While the 'free-to-play' market has taken a bit of a beating
of late due to gamers falling out of love with the use of in-app
payments, the world of mobile gaming is still an exciting one. Whether
you want games that will last the length of a commute, or want to be
lost in a port of GTA where you spend hours mowing down pedestrians and
making money out of murder, there is a game on here for you. The
list is a mixture of free and paid for games, and also that one in
between - some in-app payments aren't really that bad. Honest! If by the
end you think we have missed something special off of the list, let us
know and we will see if it is worthy of inclusion further down the line.
1. Dots
Proving the notion that simpler is better on mobile, Dots
is stupidly, almost patronisingly simple, with players just drawing
lines between coloured dots. Link them up and, as coloured things tend
to do in games, they disappear, So more fall in. And it carries on like
this, getting more and more compulsive as you chase bigger and better
dot combos.
2. The Simpsons Tapped Out
EA's game
based on the inhabitants of Springfield is surprising in a few ways.
It's free, which is quite the thing, plus, although what many would
deride as a 'freemium' game, it's more than possible to keep it going in
the background, pottering away, slowly unlocking all of its content for
free. Free-to-play done right, for once.
3. Angry Birds Space
Developer Rovio has done quite a lot of aggressive whoring of the Angry Birds franchise, but this space-based fork
of the simplistic physics game series is really worth a try. For one,
it introduces some new play concepts, with the planet-based levels
requiring different tactics, plus the puzzles generally need a bit more
of a thoughtful approach than the chuck-it-and-see of the originals.
4. Badland
Has a bit of an 'indie' vibe about it this one, with Badland
offering a weird, dark and gloomy world, in which you fly about in
control of a… blob thing. Your blob gets bigger and smaller, splits into
loads of mini clones, and generally baffles you about what might lie
around the next corner. We like a bit of a surprise, and this is full of
them.
5. Stick Cricket
Stick Cricket
is a fantastically simple little game that reduces cricket to its core
values - you just smash every ball as hard as you can. There's no
worrying about field positioning, just a bat and a ball coming at you
very quickly. Initially it seems impossible to do anything other than
make a complete mess of things and having your little man smashed
upside-down, but it soon clicks.
6. Cestos
Cestos
is sort of a futuristic recreation of curling, where players chuck
marbles at each other to try and smash everyone else's balls/gems down
the drain and out of the zone. The best part is this all happens online
against real humans, so as long as there's a few other bored people out
there at the same time you'll have a real, devious, cheating, quitting
person to play against. Great.
7. PewPew
The developer calls this a "multidirectional shoot them up"
presumably because describing it as a "Geometry Wars clone" might have
got him in a bit of legal trouble. Regardless of its origin, it's a
superb shooter with some bizarre game modes and controls that work
exceptionally well on touch devices.
8. Super Bit dash
One of the best examples of the new wave of retro-inspired platformers, Super Bit Dash
is a scrolling platformer where you don't control the scroll -- but you
do have a say in the jumping. It's a case of learning the levels and
playing them again and again and again, until you have the required
muscle memory to smash through without thinking about it.
