Cliff Notes – Best new mobile games on iOS and Android April 2025 round-up
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Mo.co by Supercell: This new MMO focuses on PvE gameplay, allowing players to battle cartoon monsters while progressing through various levels, marking a shift from Supercell’s previous multiplayer-centric titles.
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Songs Of Conquest Mobile: The mobile adaptation of the PC game features turn-based strategy and pixel art, offering challenging gameplay with a mix of exploration and tactical battles, earning a score of 7/10.
- The Valley Of The Architects: A puzzle game that tasks players with directing passengers through a series of lifts, praised for its elegant design and satisfying gameplay, receiving a score of 8/10.
Best new mobile games on iOS and Android – April 2025 round-up
Mo.co is a change of pace for Supercell (Supercell)
This month’s new smartphone gaming apps include a new game from Supercell, a prequel to The Electric State, and murder mystery Expelled!
April’s batch of new mobile game releases include the touchscreen versions of Songs Of Conquest and Dredge, along with the spiritual successor to Overboard!, clever new puzzle game The Valley Of The Architects, and a very cheap new tower defence game.
Songs Of Conquest Mobile
iOS & Android, £11.99 (Coffee Stain)
Originally released on PC last year, the mobile version of Songs Of Conquest feels like coming home, its turn-based interactions and pixel art feeling just right on a phone or iPad.
Its tale of warring fantasy characters may not have much of a sense of humour but the mix of light exploration to gather buffs and new weapons, and capture farms and cities for your cause, is interspersed with engaging Final Fantasy Tactics-style battles.
Given its cute good looks it’s surprisingly tough, with fights easily able to blindside you when spell-casting enemy Wielders are involved. If you don’t mind a few retries, and make sure you scour the countryside for power-ups, this will keep you busy for weeks.
Score: 7/10
The Valley Of The Architects
iOS, £3.99 (Whaleo)
The intriguingly entitled Valley Of The Architects is a puzzle game involving getting passengers to their correct destinations using a series of lifts that operate autonomously.
Your job is to set the floor each lift starts on and adjust stoppers that they bounce off when they reach certain floors, to get everyone to the right place – while avoiding an expanding array of obstacles along the way.
Completing levels tends to mean a fascinating few minutes’ head scratching as you set everything up, testing and tweaking as you go, followed by a final run where each passenger weaves their way to their final goal via the artful sequence of lifts you’ve arranged for them.
It’s enormously satisfying, its elegant design and perfectly minimalist interface, music and sound effects creating just the right accompaniment to your puzzle solving.
Score: 8/10
Mo.co
iOS & Android, Free (Supercell)
A new MMO from Clash Of Clans maker Supercell, that adds you to the staff roster at a monster hunting start-up business.
Unlike recent hit Brawl Stars, and the rather less successful Squad Busters, Mo.co is pure PvE, so your character can only turn his or her increasing firepower on the cartoon monsters you’re all battling, and never on fellow players.
Hopping into a glowing portal you choose which level to attack depending on time limited events and available objectives, and while the first few hours feel fairly primitive in gameplay terms – hold down attack when you’re near an enemy – things get more interesting as you get nearer the endgame.
Once you’re sufficiently levelled there are challenges for four players where each takes on a specific role, and others where dozens of hunters club together to defeat super-bosses. Whether it has the staying power Supercell traditionally aims for remains to be seen, but it’s an interesting new direction for the studio.
Score: 7/10
PBJ: The Musical
iOS, £3.99 (Philipp Stollenmayer)
Delivering its zany food-based reinterpretation of some of Shakespeare’s works through the medium of song, accompanied by visuals that use old cut up recipe books animated in a charming Terry Gilliam style, this is not your typical mobile game.
Its characters are snacks with googly eyes stuck on them, that you have to nudge and drag through dioramas depicting the plot as you listen to each of its 10 songs, all of which have a secret remix to unlock. It doesn’t really involve skill but it does prove mildly diverting.
Made by mobile game designing legend Philipp Stollenmayer, with songs written and sung by Britain’s Got Talent finalist Lorraine Bowen, we have to concede her brand of quirkiness leaves us completely cold, as unfortunately does this musical – but if you enjoy its very particular type of cheerful silliness you might find something here to love.
Score: 5/10
Dredge
iOS & Android, Free – £24.99 Full game unlock (Black Salt Games)
While Dredge is notionally a fishing-based role-playing game, its Lovecraftian milieux and sinister clutch of characters instantly place it apart from more typical fare.
Borrowing a trawler, you set out to plumb the depths for saleable marine life, as well as dredging up crafting materials and a fair number of eldritch horrors, which fortunately you can sell to the fishmonger for extra cash.
With a downbeat art style and a plot that gradually reveals all that lurks beneath, there’s plenty of exploration and ship upgrading to undertake on your way to finding out what’s going on. It felt a bit too slim on consoles and PC but while it works better on mobile the price tag is more than most are likely to pay for the full thing.
Score: 7/10
DunCreate is not quite free (Obscure)
DunCreate
iOS & Android, 29p (Obscure)
Tower defence games are far from a rarity on the Google Play and App Stores, but these days many of them are free to play, which tends to make them endlessly long and just slightly unbalanced to encourage you to cough up your savings.
DunCreate’s 2D take on the genre is a bit more honest. It’s also resolutely old school, even if its difficulty level progresses so slowly it can occasionally feel like a freemium game in the sheer scale of content to plough through.
While it may not have the panache of Ironside’s classic Kingdom Rush series its straightforward interface is ideal for mobile and does at least scratch the same itch as its more costly genre alternatives.
Score: 6/10
Expelled!
iOS, £5.99 (Inkle)
You’re Verity Amersham, scholarship student and all round good girl; it’s the last day of term, at Miss Mulligatawney’s School for Promising Girls, and Louisa Hardcastle has just been shoved through a stained glass window – apparently by you.
That gives you just over eight hours to clear your name before the holidays start and you’re expelled. You need to scout locations, harvest gossip, and gather evidence to identify the real culprit in what amounts to a text adventure, albeit one that’s been lavishly illustrated, with some of its speech voiced, making it feel lively and involving throughout.
Repeatedly looping back through the brief period of your investigation you need to be assiduous in your evidence gathering, because Miss Mulligatawney doesn’t suffer fools gladly, and anything less than complete proof will see your accusations loftily dismissed. It’s fun, and its script wonderfully acerbic.
Score: 8/10
The Electric State: Kid Cosmo
iOS & Android, Included with Netflix subscription (Netflix)
Based on the Simon Stålenhag graphic novel, The Electric State movie cost over $300 million to make, stars Chris Pratt, and is currently languishing at 15% on Rotten Tomatoes.
The game Electric State: Kid Cosmo is a playable prequel to the film, set in the decade leading up to its events. Gameplay revolves around an 8-bit Kid Cosmo handheld game, which your character and his sister play as world events escalate in the background.
The way it layers plot and characters around playing the made-up handheld – which at one point you have to repair when it breaks – works beautifully, the physicality of the handheld brilliantly realised on your phone screen, even if the simulated Kid Cosmo game itself is only okay.
Score: 7/10
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