What mobile games are we looking forward to in the second half of 2018? - Emily's picks

2018 has been a bit of a mix in mobile gaming. We've had some real gems like Oddmar, Candleman, and Dandara, and we've had some disappointments, but what about the future?

These upcoming games have me excited for a number of different reasons, and some of them are a little – er – weird. Though it's easy to just focus on what we know is coming and what we know we're going to get, it's much more fun to look forward and speculate on what we don't know, eh?

No? Just me? Well, we'd best get to it then.

The Elder Scrolls: Blades

I know, duh, of course I'd be looking forward to Blades. At E3 last month, in Bethesda's presentation we got a surprisingly detailed look at the RPG and I was rather chuffed with how it's formed.

Rather than slapping its name on an isometric real-time third-person battler or strategic combat game of some sort, the RPG we'll be getting is rather close to that of the Skyrim we all know and love. You can switch up viewpoints (playing in landscape or portrait mode), choose your fighting style, and enjoy some neat combat mechanics built for touchscreen.

Granted, my one major trepidation is how Blades will handle its free to play status. If our adventure is doomed to be blocked behind energy bars and paywalls, I'll be brushing my hands of it pretty quickly.

Dragalia Lost

This is a weird one for me to get excited about because none of Nintendo's mobile IPs have wowed me so far. When I read about Dragalia Lost I thought it sounded interesting and was keen to see something new on the cards, however my real excitement came when more details were revealed a couple of weeks ago.

Dragons are cool on their own, but the fact you can either transform into dragons or use their powers (the info's a little unclear at the mo) just intrigues me. Aside from that, both the characters and the world have been developed to the point of which there are allegedly 600 thousand words in-game. I don't know about you, but I loved a fully-fledged story.

Even without the story, the combat sounds intelligent enough that it may give you a decent, technical challenge within your party and requires you to approach a fight with a little more planning.

Gears Pop!

Yeah, I'm surprised this is on here too. I told you some of my reasons were kind-of weird.

Gears Pop! is a game we know very little about. Like The Elder Scrolls: Blades, it was announced during E3, but with absolutely no details whatsoever. We got a quick trailer which showed off its rendered art style and after that I'm pretty sure everyone had the same expression – pure confusion.

A few weeks back, however, there was a teeny bit more information released during an interview with Rod Fergusson (Studio Head at The Coalition). Apparently it'll be a MOBA rush-style game built for the platform in mind. Alright, it's not a lot of info, but at least we've more of an idea.

Funnily enough, it's not its genre that puts it on the list for me, but rather the experimentation. During that interview, Fergusson mentioned that they chose the Funko Pop! art style so that they would have more creative freedom to make something non M-rated. There's a lot of passion behind the project which really makes me keen to see how it turns out.

Radiant One

There's not long to wait until we all get to see how this one works and I actually only found out about this the other day. Still, it struck me and piqued my interest very quickly indeed. Radiant Ones heads to iOS on July 25th and it's a story-driven adventure game that's rather… bizarre.

While I'm not sure how it'll control or how much freedom the mobile version will give you, its plot is what caught my eye. After finding a mysterious book about lucid dreams the protagonist, Daniel, can suddenly do magical things like fly and create worlds. Of course, things go awry when a malicious force comes in to play, so it's up to you to help him pass the test and get enlightenment.

In my head this story sounds like it can have multiple different realities as to what the 'dream world' actually is. Daniel's trying to escape from his boring life and social media at the beginning, so that could set things up for interpretation nicely if it's as clever as I hope.

Aside from that it's got a gorgeous art style and some seriously interesting level design, so we'll just have to wait and see how it performs at the end of the month.

Cat Quest 2

I'm excited just to get more Cat Quest to be honest. After CQ2 was announced I saw a lot of responses along the lines of ' it's basically the same game, but with a dog as well'. While that may not be far from the truth, I really couldn't care less.

Cat Quest is a brilliant game on every platform it's been on and even if CQ2 is similar to its predecessor it's not going to be identical. No, we'll have more weapons, more spells, a new story, some doggo companions, and new passive abilities which give you more customisation.

We can expect the game sometime in early 2019, so we'll have to wait for more gameplay footage to see what's actually changed. Either way, I'm looking forward to it a lot.