For a few years now, I have done some traditional Game of the Year honorifics where I've given props to titles via various categories and finished with the silly exercise of trying to rank the top ten games of the year in an ordered list to declare a "winner."
There's still value in this, I think, but I have nevertheless decided to do something a bit different. Mobile is a strange landscape that feels like it gets stranger every year, and it causes a lot of people to overlook the entire landscape unless some splashy PC or console phenom gets ported. I get the logic here in entirely, and I also think that it would make for a list of games where I say Balatro is a really great game not entirely useful.
So instead I am just going to highlight some mobile titles from this year that I think folks should give a fair shake, even if they haven't heard of them or generally don't play mobile games in any dedicated sense. Here they are below:
When I started playing Dungeons of Dreadrock for the first time, I had no idea the amount of tricky surprises that were awaiting me. It was the combination of clever wrinkles as well as their novelty that made it one of my top games of 2022. With a sequel, though, how do you recapture that same magic? Dungeons of Dreadrock 2 has a few new tricks up its sleeves to keep veteran players on the hook, but I'm not sure any of the innovations here will win over any new fans.
Return to Dreadrock
The App Store description for Dungeons of Dreadrock 2 accurately describes it as "episode 2" of what now seems to be a series. This game takes the exact same look, feel, setting, and story of the original Dreadrock and continues pushing it forward.
In this game, you play as a priestess of the Order of the Flame and use your unique, magical skillset to solve 100 more puzzles within a different part of Dreadrock's dungeons. This means you'll still be scooting a hero character around single-screen, grid-based hallways, but you'll be taking advantage of powers imbued in your staff and other collectibles and items to solve increasingly intricate challenges.
More story, more action, more dread
With this in mind, Dungeons of Dreadrock 2 wastes no time getting immediately complicated in the ways that made the first game such a unexpected delight. On top of that, this game leans more heavily into its story, which both help flesh out the world but also provide nice breaks between stretches of puzzling.
By starting somewhat complicated, though, Dungeons of Dreadrock 2 seems like it has to find increasingly byzantine ways to stretch its mechanics in later stages of the game to feel like it's continuing to up the ante. While some of this results some of the same highs that made the first game world feel so real and controllable, there are also times where the envelope feels like it's pushed a little too far. Whether it's the limits of the game's single-finger control scheme, levels of abstraction that disrupt the otherwise grounded feel, or some combination of the two, late-game areas can feel hard to enjoy outside of appreciating their design on a somewhat academic level.
New players beware
If you are wondering at this point whether this game is for you, I'd say that if you enjoyed the first Dungeons of Dreadrock and saw it through to the end, then there's a lot to like in 2. Otherwise, I'm not so sure. In a lot of ways, the first game feels like a prerequisite to this one, to the point that a new player will likely have a hard time following the story or understanding game concepts that are more gently introduced in the original game.
All that said, Dungeons of Dreadrock 2 is very accommodating when it comes to figuring out how to move forward in it. Every level has multiple hints players can use at their discretion, with the final hint offer typically spelling out exactly what you need to do to reach the next place you have to get to.
The bottom line
I am still enamored with the way the Dreadrock games establish a consistent logic and tight scope to each and every one of their puzzles. Even when tasked with juggling what feels like a slightly unwieldy set of concepts in this latest game, there are still those magic moments where everything clicks and you spot a wild solution right away. Perhaps Dungeons of Dreadrock 2 could have done with a little less envelope pushing, but I am glad it exists nonetheless.
Netmarble has launched the latest version update within Solo Leveling: ARISE, offering a plethora of new content for you to sink your teeth into this holiday season. In particular, you can discover more about Chapters 21-23 of the Main Story with new Jeju Island Raid content, along with boosted combat power for Sung Jinwoo himself. And if that alone doesn't lure you in, here are three more compelling reasons that will – both newcomers and veteran players will find Solo Leveling: ARISE, boosted with its grand Ver 3.0 Update and a series of events with rich rewards, an exciting, eye-catching game to enjoy!
Test the limits of your combat prowess
With the massive Jeju Island Raid content in the Ver 3.0 Update, you can flex Jinwoo's skills up to Lv. 100 along with an expanded Bond Reward system. This also means an extra Gate Difficulty plus more Activity Funds.
I play a lot of mobile games, but if you are a keep observer of my iOS gaming habits, you'll notice I spend a lot of that gaming time on my iPad. There's a lot of reasons for this, but none of them are particularly germaine to this review. I brought it up to underscore that when I say games like Lost for Swords are the reason I started looking for games to play on mobile devices to begin with, it carries an appropriate amount of added weight. This card game is quick, smart, replayable, and feels fresh despite being part of a genre that is arguably oversaturated at this point.
Decked out dungeons
Lost for Swords is a deck-building dungeon-crawler roguelike and wastes no time making itself stand out. Every dungeon consists of essentially three different decks: one for your hero, one for the enemy creatures, and one for the dungeon itself. After picking a hero and entering a certain tower, cards from each of these decks are played onto a 5x5 grid which creates each individual floor of the dungeon.
Whichever hero character you choose is also played down on the grid and you can tap to move them between empty spaces or into cards to interact with them. For your own cards, typically interaction means equipping gear or activating spells/abilities, whereas tapping on enemies initiates a fight. The entire game is turn-based but each card interaction counts as a turn, making Lost for Swords just as much about deckbuilding as it is about managing space and combat tactics.
Wild cards
On top of the novel mechanics for card-based navigation, Lost for Swords also has no qualms with creating cards, items, and dungeon setups that are off-the-wall. The game's excellent tutorial stages for each hero type do a great job of showing examples of these interactions and how they can be leveraged to their fullest. This in turn makes every run feel like it's brimming with potential to take one or more unconventional paths to victory.
As a quick example, one of my runs as a wizard put me in a situation where I could essentially deal an unending loop of fire damage to enemies, but to get to that point I had to ditch any and all armor cards entirely and be careful not to catch myself in the radius of my firestorms. I also only finalized this deck setup right around the same time I reached the end of the tower I was fighting, which is another thing worth celebrating Lost for Swords: Its sense of pacing is such that you almost always reach pinnacle deck strength right around the time you're facing off against the boss.
Feeling the dealing
This pitch-perfect pacing feels especially satisfying given how easy to play and track any given run of Lost for Swords is. In addition to having extremely mobile-friendly layouts for both portrait and landscape play, the game also has useful tools for inspecting cards and undoing accidental moves. The entire design of the game also has a pronounced, tactile quality to the point that it feels like a game you could play with physical cards. There's very little in the way of abstract or hidden mechanics, and things like equipment collections, card replacements, discards, etc. are constantly shown on screen so you can always keep tabs on the game's upkeep (and bend it to your advantage).
Lost for Swords is a free-to-download game so you can try it out before deciding to pay $ 4.99 once to unlock the whole experience. In playing for this review, I tried it on both my iPad and my phone and ended up sinking much more time into it on my smaller device. Something that would be a nice addition to the game would be some kind of iCloud syncing so your progress can continue between devices, but given the one-off nature of runs in Lost for Swords, this isn't a huge deal.
The bottom line
Just when I think there is no more to explore or uncover in the realm of card-based roguelikes, something like Lost for Swords comes along to prove me wrong. Its fresh approach to deck-building and dungeon-crawling is as friendly and manageable as it is elegantly designed and carefully balanced.
It's always fun when a splashy multiplayer game comes to mobile because they are few and far between, so I was excited to see the notification about Call of Duty: Warzone Mobile (finally) launching last week and wanted to try it out. As someone who was familiar with the PC version of the game, I thought I had a good sense of what to expect, but I was surprised to find myself quickly bored with the mobilized battle royale.
To be clear, Warzone Mobile doesn't seem to do anything drastically different than its console and PC counterpart. In fact, it retains its high player count, boasting now to be the mobile battle royale with the highest amount of live players per match. It also retains all of the features that distinguish the Call of Duty-branded battle royale apart from the others. So, I guess what I'm saying is that before you read on, know that if you are just interested in knowing how much Warzone Mobile is like Warzone, the answer is very.
Every time I boot up Death Stranding on my iPad, I have no idea if it will actually load my most recent save. Sometimes after the 90+ second load time I am right where I left off. Sometimes, the game seemingly accidentally loads an old save and I just have to go into the system menu to reload to the more recent one. And at other times still, my most recent saves appear to have completely vanished.
Resident Evil 4 comes to iOS today, and we've taken video of the entire free portion that is available to let you see it in action and get a sense of how this new version fares. The short version is, this game feels an awful lot like the port job of Resident Evil Village, albeit with a modern classic, as opposed to a game that feels like a dated also-ran.
Read on below if you want more detailed perspective on Resident Evil 4 on iOS. Otherwise, you can look through the video to see it in action along with some light captions reflecting on the play session.
Apple talked a big game about bringing bigger (ahem) games to mobile at last year's WWDC, and the first title they touted as part of this effort is finally out. Capcom's Resident Evil Village is out now on the App Store and is a complete mobile port of the original game.
I've gotten my hands on it and put a decent amount of time into the spooky survival-horror game, getting just a bit past the title's "free-to-start" section and I recorded most of that experience in the video above. Because of Capcom's rules about sharing gameplay, the video also has editorial captions about what I think of the game, but I'll also outline some more thoughts below.
Whilst tower defences can be very fun to play, in an era of boundless technological advances and a lot of big action games dominating the market, they can sometimes feel a bit slow, a bit too static. Set in their ways. But with the recent release of Defense Derby, Krafton has taken this genre and injected it with a heavy kick of pace.
Go head-to-head-to-head with three other players
One of the first things you will notice as you start a round is that you are no longer just playing against a computer. There are three other players on their phones too, and you are all competing to be the last surviving castle in the face of some pretty unrelenting monster invasions.
Ever since the launch of Clash of Clans, tower defence has become absolutely synonymous with mobile gaming, yet it's very rare that you’ll see a TD game topping the app store charts. Of course, there are many reasons why this is the case, but for us one of the more significant reasons is that very few games have attempted to push the genre forward. Afterall, why play something new if it simply repeats the same formula?
Thankfully, this is definitely not the case with Krafton’s recently released tower defence title, Defense Derby, which revitalises the genre with its innovative scouting and bidding system and huge variety of PvP and PvE modes.
If you caught our recent coverage of Defense Derby, you’ll know that we’re pretty high on the game right now. So here are 3 reasons why you should be too.
Note: There are also FREE creator skins available if you use the following codes by going to the in-game store and tapping the "Coupon" button:
Since its official release, I've had a hard time putting down *Omega Strikers. I'm still very much as high on it as I was when I posted my glowing review, and now there's even more reason for me to play it. This week the game saw its first significant update, which added new characters, a new map, and some other little tweaks to make this already great game even better.
You can check out footage of my time inspecting and trying out the game's new characters (and going through the shop to purchase all the new skins, emotes, etc.) in the video above, and you can read on for some additional impressions and an overall evaluation of the update.
I always get excited to see how certain developers push the envelope when it comes to gaming on iOS. As a result, it should come as no surprise that I was eager to get my hands on War Mongrels from Destructive Creations. This version is a straight port of the PC and console title, and--although it may not be a technical marvel on those platforms--bringing it over in an essentially unchanged state kind of is.
The game came out three weeks ago and I immediately got a code for it, but the hold up on posting impressions was due to the fact that this mobile version had some significant issues running on the devices it says it is compatible on the App Store. And by significant I mean that when trying to play the game on my 3rd generation iPad Pro the game wouldn't even boot to the menu. The only thing I could do was view the production logos before the game hard crashed out to my home screen.
I have a lot of mixed feelings with my time with Vendir: Plague of Lies. It's an experience that in some moments are incredible in their ambition and execution and in others is sloggy and irritating. Most of the highest points of the game I've encountered without having to engage with the game's free-to-play monetization model, but I have also run up against its pinch points that push players to pay and they feel horrible.
With all of that in mind, it feels kind of impossible to assign a score to it. It is goodbad and badgood. You should play it but also not. Or maybe watch someone play it. Or maybe just play the dialog quests in the starting area and quit as soon as you have to fight something. I don't really know. I am still intrigued to keep playing it but every time I do I almost always end up quitting out of frustration once I encounter a random battle with enemies that would seem defeatable if I fed the game a considerable amount of money that I don't think it deserves.
Have you ever been granted a boon by the benevolent Visnu, or aided in the midst of combat by the mighty Ra? How about accepting the gracious assistance of Baldr as you fight to ward off hordes of enemies at the gate? EF Defense not only challenges your tower defence skills but also engages you with unique maps that are anything but static - these mighty Guardians will lend a hand when needed across colourful stages and with over 70 Heroes.
The tower defence genre might be familiar to most players, but what else can you expect to dive into with Ekkorr's new game?
Unique unit types and guardians
As you step into the game, you'll encounter more than 8 maps with dynamic elements that are key to your defence. You'll deploy warriors to keep invading enemies at bay across six tribes, and each one has its own unique playstyle. In particular, Heroes from the Human, Elf, Orc, Undead, Angel and Demon tribes will also have various weapons, armour and accessories you can equip to boost your combat power, with over 200 kinds of equipment to discover.
Of course, you will also have legendary gods (12 Guardians) that can support you during battles, each with its own set of mighty skills that can buff your warriors or wipe out enemies in a single blow.
As Arcade has been languishing, some other subscription services have been trying to establish their own foothold on the App Store, and perhaps the most attention-grabbing of these services has been Netflix. With any level of Netflix's streaming tiers, users also gain access to a mobile game library that so far includes breakout surprise hit Poinpy and modern classic Into the Breach.
Between Netflix's recent moves in securing hot titles for its service and Apple announcing recently that certain titles on Arcade are disappearing, I figured it was high time to compare the services directly as a handy way for you to decide which--if any--mobile game subscription service might be worth subscribing to.
