The month’s best smartphone games include the new game from the creator of Threes and a tie-in game for Frozen 2.
Now that the dust has a settled on the traditional pre-Christmas games rush, it’s time to get back to normal, or at least as normal as you can when you’ve got a year’s worth of Christmas shopping to do in less than two weeks. Still, for such a rarefied moment there’s quite a bit going on in mobile gaming this month, from the joyous yet sinister charms of Bad North: Jotunn Editio, to the peculiar and absolutely free delights of Bounty Hunter Space Lizard.
Takeshi and Hiroshi for Apple Arcade (Oink Games)
Telling the story of two brothers, the older, Takeshi, is a budding games designer; the younger, Hiroshi, is his biggest fan. When Hiroshi gets hospitalised, his brother brings in his half-finished game to help cheer him up, filling in the blanks from his laptop while his little brother plays.
Your job is to help Takeshi maximise his little brother’s joy level by making sure the groups of monsters he encounters are challenging without being enough to finish him off completely. New monsters are added each chapter, keeping the challenge fresh, and while the random elements can be annoying, being the dungeon master is a different enough mechanic that it stays interesting.
The brothers’ interactions and cute claymation styling make for delightful, heart string-plucking interludes between levels. There’s not much of it but it concertedly leaves the door open for future chapters.
Score: 7/10
Bad North: Jotunn Edition for iOS & Android, £4.99 (Raw Fury)
Despite its undeniably cute cartoon trappings, Bad North’s roguelite real-time strategy is actually a desperate game of survival as your tiny procedurally-generated islands are attacked by silent boat-fulls of Viking invaders.
Repelling the incoming hordes means positioning your troops for maximum effect depending on their skills. Putting pikemen where boats are going to land and archers on a cliff may sound nice and simple, but it becomes less so when there are two flotillas on their way, each approaching a different side of the island.
Unlock skills, nurture your commanders and do your very best to stay alive in this fascinatingly tricky game of tactics that if anything works even better on a touchscreen than it did on PC and consoles.
Score: 8/10
Right Runner for iOS & Android, £Free (United Nations Children’s Fund)
Endless runners may be part of a genre in terminal decline, but that doesn’t mean there can’t still be good ones. Which despite being a game with a job to do, Right Runner is. It’s not endless though, and in fact features four levels with multiple paths through each.
Created on behalf of UNICEF, it supports children’s right to play, learn, and be safe in circumstances that aren’t always conducive. The game itself has you skateboarding through rubbish-strewn side scrolling levels fraught with dangers to hop over, slide under, or in the case of arms caches and barrels of toxic waste, destroy by grinding through them.
With infinite continues and no ads, it’s a friendly user experience, and even though some of the level design is a bit iffy, the art style is unusually good for a freebie.
Score: 6/10
Discolored for Apple Arcade (Shifty Eye)
After a brief and lightly confusing introductory sequence, you find yourself in a monochrome diner on a long, deserted road. Moving around in first person, it’s your job to figure out what to do, and what it all means. What’s the glowing green triangle for? Why does the newspaper have no words? And why is there a blue rectangle in the bedside table?
The answers to these questions slowly emerge with a bit of Myst-style trial and error, and a willingness to engage with sometimes twisted video game logic. However, it can also be fiddly, its puzzles requiring perfect positioning for everything to work. When you’re not sure what you’re doing, that can mean the difference between solving a problem and 20 minutes of frustration as you scour the room for a new plan, only to discover your original idea was the correct one but you were standing a couple of pixels too close.
With a couple of hours’ worth of occasionally irritating head-scratching, there’s a slight sense of having played the intro to a much larger game. Whether you’d want a full-length version of Discolored is another matter entirely.
Score: 5/10
Hero Express for iOS, £1.99 (Tiny Games)
Driving along an undulating side-scrolling road, your job is to get your car full of supplies for the game’s hero, collecting bundles of cash and avoiding water traps as you go. The money goes towards upgrading your car, which in turn helps you get further along the road.
There are other obstacles, some of which spatter the screen with slime, requiring a squirt of cleaner fluid to see clearly again, but really this is a game of momentum. Too much and you might fly over a vital fuel can or stack of cash. Too little and you can end up in the water or unable to climb a steep hill.
Each hand-crafted level has its own theme and vehicle, presenting you with a new handling model and set of challenges. It’s addictive in all the right ways.
Score: 8/10
Guildlings for Apple Arcade (Sirvo Studios)
You’re Coda, a little girl who buys a second-hand mobile phone that turns out to be a portal used to start a dungeon adventuring guild. One of your first quests is to sign the terms of service, which it turns out also commits you to saving the world.
Guildlings has a gentle sense of humour and turn-based battles that involve no violence, instead relying on letting enemies drain their energy so that you can turn the tables on them. This then allows you to help your guild members explore and interact with their environment.
Keeping the guild members happy gives them access to more powers, but you need to be honest. Get all Polly-Anna about everything and they’ll see straight through it, which will fail to enhance their moods. Warm and witty, this four or so hours of charming adventure will leave you very much looking forward to the next episode. It’s not what you’d expect as a follow-up from Threes creator Asher Vollmer (and others) but it’s good all the same.
Score: 7/10
Disney: Frozen Adventures for iOS & Android, £Free (Jam City)
Unless you’ve found yourself trapped under a large piece of furniture at the bottom of a mine shaft, you’ll have noticed that Disney’s biggest ever sequel, Frozen 2 is in cinemas.
To celebrate, or rather to capitalise on that fact, Frozen Adventures is a match-three puzzle game very much in the mould of Candy Crush Saga. Each level has a set number of tiles of various varieties you need to match to win, which in turn earns you a snowflake you can exchange for decorations to beautify Arendelle.
The sparkly graphics and familiar faces do their job, although it soon starts to get trickier, tempting you to spend in-game gold and actual currency to complete levels. For its target audience of small girls it’s fiendishly compelling, just don’t forget to turn off in-app purchases before handing your phone over.
Score: 6/10
Bounty Hunter Space Lizard for iOS & Android, £Free (Stay Inside Games)
‘You’re a despondent lizardperson living in your space van’, is practically all the introduction you get to this wonderfully pared-back turn-based roguelike. In it, your dispirited reptilian moves around tight little maps in search of bounty to shoot or slice, then collect.
Thanks to the screen’s wrap, you can both move and fire off the left, right, top, and bottom of it, your bullet or character beaming instantly to the opposite side. It paves the way for strategy that requires increasing amounts of thought, forward planning, and tactical guess work as you progress.
It’s completely free, with no ads or in-app purchases, and is clearly a labour of love for the small team at Stay Inside Games. If you like turn-based tactics and have a phone, you may as well.
Score: 7/10
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