Cliff Notes – Best new mobile games on iOS and Android June 2025 round-up
- Game Of Thrones: Kingsroad offers a visually impressive RPG experience but suffers from shallow combat mechanics and aggressive monetisation tactics, making it a frustrating choice for players.
- Puzzle & Dragons 0 retains the original’s complexity while eliminating gacha elements, providing a more player-friendly experience with limited in-app purchases.
- Follow The Meaning stands out with its unique art style and surreal narrative, offering engaging puzzles that enhance its charm despite some challenging gameplay elements.
Best new mobile games on iOS and Android – June 2025 round-up
Game Of Thrones: Kingsroad – exactly what you’d expect (Netmarble)
This month’s most interesting smartphone gaming apps includes a new Game Of Thrones adaptation and a gacha free version of Puzzle & Dragons.
Getting things for free is great. The trouble is that, as the old adage says, there’s no such thing as a free lunch, a concept mobile gamers will be more than familiar with. Games that are free to download tend to extract their pounds of flesh through ads, microtransactions, or an unholy union of the two.
That doesn’t mean all mobile publishers are equally tawdry in their pursuit of revenue. Where Game Of Thrones: Kingsroad and Chainsaw Juice King beat you around the head with tediously relentless sales pitches, long awaited prequel Puzzle & Dragons 0 shows there are more player-friendly routes to monetisation.
Then again you could just pay upfront and enjoy the delightful Follow The Meaning or Rusty Lake’s genuine freebie, The Mr Rabbit Magic Show.
Puzzle & Dragons 0
iOS & Android, free – remove ads £9.99, unlimited stamina £9.99 (GungHo Online Entertainment)
Expert, exclusive gaming analysis
Puzzle & Dragons featured a compelling blend of match-three puzzling and combat, your match-ups and the resulting combos triggering damage to colourful assailants.
Puzzle & Dragons 0 retains most of the original’s look, feel, and mechanics but removes its gacha elements. Now you add new monsters to your team using the crystals you win by completing dungeons.
It’s just as monumentally complex though, the interlocking sets of skills and team buffs taking a great deal of time and instruction to even start getting the hang of. You’ll also need to watch a fair number of ads to stay competitive, although none are forced on you.
It’s not easy reviewing games designed to be played for literal years, because they tend to change qualitatively as you master skills and inch your way up their mountains of content, but in this case the intricacy, level of polish, and only two options for in-app purchases are promising signs.
Score: 7/10
Follow The Meaning
iOS & Android, £2.99 (Second Maze)
With a charming art style slightly reminiscent of Machinarium, Follow the Meaning is a partially animated point ‘n’ click adventure with a lovely handmade feel about it.
Both its plot and limited amount of text-only dialogue are deeply surreal, centring on your investigation of a small town’s problem with three-eyed mutants who mostly come out at night, and whom most people are scared of. You’ll need to solve a range of simple puzzles using light deduction, a bit of trial and error, and a touch of dragging items from your inventory.
A few of its puzzles are a bit abstruse, but there are walkthroughs online if you get horribly stuck and the whole thing has such a unique atmosphere it’s worth a look for that alone.
Score: 7/10
Chainsaw Juice King: Idle Shop
iOS & Android, free – remove ads £11.99 (SayGames)
Build a fruit juice empire in this amusingly unserious business simulator, that begins with just you, a chainsaw, and a gaggle of panicking, wide-eyed fruit doing their best to avoid being traumatically juiced.
Hire staff, upgrade your blenders, raise prices, and gradually ratchet up the orders of magnitude in your juicing operation – which diversifies into jam and, for some reason, gem mining.
Unlike many incremental games this is emphatically not idle, requiring plenty of active management of your operation, including chasing down those pesky fruits. If it weren’t so riddled with advertising it would initially be quite addictive.
As it is, you’re regularly forced to watch ads and strongly incentivised to sit through a lot more. The real issue is how dystopian those ads are. Often 90 seconds long and with deliberate pauses you need to click through to continue watching, they actively prevent you from just leaving them on in the background.
You can, of course, pay to remove them, but the more Juice King you play the more its gameplay feels like skill-free busy work, which is fine for a bit but eventually boring.
Score: 5/10
Kumome
iOS & Android, free (Yannis Benattia)
Kumome’s turn-based puzzles get you to move your hero one space in any direction on the board, then add a new piece in an attempt to block your opponent. If they can’t move their hero, you win.
From those simple beginnings, Kumome layers on teleport tiles, multiple opponents, single-use power-ups, and online PvP combat.
Clearly a labour of love from a lone developer, its interface may be slightly rough around the edges but its gameplay is solidly designed, providing a varying challenge throughout its 200-level single player campaign and online multiplayer, once you’re confident enough to try it.
Score: 7/10
Pup Champs
iOS & Android, free – full game unlock £4.99 (Afterburn)
Pub Champs is a football themed puzzle game that despite its content requires neither a love of the sport nor dexterity. Instead, you’ll be greeted by an escalating series of turn-based tactical challenges in which you direct a set of animal footballers to kick a ball into the back of the net.
Initially, that’s a case of getting in front of the goal mouth and tapping but soon enough you’ll find your path occluded by road cones, piles of leaves, muddy puddles, and more.
You’ll also discover that different players interact with the ball in their own distinct ways, some kicking it straight, others curling it through the air to clear obstacles. Each also has a limited number of turns, so you’ll need to combine their skills to complete puzzles.
Highly polished, Pup Champs’ 170 levels also get pretty taxing, belying the cozy setting and menagerie of young animal protagonists.
Score: 7/10
The Mr Rabbit Magic Show
iOS & Android, free (Rusty Lake)
Indie developer Rusty Lake has a wonderfully offbeat signature style that blends the sinister, dreamlike, and mundane into some of the most idiosyncratic and enjoyable games on mobile.
To celebrate the studio’s tenth birthday, they’ve released this mysterious interactive magic show, whose 20 acts are punctuated by an interlude in the Rusty Lake offices where you need to make everyone a drink, solve some puzzles, and debug The Mr Rabbit Magic Show game ready to be published.
Its puzzles are mostly straightforward, although one demands such an extreme level of trial and error that you’ll need a pen and paper – or a spare iPad – to discover its lengthy and highly specific sequence of taps.
Still, for a freebie its hour of pleasing, self-referential puzzle solving can scarcely be faulted and if you’re new to Rusty Lake’s delights this could well act as a gateway to their superb back catalogue.
Score: 8/10
What the Clash?
iOS, included with Apple Arcade subscription (What the Games)
Made by the developer of the award-winning What The Car?, What the Clash? has a similar visual design, but instead of surrealist driving escapades it features a series of mini-games that you can play solo or against a fellow human.
Starting with table tennis and soon adding racing, target shooting, and others, each of its games can be modified using a growing set of special cards that unlock as you play. That means if you and an opponent choose Archery, adding the barrel and giraffe cards gives you high winds that affect the flight of each arrow, while barrel and rotate give you rocket launchers.
It means almost every game is different – often in quite surprising ways – and that you’re continually unlocking new and frequently outlandish add-ons almost every time you play.
Some of the games are a lot more fun than others but its high production values, zany humour, and continual sense of progression are a winning combination.
Score: 8/10
Game Of Thrones: Kingsroad
iOS & Android, free (Netmarble)
Game Of Thrones’ foray into mobile entertainment delivers excellent first impressions. A graphically intensive third person action role-player, it features the visual likeness of plenty of familiar characters, and while it doesn’t boast the original cast, voice-acting is first rate.
You also don’t need to be an aficionado of the books or TV show to get it, with everything conveniently explained. Starting as a knight, sell sword or assassin, you’re unleashed into an open world infested with white walkers, their world’s take on zombies.
Problems start to creep in with combat that’s instantly superficial, and even on an iPad Pro tends to drop numerous frames when the action gets frantic. Its real issue though, is your character’s Momentum Score; the total average level of every piece of gear you have equipped.
If it’s too low, missions are deliberately impossible until you’ve met its requirement, and the enormous range of different currencies you need to progress makes it a shamelessly extended grind, which naturally you can circumvent with micro-transactions.
Inventory space is limited until you pay actual money to expand it, forcing you to sell each piece of unneeded equipment individually, and that’s just the start of a seemingly endless parade of different methods of fleecing you. Even if you’re a massive fan of the show, this is best avoided.
Score: 3/10
