Roto Force is one of the year’s best smartphone apps (Picture: PID Games)
GameCentral looks back at the last 12 months in mobile gaming, from the excellent Roto Force to the disarmingly addictive City Gridlock.
2023 has been a vintage year for mobile games, with something for every taste. From the consistently ominous escape rooms of Underground Blossom to the match-three delight of Shovel Knight Pocket Dungeon, the quality has lasted throughout the year. The only problem has been that most of the best games are clearly inspired by other, better known, console titles, but there’s still plenty of originality in there too – and always at a budget price.
Underground Blossom
iOS & Android, £2.99 (Rusty Lake)
As its name suggests, Underground Blossom is set across a succession of tube stations, each of which forms its own distinct escape room, whilst also feeding a sinister overarching narrative.
Puzzles are beautifully designed for a touchscreen, proving tricky and esoteric but also logical enough to be worked out from the small number of clues available in its deliberately sparse environments.
From Dutch uber-developer Rusty Lake, this conforms to their entirety justifiable reputation for making refined, elegant, and subtly disturbing mobile games.
Score: 8/10
Chronescher
iOS & Android, £3.49 (Purple Sloth Studio)
If you’re going to borrow mechanics, it may as well be from the best available, which makes Chronescher’s nod in the direction of Monument Valley one that’s immediately welcome.
Taking place on levels you can rotate to alter their geometry, this adds portals and time jumps, making its puzzles massively more intricate than those of its inspiration.
If you enjoy taxing puzzles and don’t mind spending a considerable amount of time experimenting and trying different approaches, this is a deeply rewarding game.
Score: 8/10
Ultra Blade
iOS, £2.99 (Foolish Mortal Studios)
Taking its cues from the all-conquering Vampire Survivors, Ultra Blade is a fellow pixel art auto-aim shooter, where you take on vast and varying legions of incoming enemies.
Following a similar roguelite model and featuring mobs that also arrive from all parts of the screen, you need to pick power-ups carefully to adapt your build as you play, making judicious use of special abilities when the going gets tough.
It’s hectic and different every single run, even if its frame rate is sometimes a little slow for the amount of onscreen action.
Score: 8/10
Roto Force
iOS & Android, Free – full game £3.99 (PID Games)
With its techno beats and action that has you dashing around the outside of each level firing into the middle of it, Roto Force plays like a modern version of arcade classic Tempest.
Unlike its inspiration, here you can also launch your avatar through the middle of the arena, landing on the opposite side, and switch from your starter machine gun to high explosive bouncing bombs or homing missiles.
Its 8-bit pixel art graphics and fast, skill-based action call back to an era of games that was both simpler and far more challenging.
Scor: 9/10
EXIT: Trial Of The Griffin
iOS & Android, £5.99 (USM)
With its wood-panelled rooms and brass-embossed puzzles, whose solutions often comprise multiple layers of Victorian mechanical engineering, Trial Of The Griffin is a sequel to 2021’s The Curse Of Ophir, which in turn is powerfully reminiscent of Fireproof’s The Room and its sequels.
Making exquisite use of the touchscreen, uncovering solutions takes a good deal of pulling, pushing, dragging, and in some cases, tilting your phone.
Luckily there is a hint system, although that, too, requires a bit of thought to decipher its clues.
Score: 8/10
Generations is all about family (Picture: Scenic Route)
Scenic Route’s Generations
iOS, £4.99 (Scenic Route)
Generations takes an unusual approach to its merging mechanic, which takes place across a set of human faces that you can combine to produce a single face that’s a generation older.
While it can initially be confusing which generation a given face belongs to, it swiftly becomes second nature, and you also become adept at chaining sequences of faces together and merging four or more to skip a generation entirely.
Originally released on Panic’s excellent Playdate handheld, which is also well worth a look for anyone jaded by the current state of the console market, this is hugely entertaining.
Score: 8/10
Pocket City 2
iOS & Android, £4.99 (Codebrew Games)
Channelling SimCity’s earlier incarnations, Pocket City 2 brings a pleasing degree of complexity to its core building and management systems, established in the now five-year-old original.
In other additions, you can now deploy your scientists to research new technology for your expanding metropolis and use its more detailed graphs and statistics to reveal exactly what your populace needs next.
For a phone game its maps are very large indeed and it’s a wonderful breath of fresh air not to have to deal with EA’s wearyingly insatiable microtransactions, which ruin Sim City BuildIt.
Score: 8/10
City Gridlock
iOS & Android, £2.99 (Short Story Games)
Starting by getting you to install traffic lights and road signs to ease traffic congestion in a small town centre, City Gridlock quickly ramps up the challenge.
That includes increasing footfall to certain stores or areas and paying attention to lane discipline to prevent unnecessary snarl-ups. It’s mind-blowing how much difference a seemingly tiny and innocuous change can make to the dynamics of traffic flow.
If that sounds a bit nerdy, well, it is, but it’s also a fascinating and highly detailed simulation that’s more than capable of generating sweet, dopamine-producing eureka moments.
Score: 8/10
Shovel Knight Pocket Dungeon
iOS & Android, included with Netflix subscription (Yacht Club Games)
The latest version of Shovel Knight is one of this year’s stops along the way to Netflix becoming a mobile games publisher of some renown.
Although match-three games aren’t exactly groundbreaking, Shovel Knight’s take on them is characteristically inventive, and like good old Puzzle & Dragons, uses it for battling monsters in your dungeon crawl.
Well balanced and requiring tactics and judgement to go along with the inevitable random location of its coloured blocks, it also manages to feel every bit a part of its otherwise almost entirely dissimilar franchise.
Score: 8/10
More: Trending
2023’s biggest mobile game disappointment
Ship Simulator: Logistic Game
iOS & Android, Free (Azur Interactive Games)
Some games are great, and some are terrible, while in the mobile world, others are just plain greedy for your cash. The poetically entitled Ship Simulator: Logistic Game is an unfortunate combination of great and greedy.
On one hand, its finely tuned gameplay has you delicately nudging your overloaded river barge over the crests of waves, whilst simultaneously keeping an eye on the tension of its tow chain, engine temperature, and the integrity of any unsecured parts of its load.
On the other, despite that being an honestly enthralling process, it’s engineered to be just slightly too difficult, in an attempt to lure you into spending money. Rather sadly that’s not removing ads or buying a starter pack but an endless conveyer belt of ad watching and microtransactions, rendering what would have been joyous, into a cold-hearted mugging attempt. Bah humbug, Azure Interactive!
Score: 3/10
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GameCentral looks back at the last 12 months in mobile gaming, from the excellent Roto Force to the disarmingly addictive City Gridlock.