Best iOS games of 2019
Apple Arcade is great, but these iOS games show there’s still a lot to love in the regular App Store. Leif Johnson reports
Mobile gaming is in an ugly spot, so a popular narrative goes, and that’s why Apple tried to tidy up the situation with its curated Apple Arcade subscription service. And we’re big fans of Apple Arcade. It’s a flawed narrative, though. Look beyond the chaff of flavour of the month, ad-riddled games and microtransaction-heavy ‘freemium’ titles, and you’ll find games that are every bit as good as what you’ll see on Apple Arcade. Some of them are even better. Read on to find our favourites of the past year.
Ordia
Price: £3.99 from fave.co/2Qxuwmk
Ordia plays a lot like Angry Birds: pull back on your avatar with your finger, and it fires off in the direction you aimed in. But that’s about where the similarities end. Here you’re a gloopy eye-like blob ascending through the primordial ooze. Along the way, you plop over to other gloopy blobs for support and calculate catapults over spikes, until at last you break through the surface at the end of the stage – and, perhaps, to the next stage of evolution. It’s a simple concept and not particularly original. Ordia’s excellence, though, lies in how well it executes this concept across three worlds and 30 challenging levels.
Hyper Light Drifter
Price: £4.99 from fave.co/2YG3tKD
Hyper Light Drifter is an action RPG that’s only three years old, although its pixel art style makes it look like a relic from my childhood. It’s almost as timeless as those digital ’80s adventures, and it combines artful minimalist storytelling about a ‘drifter’ suffering from a mysterious illness with gameplay that was pulled straight from The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. It’s also famously intense, but the touch controls translate well (aside from some annoyances such as having to reach too far to trigger health boosts). I highly recommend playing it with a controller, though.
Dead Cells
Price: £8.99 from fave.co/2N7iI8c
The title Dead Cells refers to the hero of Motion Twin’s game, who’s a bundle of sentient cells that slithers into the bodies of decapitated prisoners in their…cells. Like Castlevania, it’s a 2D game that relies on exploring and backtracking through various levels. The key difference is that these levels randomly generate each time you go through. And you’ll be going through it a lot. Dead Cells is a hard game, not least because it features a permadeath mechanic that makes you start from the beginning every time you die. Fortunately, you can keep the boosts you acquire and unlock better weapons, and so with every attempt, Dead Cells gets a tad easier.
Sky: Children of the Light
Price: Free from fave.co/2YvijUQ
Sky: Children of the Light is a visually striking game about empathy, cooperation with other players, and lightweight puzzle solving that’s framed as a tale about restoring spirits to their rightful place among the constellations. I initially worried the in-app purchases would smother the intensity of that experience, but happily they’re benign. It’s short and simple, and you can even set up the controls to play with one finger if preferred. Earlier last year I lamented that it didn’t launch with controller support, but luckily that support finally came in September.
Call of Duty: Mobile
Price: Free from fave.co/2t1f9d1
Call of Duty: Mobile isn’t just a good phone shooter: it feels like Call of Duty. That especially comes through in the maps and the five-versus-five team death match and domination modes, but you’ll also feel it the 100-player battle royale that resembles Modern Warfare’s Blackout map. You can play with either touch controls or a gamepad. It’s free to play, so – as you should expect – you’ll find some microtransactions. They’re benign as these things go, though, and you could play almost everything without dropping a penny. The catch? You’ll be reminded at almost every turn that you could be dropping a few pounds in the store.
Star Traders: Frontiers
Price: £6.99 from fave.co/2tJ8Quo
Star Traders: Frontiers’ appealing mix of strategy and roleplaying makes it a fine match for mobile. And while there’s a lot to do here, it rarely feels overcomplicated. Other spacefaring games lean too heavily on familiar sci-fi tropes, but Frontiers presents a galaxy where space pirates conduct trade or hobnob with fellow corsairs while dressed like gunslingers or 18th-century rajahs. Nor is this individualization merely for show, as each crew member plays a vital role in combat missions and planetary exploration. Free of strict devotion to existing properties, Frontiers is able to go places where few other mobile space sims have gone before.
The Gardens Between
Price: £4.99 from fave.co/2tBxHAD
The Gardens Between is an artful puzzler lets us see what big differences small changes can make. With swipes of your finger, you nudge time backwards and forwards around two friends, letting them subtly alter their actions so they can ascend the peaks of small islands made from the detritus of their memories. It’s not always adept at using the gameplay to communicate its messages. Some elements seem to exist only for the sake of a good puzzle. Even so, it succeeds at leaving an emotional impact, chiefly on the strength of the animations of its human heroes and the haunting notes of its soundtrack.
Telling Lies
Price: £6.99 from fave.co/31rdklL
In Telling Lies you’re a National Security Agency agent, who’s been tasked with piecing together the story behind a traumatic event by watching and listening to secretly recorded one-sided video chats from a large cast of characters. Your job is to pull the most important clues from what you hear. This isn’t easy though, as you’ll quickly realize some of these chumps are shameless liars. The story unfolds almost entirely through videos, although playthroughs can change dramatically because you’ll have to choose which files to sift through. The acting is phenomenal, and it’s one of the best detective games on the App Store.
Forgotton Anne
Price: Free to try (£9.99 for full game) from fave.co/2QVeaD7
If you’ve ever wished for a game set in the world of a Studio Ghibli film, Forgotton Anne is probably about as close as you’re going to get. Anne herself is an Enforcer (a cop of sorts), and she’s one of only two humans living in a realm where all forgotten things end up when they’re lost. The citizens of this place consist of everything from talking guns to bartending fridges, and Anne leaps among them with some occasionally awkward platforming. Good thing, then, that telling a good story is always the chief focus here. You’ll find few other games on the iOS App Store with so much heart.
Gwent: The Witcher Card Game
Price: Free from fave.co/2FzruaM
Gwent is a standalone version of a collectible card game that was designed for 2015’s The Witcher 3: the Wild Hunt (one of the most acclaimed roleplaying games of all time), and much like Hearthstone before it, it’s arguably better suited for devices like the iPad than to its original home on the PC. Fair warning: it’s unconventional as card games go, and I actually avoided it while playing The Witcher 3 because I couldn’t wrap my head around it. Fortunately, it’s a little easier to pick up on iOS, and there’s a thriving community of active players when you’re ready to play against someone other than the AI.
Rolando: Royal Edition
Price: £2.99 from fave.co/2Taptu1
Nostalgia isn’t often justified, as old games and movies often aren’t as good as we remember them. But Rolando: Royal Edition is an exception. This 2008 game vanished from the App Store in the wake of iOS architecture changes, but it’s still wonderful enough to justify the near-perfect score we gave it in our original review. It’s all about using the iPhone’s tilt controls to roll ball-like characters through puzzles with springboards, passages, and other elements before you can advance to the next level. It’s a nice callback to the days when tilt controls were all the range, and Rolando is a reminder that few games since have used them so effectively.