Cliff Notes – Best new mobile games on iOS and Android October 2025 round-up
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Worms Across Worlds: Celebrating 30 years, this mobile adaptation features new mechanics like wormholes and a comprehensive single-player campaign, maintaining its entertaining, turn-based combat style.
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Fire Emblem Shadows: Nintendo‘s latest mobile entry disappoints with a lack of tactical depth, transforming the beloved franchise into an auto-battler that fails to engage players meaningfully.
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Maze Mice: This innovative game combines elements of classic titles, offering a unique gameplay experience where time only moves when the player does, resulting in strategic and engaging challenges.
Best new mobile games on iOS and Android – October 2025 round-up
Worms completes the journey from Amiga 500 to mobile phone (Team17)
The latest batch of notable new smartphone apps includes a Fire Emblem spin-off and a game you control with a pair of AirPods.
As Microsoft’s Xbox juggernaut lurches through the games industry, destroying much loved studios and promising unreleased games, along with decades of good reputation and shareholder value, it’s reassuring to note that the studiedly independent world of mobile gaming continues as if this inadvertent corporate apocalypse wasn’t even happening.
This month’s releases include the genre-bending Maze Mice, the mobile port of the wonderful Chants Of Sennaar, a genuine – and mildly peculiar – innovation in RidePods – Race With Head, and a game based on a much-loved Nintendo IP.
Although given how the new Fire Emblem spin-off slipped out without any marketing at all, you might already imagine that it’s not one of Nintendo’s best efforts…
Fire Emblem Shadows
iOS & Android, free (Nintendo)
Expert, exclusive gaming analysis
Nintendo’s latest foray into mobile Entertainment returns to Intelligent System’s venerable Fire Emblem franchise, reinventing its tactical turn-based combat (that typically comes with the heartbreaking permadeath of key characters) into a boring auto-battler.
Fights take place on a familiar grid, and still feature the series’ classic rock, paper, scissors strengths and weaknesses for each unit, but now instead of controlling your troops, all you can do is cast heal or attack spells once their cooldowns let you.
In a further misguided innovation, there’s now a traitor system, where one of your two compatriots in each battle is working for the other side. But given the fights’ extreme brevity and the lack of any social chat, your 50/50 guess as to which purported friend is actually an enemy is about as good as a coin toss.
It’s atrocious, failing both as a tactical combat game and a whodunnit, instead settling for charging you to win more frequently via its paid battle pass.
Score: 3/10
Maze Mice
iOS & Android, £4.99 (Trampoline Tales) – out 10th October
Playing like an unlikely sounding hybrid of Pac-Man, Superhot, and Vampire Survivors, your mouse takes to a maze populated by sleeping cats and edible dots. Your job is to eat the dots, which cumulatively earn you power-ups, and survive long enough to beat each level’s boss.
The twist is that time only moves when you do, so by default everything stands still and it’s only when you press a direction button that enemies also head towards you. Regular enemy cats need to work their way through the maze, to attack you while ghostly ones can move through walls, making teleport tunnels a useful last resort.
All weapons you unlock trigger automatically at the end of their cooldowns, auto-targeting the increasing phalanx of cats that follows you while you eat dots and do your best to survive, pausing whenever you like to plan your route.
New mazes, and mice with varying starter powers, unlock as you progress It’s fascinating to find out how each level’s distinct pattern of pathways interacts with your weaponry and the enemies you face, the game’s subtlety gradually showing itself as you continue playing. It’s a low key gem of a game.
Score: 8/10
TED Tumblewords
iOS & Android, free – remove ads for £6.99 (Frosty Pop)
Yes, it’s that TED – usually famed for bringing topical speakers to YouTube – and for reasons never made clear, the brand has stamped itself on a daily task-orientated word game. In it you’ll need to make words from letters on a grid, whose columns and rows you can move to open up more potential spellings. Outside the wordplay, the app is obsessed with encouraging social media sharing.
The oddly uninspiring daily quotes that appear when you login come with a share button that bounces about on screen in its eagerness to get you to repost. You’re also entreated to share every single result from every round you play. It would be exhausting if it wasn’t so baffling. Who cares if you scored 1,400 points in TED Tumblewords?
The word games themselves are actually reasonably compelling, and each variant comes with global leaderboards, giving you plenty of scope for competing against fellow cunning linguists via an interface that’s never less than satisfying to use.
Score: 6/10
Faily Brakes Roadtrip
iOS & Android, free (Spunge Games)
In Faily Brakes you steer a brakeless car down a series of hills. On the way you’ll need to avoid all manner of obstacles, from freight trains to trees, and a similar variety of power-ups that range from obstruction-destroying miniguns to shields that let you simply trundle over pieces of level furniture that would otherwise have ended your run.
Your default car has fairly spongey suspension, so even minor bumps have the capacity to mess up steering for a few seconds as your car bounces back to stability, but you can earn better vehicles if you stick with it.
Unfortunately, that involves a lengthy grind powered by watching ads, which anyone who plays freemium mobile games regularly will know are some of the most inane, repetitious, and wilfully deceptive pieces of media your eyeballs will ever have the misfortune to endure. Faily Brakes’ distinctly milquetoast thrills are nowhere near enough to compensate.
Score: 4/10
Worms Across Worlds – still going strong after three decades (Team17)
Worms Across Worlds
iOS, included with Apple Arcade subscription (Team17)
This year is the 30th anniversary of Worms, a franchise built around cartoon vermicular warfare where up to four players take turns to move their team of soldier worms, unleashing a range of outlandish weaponry whose excessive firepower often proves accidentally suicidal.
Across Worlds adds Portal style wormholes and various combat roles, from scouts who can sneak past landmines without blowing them up to scientists who heal slightly at the beginning of every turn.
It also comes with an unusually fully formed single-player training campaign, each level of which introduces fresh weapons, mechanics, and techniques. This sets you up for multiplayer engagements, which once again can be played either online or by passing an iPad or phone between players.
You can also now earn silly hats for your worms, a cosmetic upgrade we found it hard to get too excited about, but the knockabout and deeply unserious military action remains entertaining.
Score: 7/10
Chants Of Sennaar
iOS & Android, £7.99 (Playdigious)
The adventure you go on in Chants Of Sennaar’s minimally drawn, isometrically viewed world is one of exploration and understanding, as you gradually ascend what amounts to a Tower of Babel, using logic and observation to try and understand the written and spoken alien language used by its denizens.
Mysterious glyphs appear in the speech bubbles of characters you meet, and on signs and artwork you encounter, each one potentially extending your understanding as you make breakthroughs or realise that previous epiphanies were actually all wrong.
It’s a fascinating process that you manage via the game’s journal, which mixes pictures and text, letting you make and correct notes as you go, cleverly obviating the need for a real-world paper notebook to make sense of your observations.
Originally released on PC and consoles, its geometric world and point ‘n’ click interactions are right at home on a touchscreen, making this a wonderful way to introduce yourself to its estimable charms.
Score: 8/10
RidePods – Race With Head isn’t finished (Ali Tanis)
RidePods – Race With Head for iOS, free (Ali Tanis)
Let’s get this out of the way upfront, the eloquently entitled RidePods – Race With Head, is not a fully-fledged game and is nowhere near developed enough to get a score. Its gameplay consists solely of riding a motorbike at high speed along a primitively rendered motorway, dodging slower moving cars as they seem to hurtle towards you.
Its claim to notoriety is that rather than use your phone’s screen to steer, you instead control it by putting in a pair of AirPods and inclining your head left and right as you speed through traffic.
It works surprisingly well, and while the game itself is unlikely to detain you for more than a few minutes, as a proof of concept it competently demonstrates that you can indeed control a game using a pair of earbuds. It will be interesting to see whether any plucky developers can make more of it than a fleeting tech demo.
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