Mobile gaming has come a long way from its early days, and now provides the fun and immersion of some of the best Android titles.
The match-three adventure Candy Crush platform has a multigenerational fanbase. And with Monument Valley, surreal geometry becomes the match-three framework in a similarly whimsical, puzzle-driven adventure. Pokemon GO invites players to track down Pokestops and Gyms in their surroundings.
Asphalt 9: Legends
Race on roads charging with adrenaline and crazy stunts. Win the races with nitro boosts and defy the laws of gravity! Choose between manual or TouchDrive control. Can you dethrone the leaderboard? Crazy Racing is an offline car racing game with multiple game modes and gameplay types. It’s a premium game available for FREE.
As a mobile racing game, the ambition of Gameloft Barcelona’s Asphalt 9 (2018) is staggering. The cars look glorious and there’s an endless selection of them to unlock, in this sequel to the equally impressive Asphalt.
Granted, iRacing falls on the informal side of the racing game spectrum and is easily the most gorgeous, fastest and data-heavy racing sim out there, but updates appear regularly — something that’s pretty much unheard of for freemium titles.
Data Wing
With the promise that Data Wing is going to be another top-down, razor-fast racing game, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was just another high-speed racer after the glory of Impossible Road. And then you’d be wrong. Data Wing is much, much cooler than that.
Guide a little triangle-shaped vessel through a neon-inspired cyberscape. Touch either side of the screen to turn, and both sides to brake (your ship speeds up if you drive it next to walls).
On the gamepad and PC inputs, the controls are smooth and satisfying for all the right reasons, and the super-saturated colours accompanied by chromatic aberration give the graphics a dreamlike quality that only enhances the style. Meanwhile, there’s an oddly surreal vaporwave soundtrack to listen to, if you have AirPods.
Ticket to Ride
As far as mobile games go there are lots of board games out there for you to choose from. However, none of them match up to the depth and gameplay of Ticket to Ride. Its move-by-move gameplay means that you can easily teach it to new competitors and there is a huge amount of gameplay and fun to be found in a race against the clock to see who can lay their tracks first and reach their destinations before your opponents do!
Ticket to Ride is a simple, fun experience that’s a blast to play online with friends or random strangers in a lobby, but the game really shines when played at home using local multiplayer and the pass-and-play mode. It also works well in a single-player fashion, either on your own if you like to see the AI battle against itself, or if you’d like to give your friends or arteficial companions a bit of a headstart to make the game more challenging. It has a lot of free expansions (1910 maps for Europe and an extra mode where you play in big cities and have big city mode plus Nordic Countries’ added routes for extra replay value).
PUBG Mobile
PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds Mobile (PUBG Mobile) is the most complete full-scale combat gaming experience available on mobile, though it is a far cry from Xbox or PC console game controller play. Instead, it packs the adrenalin of combat into a mobile game.
Dropping in from a plane together in the same location, opponents try to eliminate each other to win their last-man-standing death match for ultimate bragging rights and a bounty of in-game currency, or ‘chicken dinner’.
Call of Duty: Mobile
Call of Duty has played with mobile gaming before, and previous attempts were unpleasantly unplayable. Now, however, with Call of Duty: Mobile they have finally nailed it – this free-to-play shooter is hugely playable, featuring weapons from their Black Ops and Modern Warfare franchises, and their Zombies mode as well as a 100-player battle royale free‑for-all. Progression is satisfactory, fan favourite content selection!
On top of that, unlike many other FPS titles with energy meters or just straight-up ads that cost you money per play session (the horror!), Battlerite has no such restrictions and is a good option for FPS fans.
Doom & Doom II
Bethesda took note of Doom’s newfound gold status and re-released the pair into a single edition, retconned with widescreen support and 120Hz monitor support.
And its most enduring legacy is the ingenious level design that makes it productive (and therefore enduring), now as much as ever. Every level of Doom – Scar Base to Ash Mill – offers its own specific equation: here is where you have to go. Here are your options for getting there. Now you must figure out the best way to throw yourself down these chasms and into this mechanised meat grinder.
For sheer diversity and variety, though, you can’t go wrong with an old school classic such as Doom. It boasts one of the most active open mod communities around, with literally hundreds of custom maps to explore. The perfect antidote to the hyper-Gaza-Strips of your tribal affiliation.
World of Tanks Blitz
This free-to-play mobile port of a popular PC and console series is the gold standard of games that convert well from full-size platforms to handheld systems with touch controls, and the turn-based strategy rewards player skill.
While its core multiplayer mode hasn’t changed much for mobile, it has tweaked it somewhat for the platform. Upon launch, teams are reduced to seven players per team, match times are shortened, and map sizes have shrunk as well.
In gameplay, players start with light tanks traversing maps at speed and gradually climb the dizzying high-tech tree, earning new upgrades and equipment.
