Gears POP! guide - Other games that won't make you wish you had Rustlung

Another big-name franchise has come to mobile, and it’s (unsurprisingly) pretty bad. Gears POP! follows in the footsteps of Dr. Mario World and The Elder Scrolls: Blades. All are high-profile mobile releases and all actively engender ill will toward mobile gaming by being somewhat boring knock offs of predatory free-to-play games.

Hopefully, with the launch of Apple Arcade, this will be less of a problem. In the meantime though, there are some games out on mobile that might give you what you want from Gears POP! without subjecting you to its clunky gameplay or intensely haunting Funko Pop aesthetics. See below:

Monsters With Attitude

If you want a fun multiplayer game on mobile that is still free-to-play, Monsters With Attitude is a good way to go. It’s a game where you control a kaiju-like monster and compete with other players to wreak as much havoc as possible. This game uses the same kinds of annoying monetization schemes as Gears POP!, but it plays more like a party game so it doesn’t feel as unbalanced. It also feels better to play in almost every way.

Tacticool

Gears POP! is in no way a shooter. It only borrows the aesthetics of Gears of War to create a lame Clash Royale clone. If you want a multiplayer shooter in your life on mobile though, you should check out Tacticool. It’s about as fun as a multiplayer shooter can be on touchscreens, and it also happens to share a lot of Gears-like DNA: It's team-focused, success is more about positioning and holding strategic map points, and the game is full of lame baditude, just like Baird.

Space Marshals 2

Another more shooty option here is Space Marshals 2. If you want a single-player focused third-person shooter that forces you to use cover, this game is about the only thing on the App Store that fits that bill. It also just so happens to be a really great shooter in its own right. Check it out if you haven’t already.

XCOM: Enemy Within

As weird as it sounds, I actually think the closest way of emulating a Gears of War-like game on mobile would be to make it turn-based, and it just so happens that the only turn-based strategy game featuring super soldiers taking cover and fighting off an alien threat is XCOM: Enemy Within. Just name your squadmates Marcus, Dom, Cole, Carmine, and Dizzy, and you’re good to go. You’re welcome.