten this for a very unusual and stupid reason. I’d want it on my phone, and on my pc\steam deck; but don’t want to pay for it twice, out of spite.
I refuse to but it on mobile because I already bought it on steam.
Because when I get into balatro I get hooked hard, and the last thing I need is immediate access to fucking crack every where I am.
In that same category, Merge Maestro. Very fun and addictive game where no two runs go the same way.
Edit: Free to try, full game is a single $2 purchase.
Just played my first Merge Maestro game and won. Fun so far at a super good price at $2. I have a feeling that my work will be cut out for me chasing down exploits to take advantage of. I see it becoming almost overly hard to keep track of everything.
It isn’t hard exactly, you get a feel for synergies and they usually happen organically. Sometimes something triggers that you weren’t even expecting and next thing you know you have 1,000 attack with 200 multi strike.
Yeah. I can definitely see that happening. My first go I was able to spam hotels that were doing like 15 damage a piece at the end of each turn. Boss only had like 45 HP
Nice! It’s always fun to get a good passive setup running
Free, ad-free, open source phone games
Unciv: Civilization V clone that runs on a potato; a grand 4x strategy game. It seems pretty mechanically complete and has a lot of content. Easily modded. (Graphics may not be to everyone’s taste)
Simon Tatham’s portable puzzle collection: Mathematically inspired Puzzle games with a lot of customization and reasonable interface. This includes classics like untangle (graph planarity) and solo (sudoku, but generalized). I personally really enjoy Tower, and hadn’t seen it elsewhere (and like 15 more games besides).
Chip defense: computer science themed tower defense. By the power of Turing, Noether, and Knuth you can strike down malicious packets attempting to corrupt your CPU. Good content, fun towers and educational bonus material, and I think it looks rather good. (Minor gripe/warning: early levels are optimally played with a lot of tapping that is not very ergonomic; this drops off after the first few levels.)
Honorable mentions (not FOSS, but still free, MTX free, and no ads beyond fishing for a rating). Higgster’s game compendium: collection of games in a consistent and pleasing artstyle. Includes things like solitaire, wordle, binaro, and mastermind (20+ games total, several more have been added in the last year). This is really very well done, give it a look!
Flocks: Sliding puzzle game with excellent graphics and animations. Lots of levels, introduces new mechanics regularly, and easy to pickup or put down. I quite enjoy everything Robert has made, recommended!
Piggybacking onto this (all of these are FOSS):
Endless Sky is a 2D sandbox space sim. It’s a spiritual sequel to the old Escape Velocity: Nova, and has very active development.
Feudal Tactics is an extremely simple strategy game that can nonetheless be quite hard.
Battle For Wesnoth is a whole-ass fantasy campaign turn-based strategy game that has been ported to mobile. Think Warcraft but turn-based.
Arx Libertatis is a port of Arx Fatalis, a first-person RPG. This one is still on my list to try out, but it looks interesting.
Shattered Pixel Dungeon is quite a timekiller on the phone
Puzzles by Simon whatshisface
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=name.boyle.chris.sgtpuzzlesBunch of puzzle games, no monetisation
Hey, a little respect for the developer of PuTTY. (yes, it’s the same guy)
Wow I didn’t know that, super cool.
Also available from F-Droid: https://f-droid.org/packages/name.boyle.chris.sgtpuzzles
CMV: Towers and Unequal are literally impossible to beat at their harder/hardest difficulty levels without any cheating or guessing.
Slay the spire, balatro, Ascension, melvor, plague inc, terraforming Mars, unciv, shapez…
Vampire survivor is good too
Uhhhh BALATRO!!!
10€ for card game?! Are you real??
Belatro won all sorts of awards, including GDC game of the year. $10 for an award winning game is nothing. Probably the most addicting game I’d played in years, and I’m not even into that type of game.
It’s highly regarded for a reason. If you’re on iPhone you can get a one month trial for Apple Arcade and play it for free, but it’s worth 10€ imo. It’s a good game in it’s own right, but it’s also one of very few mobile games that are not monetised beyond the initial purchase, well suited to touch controls and short play sessions and are actually fun.
I’m sorry but I just don’t see the fun in what basically looks like glorified video poker. I could see the appeal if there were other people to play against, but if it’s just single player I might as well just go to the casino and play the slots instead. It looks that boring to me.
I wish there was a free time limited demo I could play cause I’d love to be proven wrong…
It’s not poker. It’s a deckbuilding game based on poker hands.
Pirate it if you want. You will probably want to pay for it after a few hours.
I tried pirating, but I couldn’t find an APK that isn’t sketchy as fuck, and I don’t want the PC version because this is the kind of game I’d rather play on mobile to kill time at work.
Not €10 10 $
I’m just giving you shit but yes, how have you not heard about this game yet, watch some Youtubers play it and see why it’s so fucking great holy shit do you like ads in your face every three minutes and micro transactions and no free updates, you do you hon I pay for quality. The soundtrack the visual design the fucking game itself, there’s so much good going on in this game. I support it 1,000,000%.
I payed for most of my games but 10€ is to much for a game like this. Im from Europe so my prices are in € not $. Often for 1€ higher than $ prices. Like its not enough that 10€ is more than 10$ alredy…
You can find copies online with some mild searching.
Tap for spoiler
Mobilism is one such website where one can procure such items for Android
To try things out before buying of course.
If they are using iPhone, their chances of being able to find a pirated copy and getting it to work are practically zero without deep technical knowledge
I have iphone
What did you decide? Watching videos of people playing (for the first time) would give you an idea of value for yourself.
There is no way i would pay that amount, am not even into card games… And also salery in my country is like 10 times less than in US so dont even judge me…
I mean… not sure if it counts as mobile but the entire history of console gaming up to few years ago works on emulators, so that’s a VAST choice. Sure you might dislike 99.99% but if there is even 0.01% you enjoy, that’s hundreds of games if not more!
Check https://search.f-droid.org/?q=emulator and consider a BT controller.
Not all of them are enjoyable when played on a small touchscreen, so the question is still relevant: which ones actually work well for the form factor?
Fair enough, hence why I mentioned the BT controller but OK so might want something more compact, say if you are walking around or in the subway for 1 stop.
That’s not my situation so naively I’d suggest stuff like https://hexgl.bkcore.com/ or (and sadly I can’t put my hand on it right now) those who rely on accelerometer, this way you don’t even tap on your screen.
That being said I think there are also now Web based emulators that do have controller overlay. This way you use your entire screen real estate but also use the device it as a controller. There is no haptic feedback but works relatively well, I used that for WebXR on mobile.
Edit: it wasn’t any of these but still gives the idea https://forums.libretro.com/t/rgpad-a-universal-gamepad-overlay/41134 https://github.com/ShawnHymel/phaser-plugin-virtual-gamepad/
can’t forget about NetherSX2. It’s a little bit of a pain to set up but it gives you all the PS2 options.
Out of curiosity why is it not on F-droid?
I don’t mind installing myself the
.apkviaadbbut the more I learned about how positively strict the process to publish to it is (via https://github.com/Mentra-Community/MentraOS/issues/1168 ) then I also take absence from F-droid as potentially warning side a project isn’t truly open or rely on proprietary parts or anti-pattern.Good question, I think it might have something to do with it being useless until you download a region iso or something. I can’t really speak to it though.
Balatro, all the other rougelites, monster train, slay the spire, etc.
Balatro is great but eats my battery for some reason
You can try lowering or outright disabling some of the special graphical effects like the simulated CRT scanlines.
Shattered Pixel Dungeon.
Infinitely replayable procedurally generated roguelike that is hard but fun to master, and a blast to play. It’s been on my phone for five years now and I still go back to it.
Totally offline, totally ad free, and still receiving active updates from the single developer.
It’s also got a pretty robust community.
By the way, it’s completely open source (GPL-3.0)
Oh yeah! And a lot of spins because of that, if you use android or computer.
In my experience the play store is awful to use if you’re looking for anything that’s not full of ads and/or extremely monetized. I recommend only using it when you know exactly which app you’re looking for.
Generally I find games through itch.io and recommendations from others. Also there are foss game emulators on GitHub and similar sites.
Netflix recently started offering mobile games as well.
Ages ago humble bundle did android games but that’s all in the past now.
I’ve been enjoying worldbox and lichess. I used to have a bunch more but the latest Android version made most of my collection stop working.
Slay the Spire: it’s the same game as on PC or any other medium. Fantastic game. Obviously costs the same as other places (about $10), but well worth it!
Pokemon TCG Pocket. I started early with this, so I have had no problem with being F2P, but I’m sure that late adopters would need to pay some amount to become competitive. Still should be playable F2P, though. Anyways, it’s amazingly unintrusive when it comes to real money transactions. No interrupting ads and you basically have to search for the in-game shop to find the microtransactions.
Roller Coaster Tycoon Classic. This one might have changed since I got it ~8 years ago. It’s a pretty good mobile version of the original game. I’ve spent a lot of time with this game.
Stardew Valley, Shattered Pixel Dungeon, Luanti with VoxelLibre, Mojo Launcher, Unciv, Lemuroid to play console games like Crash Bandicoot or Super Mario Bros, Geometry Dash (not the Lite version, that has ads), 2048, Vector Pinball, 1010! Klooni
Shattered is fantastic, but I’d hate it on any phone that you don’t have a stylus for.
I really like the polybridge series of games. Bridge puzzle game worh great mechanics.
Lots of good PC ports. The Kotor series and Baldurs gate 1 and 2 and icewind dale ports are good.
Autochess is fun. Lots of opportunities to spend money but none are important, just cosmetic.
Balatro is good (if you like that game as i do)
And also a series of games called “doors” are fun to pass the time. Like a puzzle box where solving one element opens another until the door is opened.
It is 99% crap on the stores though. I tend to get ports and emulators for most of my mobile gaming.
I’ve been playing old electron engine game like icewind Dale & Baldur’s gate. Even Neverwinter nights runs & plays great.
Emulated? Ported?
Fully ported, mod & module compatible! There is potentially infinite playtime in Neverwinter nights cause of it.
Dayum. Sold.
They are the enhanced edition ports i would imagine. Ive played through icewind dale fully on my foldy information rectangle. Played through most of bg1 and going to play the err midqual? Between bg1 and bg2 called siege of dragonspear before i go on to bg2. Characters can be imported between all three.
Unciv
