Campbell has been writing about games for the majority of his adult life and made the jump into covering mobile games in 2013. He is always on Twitter when he's not playing games.
Every day, we pick out a curated list of the best mobile discounts on the App Store and post them here. This list won't be comprehensive, but it every game on it is recommended. Feel free to check out the coverage we did on them in the links below to further vet these discounted games before you decide to buy:
Games marked with an asterisk(*) denote that the entire developer/publisher’s catalog is discounted, despite the fact that all of their games may not be listed here.
Over a year into the Apple Arcade experiment, I’m adjusting my approach to these rankings to make it a bit less cumbersome to update and read. For the most part, this means the number of updates on previously released games will decrease, and the text below each entry will be kept to a brief-yet-accurate justification for its positioning.
This has less to do with the pace of Apple Arcade releases and more to do with the fact that the general quality of games on the service simply isn’t what it should be. In the time that one release comes to the service, multiple high quality games hit the App Store that you don’t have to pay monthly upkeep for. Unless something drastic changes with the service, my opinion on it probably won’t change much. With the most recent update bringing older established titles to the service, Arcade is certainly the strongest it has ever been, but additional shakeups like this will need to keep happening to finally sell me on the service.
We were obviously big fans of Genshin Impact when it launched last year, so much so that it grabbed our Game of the Year award. Since that time, though, the game (and our enthusiasm fo it) had gone somewhat quiet.
You see, Genshin Impact is a service game, but since last winter there had been precious little added to the experience. Post-Dragonspine, a couple of story quests showed up and a trickle of new characters came and went, but there was nothing really new and exciting for players to latch onto--regardless of whether they played daily or dropped off months ago. This summer showed a glimpse of excitement with a temporary archipelago being added to the game, but the whole experience felt like stopgap effort designed to prevent more of the player base moving on to something else.
iOS has always been a great place to play card and board games digitally, provided the game selection available was to your taste. I've made bunch of great discoveries over the years by trying out titles like Root and Lords of Waterdeep, but what I always secretly wanted all this time was a way to play Dominion on the go.
Thankfully, it seems like I'll be getting exactly what I've been waiting for soon, as Temple Gates Games is currently finishing up a digital version of Dominion for mobile and PC. In a certain way, I already have it, as this version of the game is already in open beta and you can play it right now. If you have any interest at all in Dominion or deck-building games, you should sign up right away.
The more I explore The Hollow Marshes, the more two things are evident: First is that The Divine Order is categorically evil. Second is that these marshes are confusing as all heck. In both video segments for today, I alternate between wandering around like a lost puppy and stumbling upon magisters that are doing bad stuff. At least one of those things makes me feel better about killing that blind, defenseless chap from the last entry.
The first video starts with me wandering up on some sorcerers that have been crucified, seemingly by The Divine Order. The nearby elf suggests there is nothing I can do to help them, though I find a way to seek vengeance soon enough. Not far from the brutal scene is a camp of dead Seekers that eventually leads me to the group of magisters that killed them. I didn't think twice about attacking, and feel like Divinity - Original Sin 2 has finally surpassed any point of sympathy or curiosity I might have had for The Divine Order. There's no perspective they could have that makes what they are doing seem worth it. They will continue to die by my hand as often as I can make it so.
In any case, my fight with these magisters got cut off prematurely, so I finish it off at the top of the second video here. From there, I find a mysterious dungeon with a cursed door that has killed some greedy magisters (good), though it doesn't really do the same to me (weird). I couldn't puzzle out how to open that door, but I found some more magisters to kill in order to meet Gareth, a Seeker who is looking for weapons that will help him steal a magister boat to get off this island. My guess is those weapons are behind that dungeon door and that that's my next step in Divinity - Original Sin 2's main quest.
All that said, I spent much of the rest of my time in this play session kind of wandering. It is almost never clear to me where I am supposed to go in this game, and the map system seems horribly unclear. Perhaps it's all these years of playing mobile games but I wish at some point there was just a way to teleport to the next thing I wanted to do or an arrow that could point me to where to go. I am finding some things along the way as I wander, but some of it is equally as puzzling so it doesn't quite feel all that rewarding.
I'm really hoping that in my next entry or two I'll have these weapons and be on a ship off this island. Only time will tell though. Maybe I'll be marooned here forever. Until next time!
The Hollow Marshes continue to get weirder and weirder the more I explore them. After some much-needed character maintenance at the top of the first video, I came across my first true crossroads in Divinity - Original Sin 2 that didn't feel like a forced choice. The second video has me actually encountering a Shrieker, which was mentioned as The Divine Order's super weapon in the previous entry, before wandering up on some more Voidwoken.
SNKRX is a roguelike dungeon-crawler modeled after the classic game of snake that makes great use of auto-chess systems to keep it always feeling fresh.
In the last gameplay journal for Divinity - Original Sin 2, I said goodbye to Fort Joy as I wandered deeper into The Hollow Marshes, and I was not exactly prepared for what I found. This area is packed with new info and lore about what is happening in the battle over the Sorcerers (i.e. you, your party, and anyone blessed with magical abilities), but with all these reveals I also encounter more and more questions.
Baba Is You released on iOS this week, and you should probably play it. If you're unfamiliar with the 2019 puzzle game, it's ostensibly about pushing things around as a little sheep. The only catch is that some of the objects you can push around in levels just so happen to also be the words that dictate the game rules, allowing you to change their meaning at will.
Steam Link Spotlight is a feature where we look at PC games that play exceptionally well using the Steam Link app. Our last entry looked at Genesis Noir. Read about how it plays using Steam Link over here.
It's becoming a trend now: PC card games by and large work well on touch interfaces. That is part of the reason why this entry focuses on Roguebook. Other big reasons we're taking a look at it include the fact that Richard Garfield--creator of Magic: The Gathering and (more recently) Keyforge--worked on the design of the card game while the game itself was developed by Abrakam, the team behind what is still my absolute favorite digital collectible card game, Faeria. Side note: Faeria is also great on Steam Link.
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