Best Apple Arcade games
The third part of our guide to Apple Arcade. David Price reports
Over the past two issues we’ve published our guide to the best Apple Arcade games. Here we continue our series.
We test primarily on iPhone. We also strongly recommend that you get a hardware controller, given how many of the games benefit from one: we test with an Xbox controller and a Rotor Riot wired controller to see if this works and how well it suits the gameplay. Many games support Bluetooth controllers despite not mentioning this fact in their App Store description.
121. THE LULLABY OF LIFE
Cheerful if limited music-themed puzzler. The protagonist, who can only be described as a blob, activates triggers and opens barriers by playing the correct sequence of sounds when prompted.
There’s more to that premise than you might think, given that the blob, as
well as playing his own notes, can recruit new sounds and drag them along for the ride; obstacles limit the places to which he can transport these handy sidekicks, and sometimes you have to make use of long strings and time-delayed loudspeakers to get a sound wave to its required destination. But you’re unlikely to get stuck on a puzzle for long.
Puzzle • Age 4+ • Single player only
• Supports hardware controllers (and works well)
122. SCRAPPERS
This takes me back. It’s a side-scrolling beat ‘em up!
You control a robot dustbin man, and your job is to collect rubbish and chuck it in a truck that follows you round. Your rivals don’t take kindly to you entering their turf, but you have a solution: kill them and dump their bodies in the truck.
Combat feels a bit button-bashy and I’ve yet to find much subtlety to it: there are combos – sort of – but these are generally to be avoided because the third attack is slower and can leave you vulnerable. I suspect it will work best as a multiplayer but it was unable to match me with any human teammates and there’s no option to fight alongside AI players.
Fighting • Age 9+ • 1-4 players • Supports hardware controllers
123. STELLAR COMMANDERS
Good-looking sci-fi strategy game set on an adorably tiny planetoid that’s about to blow up. It’s territory-based, and the idea is to conquer or destroy as many as possible using a mixture of ground troops, aircraft and longrange missiles.
A curious and disappointing omission is a single-player campaign with a difficulty curve and progression. Instead, as soon as you get through the brief tutorial (which, unusually for a mobile game, veers on the side of under- rather than overeducating you) you’re plunged into two-player duels against real people or AIs.
Strategy • Age 12+ • 1-2 players • No controller support
124. EARTHNIGHT
Dragons have conquered the planet, and everyone is welcoming our new reptile overlords... except the bloodthirsty main characters in EarthNight, an auto-runner with a slight resemblance to the great Tiny Wings.
Taking things one immense dragon at a time, you’re running, sliding, jumping and dash-gliding along the creature’s back, dodging smaller monsters and collecting loose treasure (why hasn’t it fallen off?), before reaching the head and stabbing it, Shadow of the Colossusstyle. Then you jump off the slain beast and free fall to the next.
The game looks terrific
and the variety of dragons is pleasingly challenging. But the Tiny Wings comparison is instructive: with far more movement options this cannot match that game’s elegant simplicity and accessibility, and it never really explains how to kill the dragons – although some players will like the fact that you have to work things out for yourself.
Puzzle • Age 9+ • Single player only • Supports hardware controllers
125. LOUD HOUSE: OUTTA CONTROL
Readers of a certain vintage will have fond memories of Flight Control, a bestselling iOS game that came out in 2009 and disappeared from the App Store in 2015. Players took the role of air traffic controller at a busy airport; each time a plane arrived, it was your job to trace a path on screen that led it to a runway of the correct colour, without hitting any other planes.
Outta Control is the same concept, except it’s squabbling children instead of aircraft. Which immediately makes less sense; children don’t explode if they bump into each other, nor do they disappear conveniently after reaching their destination. But fine.
The game works because this is such a brilliant and enduring mechanic
– as is obvious from the wealth of Flight Control copycats available to this day – and it’s undeniably addictive. But Outta Control has nothing special or novel to recommend it, unless you’re a fan of the Nickelodeon TV series it’s based on.
Arcade • Age 4+ • Single player only • Supports hardware controllers (but it’s much more difficult with one)
126. TALES OF MEMO
Neat but limited puzzler based on those old number-matching memory games. Open two chests with the same number inside and you can make an ‘attack’ of that power; keep matching chests and you can add more numbers, multipliers etc, but you run the risk of a counter-attack which damages you and closes all the chests you’ve got on the go.
It’s pretty fun and looks quite nice, and later levels have the added difficulty of timers, and shields that protect your enemy unless you get above or below a specified number. Still, it never feels like you progress tactically: there’s not a lot of depth.
Puzzle • Age 9+ • Single player only • No controller support
127. PATTERNED
Frazzled commuters will enjoy this soothing puzzler, which brings the pleasures of a Bank Holiday jigsaw to your mobile screen – in both landscape and portrait mode, which is an unusual bonus.
Each level begins life as a silent black-andwhite sketch, but as you place the right pieces on to the board the colours gradually reappear and
music plays.
It’s all rather lovely, and the back-to-front difficulty curve – tricky at first but easier as the pieces build up – is generally satisfying.
I will add, however, that the level-specific difficulty is wildly inconsistent, and there’s no apparent way to request an easy or advanced puzzle. It all depends on how repetitive the pattern is, and to what extent this repetition happens to map to the grid: on Kawaii Cookout I kept getting pieces that fitted perfectly in four different places, which turned it into unsatisfying trial and error.
Puzzle • Age 4+ • Single player only • No controller support
128. SHANTAE AND THE SEVEN SIRENS
Polished but largely conventional action-platformer in which a half-naked half-genie leaps about the screen killing baddies with her hair and, later, magic. Fans of the series won’t be disappointed, although I found the onscreen controls super-frustrating, frequently hitting jump instead of attack (or vice-versa) at critical moments – it’s much better when played with a hardware controller.
Platformer • Age 12+ • Single player only • Supports hardware controllers
129. SPIRE BLAST
Your job here is to topple a precarious tower by shooting balls that disintegrate blocks of the same colour. It’s basically Puzzle Bobble crossed with Jenga.
The garish presentation, handholding helper hints and obsession with power-ups are all strongly reminiscent of the money-grubbing freemium titles that plague the App Store, and this hardly feels like the sort of innovation that Arcade was supposed to be about. One suspects that Apple lost its nerve a little bit and asked devs to focus more on generic but reliable offerings along the lines of Grindstone.
But it is rather fun. I really like the way you swipe to spin the tower when searching for a weak spot, and it falls in a very satisfying way. Generic it might be, but it’s addictive too.
Puzzle • Age 4+ • Single player only • Supports hardware controllers
130. SPONGEBOB: PATTY PURSUIT
Who lives in a barnacle under the sea? SpongeBob SquarePants, who has arrived on Apple Arcade in this tie-in auto-runner platform game.
We say auto-runner, but it’s an unusually easy-going example of the genre: you can go back to grab things you missed and there’s no time pressure. It’s also not as tightly designed as such games tend to be, with unresponsive tap controls (a joypad makes things better) and enemies that can be hard to spot.
Still, it looks great, and features voice work by the original cast. Variety is provided by secondary characters who
give you specific abilities, and funny transformations.
Platformer • Age 4+ • Single player only • Supports hardware controllers
131. LEGO BRAWLS
Online multiplayer fighter based on the popular brick-based construction toy. The action is simple but fun: running around one of several 2D arenas and battering one another with guns and handheld weaponry. The more you play, the more minifigure parts are unlocked for you to customise your character, which is cosmetic but charming.
The game itself is enjoyable, then, but it seems to be either excessively dependent on a good network connection, or underpopulated, or both; I have yet to successfully set up a Party game, and on multiple occasions (even when connected to what I believed to be reasonably decent WiFi) my Brawl games have been plagued by lag. This is a little annoying, given Apple Arcade’s promises of offline play. The only offline part of the game is an uninspiring Training mode.
Fighting/Shooter • Age 9+ • 1-10 players • Supports hardware controllers (and virtually requires one)
132. DON’T BUG ME!
Tower defence game which sometimes pretends to be a first-person shooter. You’re a Martian explorer trying to hold out against the alien hordes surrounding your tiny base; sometimes you’re building defensive structures (automated lasers, exploding barriers etc), and sometimes you’re switching view and gunning them down personally.
It’s all about multitasking, then: simultaneously keeping an eye on the radar, the condition of your towers, the available solar power for building new towers and your personal ammo supply. It’s a little stressful, for this reason, and somewhat limited in scope, but pretty fun nonetheless.
Strategy/Shooter • Age 49 • Single player only • Supports hardware controllers (but touchscreen is fine, and probably easier)
133. SUDOKU SIMPLE+
Mobility Ware is good at these slick adaptations of classics, and I’ve spent a
lot of time on the company’s solitaire offering, which is also in this chart. This sudoku number is also both faithful and well-executed, albeit not quite as compelling.
It offers three difficulty levels, and I’d recommend the hardest of these for the complex, multi-step deduction (“if that square is a 4, then that square has to be a 7 or a 9, which would mean the 3 would be there…”) which makes sudoku rewarding. It’s just a shame that there’s no way to annotate squares with the possibilities, as you would with a Biro in a newspaper.
It also lacks the brilliantly compulsive daily goals element that keeps pulling me back into solitaire. (There’s a daily challenge, but that’s just another puzzle.) Still, it’s good for Arcade subscribers to know that Mobility Ware has the basics covered so competently.
Puzzle • Age 4+ • Single player only • No controller support
134. DODO PEAK
Retro arcade number in which you (a bird) hop down the steps of a mountain to retrieve/hatch your eggs and then hop back up again as quickly as possible, while evading bad guys and obstacles.
It’s a pleasantly simple and elegant concept, cosmetically reminiscent of the 1980s classic Q*bert, but rather let down by the controls. On touchscreen you’re swiping, which doesn’t work terribly well for accuracy or speed; using a hardware controller improves matters a little but it’s still very prone to overshooting. This is frustrating in a game where time is short.
Arcade • Age 4+ • Single player only • Supports hardware controllers
135. TOWAGA: AMONG SHADOWS
Towaga calls itself a twin-stick game, but that’s hardly accurate: it’s a
single-stick really, because on most levels your character is locked to one place and your job is simply to shoot the baddies coming at you from all angles. From time to time you ascend to the stars and get the chance to move and shoot, and it’s a cruel reminder of how fun twin-sticks can be if they’re allowed.
The look and narrative flavour are both pleasingly odd, although it’s shame that the English text contains so many errors. I didn’t feel like there was a lot of progression in the level design, and found the stationary levels quite stressful.
Shooter • Age 12+ • 1-4 player • Supports hardware controllers
136. POSSESSIONS
Sharing numerous beats with Assemble With Care, Possessions also weaves an understated story around a series of simple puzzles. And if that’s your jam you should undoubtedly try both.
In this case the puzzles are so easy and the entire thing so brief (you’ll finish in 45 minutes) that in pure gaming terms it has to be ranked lower. The ‘moral of the story’ is also rather simple (and probably guessable from the title), but I
love the game’s wordless delivery of that message: it first encourages you to explore and revel in beautiful spaces, and then makes you question what those spaces are really worth.
Puzzle • Age 9+ • Single player only • No controller support
137. SPELL DRIFTER
I’ve been having some good times with this turn-based tactical RPG, which is deep, tense and blessed with excellent artwork. But here’s my reservation: the card-playing elements feel like an afterthought.
Deck building is a fashionable (and very rewarding) genre but blending it into an RPG framework is not easy. Spell-drifter waits a fair while, perhaps tellingly, before letting you have any control over your cards, and even then you’re constructing your deck between fights rather than in-game – in other words, it’s more Magic: The Gathering than Ascension. The cards themselves look great but they’re mostly just attacks, heals and buffs; you don’t get a lot of the interesting combos and synergies that you get in Dream Quest, for instance.
Also, parents of small children may find that the cock-rock soundtrack reminds them of Blaze and the Monster Machines, which rather undercuts the atmosphere.
Card/RPG • Age 12+ • Single player only • Supports hardware controllers (but touchscreen is easier)
138. TINT
This gorgeous, gentle puzzler puts you in the role of a back-garden watercolourist. On each level a few blobs of paint are dripped on to your canvas, along with one or more ‘targets’ which you have to reach with a specific colour by applying swiped brush strokes and, frequently, mixing two colours together.
This simple concept is quickly complicated by mazes of pre-painted lines and colour-cancelling water droplets, and the levels get reasonably mindbending by the end, while remaining pleasingly relaxing at the same time.
But there’s a messiness to the puzzles that’s unsatisfying – sometimes you’re not sure if you’re doing the wrong thing, or doing the right thing clumsily (this isn’t helped by the puzzle being partially hidden under your finger). And often the solution turns out to be “go round the back of that blob that doesn’t look there’s enough room behind it”.
Puzzle • Age 4+ • Single player only • No controller support
139. SPEK
Tasteful but slightly antiseptic puzzle game in which you manipulate perspective (hence, presumably, the name) to guide a ball around line
drawn objects.
Undeniably cleverly designed, Spek shares Monument Valley’s sense of optical mischief – and relatively gentle difficulty curve – but not its heart.
Bonus points, however, for the interesting AR mode, where the puzzles are projected on to the surfaces of your home or office and you reach a solution by physically walking around.
Puzzle • Age 4+ • Single player only • Supports hardware controllers (but touchscreen is easier)
140. CUT THE ROPE REMASTERED
Most of the App Store classics that flooded Apple Arcade in spring 2021 are essentially unchanged from their glory days, with only the tell-tale + sign to indicate that technically – and to get round Apple’s rules for the service – they are separate apps. But Cut the Rope has been “remastered”, which alludes to a more substantive alteration. Part of that is a bump from 2D to nominally 3D graphics, which admittedly makes the game look more modern but loses some of its charm. There are also some new levels (it’s a mixture of old and new), but mechanically it’s very much more of the same, from cutting ropes and popping bubbles to puffing air and rotating trampolines.
Hundreds of iOS physics puzzles owe a creative debt to Cut the Rope. But at this point in its life I would rather admire the game for its legacy than actually play its levels, which even after being remastered feel (understandably) quite dated.
Puzzle • Age 4+ • Single player only • No controller support
141. MIND SYMPHONY
This therapeutically themed game’s first mode, Release Stress, is all about catharsis through frenzied destruction: it’s a comparatively traditional bullet-hell shooter except that enemy movements, weapon fire etc are synced to the music. It’s hard to tell the difference between power-ups and enemies but this part mostly works – provided you have a joypad, since the onscreen controls aren’t anywhere near quick enough.
Calm mode, meanwhile, is intended to be more restful, and doesn’t require you to do any steering, dodging or aiming; you just have to tap when two circles overlap. Again it’s not totally clear what you’re supposed to be doing and the exactitude required to get a good score – and, some might say, the fact that you’re being scored at all – makes it not actually very calming.
Mind Symphony is a curate’s egg of a package: essentially two unrelated games that are sometimes original and sometimes good but very rarely both at once. And the number of small issues – such as persuading it (unsuccessfully) to connect with Apple Music, and then persuading it to stop trying without restarting the app – makes me extremely dubious about its positive impact on the player’s state of mind.
Shooter • Age 4+ • Single player only • Supports hardware controller
142. DECOHERENCE
If you like simplicity, look elsewhere; this sci-fi number blends elements of twin-stick shooters, tower defence and real-time squad strategy into an intimidating whole.
The core of the game is bots: at the start of each level you decide which bots you’ll be employing and where they’ll start, customise their load-out and give them simple orders. Then
hit the start button and watch them tackle the enemy and try to meet victory conditions.
But it’s not completely hands-off. Your pilot is there too, and can wander around joining in with a gun (unwise) or clambering into a vehicle or mech (better). Some will undoubtedly enjoy this, but I found the difficulty curve cliff-like and struggled to get into the game.
Strategy/Shooter • Age 12+ • 1-2 players • Supports hardware controller
143. OPERATOR 41
Stealth puzzler in which a spy tries to negotiate a series of levels without getting spotted. The key is observing the routines of the guards and slipping past when the moment is right (with the occasional assistance of throwable decoy objects) and in this sense it reminded me a little of Hitman Go, only real-time instead of turn-based.
The problem is that tap accuracy/ responsiveness sometimes lets you down when rushing, and using a joypad isn’t much better because it controls a cursor, not your character. It can be hard to see what’s going on, too, because you have no control over the camera.
The security-footage visuals are nice, with orange details (such as guard sight lines when you’re spotted) popping against the grainy mono background. But there’s not much
substance here, since there are only 15 levels at time of writing and all but the last 3 or 4 are straightforward to solve – failures are far more likely to be a tap not registering than a puzzle being too fiendish, and that’s a shame.
Puzzle • Age 4+ • Single player • Supports hardware controller
144. SECRET OOPS!
In the world of board games, critics sometimes talk about a ‘pasted-on theme’, when an abstract concept is livened up with a surface narrative that doesn’t really link to the way the game actually plays. Which brings us to the likeable timing-based puzzler Secret Oops!, which is supposedly about protecting a clumsy spy, but is really about pressing coloured buttons at the right moment, much like the 1980s toy Simon.
Special Agent Charles, a gentleman of limited intellect, will blunder into lasers, security cameras and booby traps unless you disable them at the correct moment by... tapping them on your iPhone. Which doesn’t make a lot of sense. But this doesn’t stop it being fun, and the animation and (nonverbal) voice acting when the spy gets caught is undeniably entertaining.
The controls are fiddly and the doors in particular feel slightly unresponsive. It’s also tough to get a clear view of what you’re doing, whether you’re scurrying around in the real world using the (very cool) AR mode, or squinting at the non-AR mode in portrait orientation and discovering that you can’t rotate the level while zoomed in. Then again, awkwardness may be the point: like in Surgeon Simulator or
Spaceteam, a lot of the fun comes from desperately trying, and frequently failing, to accomplish simple tasks under pressure.
Puzzle • Age 4+ • 1-4 players • Supports hardware controller
145. FRUIT NINJA CLASSIC+
Various pieces of fruit pop up on the screen like clay pigeons; by swiping with your finger/sword, you must slice them into colourful pieces, while trying to avoid the bombs inexplicably mixed in with the food. And that’s Fruit Ninja. It’s a classic for a reason, but I can’t help feeling mobile gaming has moved on.
Casual • Age 4+ • 1-2 players • No controller support
146. MARBLE KNIGHTS
The central gimmick – that all the knights have a marble in place of their legs – isn’t enough to save this action slasher from being generic.
Marble or no, you trundle around, hammer the attack button when baddies appear, try to find treasure chests, and occasionally fight a boss.
The JRPG-style cut-scene graphics are nice enough, but nothing really stands out. The characters fit the usual RPG archetypes without being in any way ‘rounded’, and the levels hold few surprises. Also, having played games like Slash Quest where coins are collected automatically, it feels unnecessarily laborious to have to go back after killing monsters to pick up their dropped loot. Give us a break!
Platformer • Age 9+ • 1-4 players • Supports hardware controller
147. ULTIMATE RIVALS: THE RINK
It’s three-on-three ice hockey, but here’s the catch: the players are drawn from five different sports, so your team could be made up of a baseball pitcher, an NFL quarter-back and a football centre-forward. It’s a bit like that old TV show where Kevin Keegan fell off a bicycle, only vastly more US-centric. I wish they could have found room for Ben Stokes or Ronnie O’Sullivan.
Sadly it’s never explained why all American sports have been folded into ice hockey, nor why some of the participants actually are hockey players – surely they would win every game with ease? Presumably the overwhelming info dump of a tutorial at the start of the game left no room for plot exposition.
The game itself is fun but surprisingly complicated, with all kinds of manoeuvres and special moves to memorise. It’s not easy to hit the right touchscreen button at speed, and playing on a hardware controller (which is recommended) leaves you without much guidance.
Sport • Age 4+ • 1-2 players • Supports hardware controller
148. ROSIE’S REALITY
Cute puzzle game in which you arrange function blocks (change direction, jump, speed up etc) in the correct formation to get a robot from point A to point B. This is all pleasant
enough except for a curious ‘hurry up and wait’ aspect.
Your performance in each level is partially rated according to the time it takes you, and the average player will obviously take this (and the big “3-2-1-Build!” countdown) as a cue to rush. This runs counter to the thoughtful spirit of most puzzle games, and the fact that you can’t stop and think about a level – there are two different pause options, but one keeps the clock running and the other hides the blocks – makes it a little stressful.
Working against this, the game itself is annoyingly slow at reassembling itself each time you start or restart a level: the robots sprout wheels and drive to their starting points, the blocks drop leisurely into place, and none of this is skippable. Fast restarts are vital for non-annoying puzzle games, and the game ends up being frustrating.
Puzzle • Age 4+ • 1-4 players • Supports hardware controller
149. SUPER MEGA MINI PARTY
No self-respecting games collection is complete without a few mini games; Arcade has this, and Big Time Sports.
SMMP offers ten things to do, all of them both simple and strange, running
the gamut from pogo-sticking on lava to dynamite juggling. This simplicity is both a strength and a weakness, since you get the hang of each thing almost immediately but then (when played on solo) tire of it quite quickly too.
It would undoubtedly have more sustained interest when played with mates, but I was sadly unable, despite trying several times, to find a party to join. It’s nice that you have the option to join a random group (something Pac-Man Party Royale sorely misses) as well as linking up with friends via code, but right now there doesn’t seem to be a big enough player base to make this a realistic option.
Arcade • Age 4+ • 1-4 players • Supports hardware controller
150. JUMPER JON
Platformers tend to fall into two categories: seat-of-the-pants thrill rides, and ones where you need a map. This is the second type.
So no, it’s not exactly one for adrenaline junkies. Even the jump mechanism – the sine qua non of the genre, you might think – is curiously sluggish and floaty, rather than the zippy bounce you get in something like Rayman Mini. This is frustrating when a boss keeps tagging you mid-jump.
Ironically enough, the game’s central gimmick does incentivise speed: an ever-present 30-second timer will kill you if you can’t reset it by hitting the next checkpoint in time. But given that syrupy jump button, not to mention the requirement for explorative thought, it’s an incongruous (if fun) inclusion.
Platformer • Age 4+ • Single player only • Supports hardware controller