Thread for iOS games 2017-2023: shame, loathing and recommendations

i think FL is actually the better more fully realized game but SS is def worth playing - and the sequel is being kickstarted right now

my favorite twitch streamer said SS made him so happy it was like when he was a kid and first got into Escape Velocity on his Mac, and I was "like well that was college for me kiddo but if you loved EV, I loved EV and this game scratches that itch then here you go App Store here's $9.99 make sure this army vet weirdo in Texas gets a cut ok"

the highly compelling clicker SPACEPLAN (originally brought to your attention last August via The Best Free Online (in-browser or downloadable) Games) is now on iOS

I am still Realm Grinding away, though, so I don't think I need to repopulate the potatoes on my phone

also thanks to realm grinder I now know the differences between scientific and engineering notation, and the names of a lot of extremely large numbers. the math in this game is ridiculous

nintendo released a fire emblem game for iphone and i was super excited because i've never played a fire emblem game and i've always wanted to. it was a smallish download, and then it asked me to download a 50 MB update as soon as i started it up. after a few battles, it asked me to install a 500 MB update, which i grudgingly did even though i have a shitty iphone with not much storage. i took leave of the reception areas in the united states for a few days, and when i returned and started up fire emblem, it asked me to install another 700 MB update and i racked up my first ever rage quit/delete on a screen asking me to download a patch

Wow. Better you than me!

I'm finally playing Lifeline on my phone.

Getting this Taylor kid into shitty situations is not quite as fun as intentionally wrecking your dude in one of those bmx / snowboard / tony hawk games.

I do have a feeling the ultimate goal is probably more satisfying, though.

I'll keep at it.

Tombot is busy.

Waiting for a busted elbow to heal have given me time to get back to mobile gaming, until I can shake public transport and get back on my bike.

Grim Fandango Remastered: the first two acts are still the greatest adventure game of all time, the third loses it a little (though at least it doesn't crash when I get in the crane, like the last two torrents of the PC game I tried), and the last act is both a touching return to the earlier acts and too bitty.

Monument Valley: Lovely aesthetic perfectly married to the platform - I'm sure there'll be a PC port at some point but using a mouse to rotate one of the chunky pieces of architecture won't be as satisfying as doing so by hand. Also I appreciate a game that's good at manipulating my emotions.

Tomb Raider Go: Decent selection / curation of a different aesthetic here, breaking some of TR down to basically a game of Sokoban (with a slight hidden object game not even bolted to it but rather laid beside it in the same box).

Spaceplan was amusing but I didn't expect it to play through so fast and have no replay value.

I'm starting to really wish the hero in Love You To Bits could just WALK A LITTLE BIT FASTER FFS
he could learn a lot from Taylor in Lifeline imho, this guy trucks, even with a fucked up ankle

Has anybody tried Subterfuge?

Bunch of stuff on sale for 0.99 in the US App Store today btw

I kinda don't want any of them because I never finish adventure puzzlers, suck at touch platformers, and hate RTS/Tower Defense. but I guess mini metro is going to get a shot.

I was a big Advance Wars fan in the GBA days, so I love Warbits. Great graphics and gets most aspects of the genre right. It doesn't seem to have boats and other water units, though, just land and sky :/

Uh, I think it came out last year, though.

MiniMetro pulled me in for a couple weeks.

Thread title time frame is not intended to prevent posting about out old games. Most good games on iOS are from <2016 anyway imho

Most good games on iOS are from <2016 anyway imho

It's true. What's the deal with that?

It's about ethics in video game journalism

This?

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/180322771/rogue-wizards-fantasy-role-playing-game-rpg

This isn't bad at all. I might actually pay for the gem doubler (the "here fine here's five dollars for your game you gave away for free" purchase)
I'm pretty annoyed your character choices are "white boy" and "white girl" though - like, even Spirit Lords did better.

iOS games kinda not being good this year shocka

I'm having trouble finding anything that holds my attention. Every goddamn thing has IAP.

Some recent faves:

Card Thief
Polytopia
Swing King
Cordy 2
Bike Club

I am still playing Marvel Puzzle Quest

help me

expansion for 868.HACK?

his description is utterly opaque to me because i haven’t played it for a long while, but ,ugh this be a good time for anyone who hasn’t to give it a go?

not sure what ugh is doing there. some kind of phone typo.

it's so hard to find anything good in the store apps (ios or android). all of the lists are freemium crap.

pocket tactics used to be a reliably good source of info on strategy/rpg/puzzle/war games, written by like 3 dudes, but then they got bought out and became a terrible website

I suspect starting 868 with the expansion would be an exercise in frustration

This needs to happen

http://toucharcade.com/2017/06/21/darkest-dungeon-ios-release-chance-extremely-high/

might finally get around to playing it

on the leaderboards for the 868 hack expansion! i am just way more attuned to this than imbroglio i guess

Also it looks like toucharcade is about to go out of business? So basically nowhere left doing independent reviews of App Store games as far as I know.

I got Lowerlander yesterday. It's pretty fun so far. The save mechanism is kind of annoying in 2017 but it's no game breaker.

I can actually see this causing me to blow a subway stop on my commute which no game has done for a good while (usually it's work email)

^^ loving this, it is totally making me late for meetings

started playing at your suggestion tombo, really scratching that ultima itch

Fucking Flappy Dunk. I hate myself.

Galaxy of Pen and Paper, the sequel to Knights of Pen and Paper, is out today for iOS (and steam and android) at $4.99. i haven't played it yet but the kotaku review says it's similar but better than the original, which i enjoyed. given the lack of good iOS games recently i'm inclined to give it a shot

another pen and paper game already? god dammit that's my beer money

(all the pen and paper games are worth it btw)

(they do get silly towards the end, not in a great way, but then what RPG doesn't)

Terraria for mobile might be getting a major update soon, praise moonlord

Target Timing for release of Mobile 1.3 remains a few months after Console, so you can expect this in the second half of 2017; hopefully sooner rather than later!

http://www.pockettactics.com/reviews/review-miracle-merchant/

Agree with this review, solid game.

Layton Brothers Mystery Room, which is like a terrible version of Phoenix Wright, and Layton's Mystery Journey, which is a lot more like the original.

On the shame and loathing front: i feel like seriously, after 4-5 years, I've finally broken free of the psychological grip that Puzzle and Dragons and Marvel Puzzle Quest had on me. Basically barely want to even login daily any more. Feel like this is progress.

find someone who looks at you the way Nhex looks at MPQ

glad you escaped! :)

Tsuro is the free app of the week in the US app store and I highly recommend it. We just spent a couple of hours on it in a very device-heavy "family board game night"

My daughter is now playing Tiny Tower! I had no idea they kept updating that thing. It's been 6 years! Last update was in January though so maybe they're finally done? There are like, so many new elevators, you guys.

I pulled Ticket To Earth back out and for some reason I feel way better at it than I was before.

also lol, as soon as I blow away all the ep1 content it turns out Episode 2 is coming out this week as a free update. Hooray!

1. I thought I broke my save on Lowerlander but I emailed the dev and he fixed it for me - on a Saturday.

2. Ticket to Earth episode 2 is so far all my favorite stuff about the first one but might be too easy

Lowerlander update: once you get the ship that has long-range cannons, bombarding mobs from the sea is truly satisfying

I went home last weekend to see my niblings, and they are always keen to play games on my phone - Monument Valley was a big hit, except you can only give it or its sequel to one of them at a time. Anyway, the App Store had a special on gentle puzzle games so I got:

_Prism: this looks lovely and 3-d, but it's a pretty cover for a game of moving switches to get points to line up - it's not very long, it looks lovely, but the hit detection of the non-massive iPhone is not quite up to the bits where you're trying to get three fingers on the screen at once.

Push - tap the buttons on the screen in the right order, sometimes using other switches to rotate or switch the 3-d surfaces that the buttons are on - it all looks very clean, and the buttons seem weirdly tactile - it's a good game if you've got 10 minutes and would like to feel smart for solving something.

_-_ - get all the horizontal lines roughly in the centre, sometimes when you pull up on this line, those lines move up or down by other coefficients... I haven't played enough with it to see if there's much more to it than that.

LVL - you move solid shapes of colour on the sides of a cube, trying to completely block out the light in each of the three faces. Each cube is effectively (again, as far as I got) three separate games where you're working both opposite faces, but you can't overlap the shapes on any given side - there's some "okay that has to go here so I have to move this there first" even once you figure out what each side has to be.

Vignettes - this is good but a little fiddly - you can rotate an over-saturated object around in the centre of the screen - sometimes when the silhouette matches another object there'll be a slight tug and it changes - so you might turn a bowl so that the white circle of the inside entirely faces you, but when you turn it some more, it's now a lightbulb viewed from the top. The problem is that this is both fiddly and temperamental.

Flower - this is the PS3 game! You fly around being a petal and flying through other flowers to gather more petals and it's really really really not very high tension. It looks lovely though.

.projekt - literally no-one involved in this game doesn't have at least two 'k's in their name. It's a simple 3-d builder, you place/remove blocks in a 5x5x5 grid to match silhouettes on two axes. After a while you get a point for the minimum vs the maximum number of blocks, and past another while there's a picross version - 80 stages, the time passes well.

Rubek - I know there's a canonical version of this type of puzzler around - you roll a cube around a cell-y surface, sometimes you have to pick up something on one face and then deposit it elsewhere.

Slayaway Camp is free on ios and android this week. It's great.

Subwords is my new thing to do after the crossword puzzle. Might not last long, though, unless I get within striking distance of the leaderboards on classic mode

So like... a bunch of my older games don't work on the current iOS, as happens every year.
But since they killed iTunes app backup/management, if i delete it off the phone, it's gone forever unless I can redownload it from the App Store, right?
I have a ton of these games I've just been deleting over the last few years that I carried from phone to phone. Alas, Gravity Hook, looks like you're gone forever.

Endless Archery for Desert Golfing fans.

Picked this up recently and am enjoying it:

https://www.theverge.com/2016/10/13/13262994/really-bad-chess-zach-gage-iphone-ipad

I just want to say I'm very disappointed Trainyard never got updated to work with later iOS versions.

Donut County isn't doing much for me but Florence is good.

pocket city is a good handheld version of sim city 2000

hard disagree on that one

pocket city made me angry

pocket city was ehhhhhh

(I did break my brain playing too much sim city 2000 as a kid so ymmv)

dowd mentioned Night of the Full Moon on another thread recently so I gave it a shot. it's really fun! what is the genre...CCG/rogue/rpg, sort of? it's $1, although you can pay more to unlock additional character classes. it's one of the rare games that has voice acting that is actually good, especially on iOS. it actually even made me LOL, the first time a game has done that in forever (a pumpkin head enemy said something like "how would you know what it feels like to be in the cutting baaaawrd?!" in a ridiculous accent - hard to explain but it was good).

I like Alphabear 2 a lot but despise the insane amount of ads. Even if you buy it there’s still the “TV Time” bonus for watching 3 ads every four hours...

New Michael Brough game P1 Select for those who like these things. (I do). Sounds like he hasn'tried (or had the time) to do anything new, but is happy with that.

Thank you! I will always check out his games

I need new rpg for iphone 11

Dungeons of Chaos look good.

Nope

Lol

Not new but I was psyched to see that Knights of the Old Republic is available for iPhone. Maybe this is a good time to start it.

Super late to this party, as I just picked it up as a freebie a few weeks ago, but damn yeah Alto's Adventure is probably the best endless runner. Just completed all 180 goals and got that "survived for three days" achievement.

Alto's Odyssey is a nice follow-up too but very much more of the same

new BROG - well large expansion for Imbroglio:


http://mightyvision.blogspot.com/2020/05/preview-for-imbroglio-mizzenmast.html

nice

yes. i mean cinco paus is just wonderful but i love imbroglio as well.

I 100%ed Hidden Folks and now I’m sad

instead of developing speed run routes for hidden folks I just went on a little spree today and picked up the phoenix wright trilogy, black box, and soda dungeon 2.

is meteor fall any good?

Good Sudoku is good.

I burned out on it after about a month, but yeah, it's good. I hate the mode that takes away all the improvements though (Classic?) but the others worked nicely

Yeah I accidentally played a classic one today and I messed it up good

Cosmic Express is a great little one-screen logic puzzle game. I even like the background music, which is usually the first thing I turn off.

Any decent graphic adventure/visual novel/point & click games on phones recently? Feels like the high point was The Room and its sequels, and now developers are making gacha games instead.

The Cube Escape games are great but probably not recent

i'm near the end of kentucky route zero, which is unfortunately not for iOS, i don't think. but maybe this will help?

https://www.50gameslike.com/games-like/kentucky-route-zero/ios

is it my imagination or is apple shifting any game that looks good or interesting at all to apple arcade

cupe escape / rusty lake games are great yes

I found the first chapter of KRZ too slow but that list has some games I've liked and others I've added to my wishlist.

Ooh The Silent Age is good! Syberia II is not.

Luck Be A Landlord is my new favorite iOS game. Addictive.