This month’s selection of the most interesting smartphone gaming apps includes a world class Tower Defence and a very odd detective game.
As the video games industry begins to dethaw from a typically quiet start to the year, there’s already plenty of interesting new mobile titles to choose from, including what is easily one of the best Tower Defence games ever made.
There’s also the entertaining, and wilfully strange, Mindcop; joined by anti-gambling game CloverPit; and the mobile release of TR-49, which is just as enthralling on a smartphone as it is on PC.
There’s never really a good or bad month for mobile games, as must-haves can often appear without warning, but this February definitely has an above average crop of interesting apps.
Potion Punch 2+
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iOS & Android, included with Apple Arcade (Monstronauts)
There are innumerable cooking and restaurant management games, and while Potion Punch 2+ is notionally about serving magical elixirs, they often come with food side orders and, materially at least, this doesn’t differ much from the genre it’s part of.
Running your potion shop means pouring and mixing potions of various colours and gradually upgrading items in your shop, both to smooth the process of service, and to increase each item’s price.
The incremental pace of progress and presence of numerous currencies are the remnants of its microtransaction-based original version, which is still available on Android, where its clean graphical style and slowly complicating interactions remain moderately entertaining.
Score: 6/10
Tower Dominion Go
iOS & Android, free – full game £8.99 (Nvizzio Creations)
Tower Dominion offers a couple of twists on the by now well explored tower defence genre. Its first is the exceptionally large number of unlockable towers and sets of commanders who hail from three different factions, each of which comes with its own unique skills.
The second is that you build a new path for mobs to follow each round you play, drawing random track pieces to connect to a gradually expanding landmass. The interplay of commander powers with the turrets and pathways you draw makes for a substantively differing experience each time you play.
What really ties it together is its high production values. Watching tiny, beautifully drawn and hugely varied defensive structures firing at equally lovely looking and diverse enemy mobs really is a spectacle, making the slow learning process of where each new tower fits into a potential strategy all the more enjoyable.
With five difficulty levels, getting a win in each is only part of the story. The lengthier and more involving meta game of unlocking all its towers and commanders is the real meat, its increasingly labyrinthine mazes and exquisitely detailed graphics proving to be a joy in themselves.
Score: 8/10
Claw Quest: Roguelike RPG
iOS & Android, free (Hexpion)
While roguelikes and free-to-play games are two a penny, games featuring that old fairground favourite the claw machine are a lot more of a rarity, making Claw Quest’s offbeat adventure game an interesting curio.
Presented in 2D, combat consists of positioning the claw over scattered weapons, defences and power-ups, before triggering it to drop, grabbing at whatever’s directly underneath before violently swinging over to a chute at the side and releasing its treasures. Whatever you get is used to attack enemies and bolster your armour.
It’s great fun for a couple of hours, but over the artificially extended playtime of a freemium game it quickly pales, becoming less interesting as you play, the grind highlighting the mechanic’s innate shallowness. It’s good while it lasts though and doesn’t force you to watch ads or overly nag you to spend actual money.
Score: 5/10
CloverPit
Inverting the usual lure of gambling, CloverPit presents you with a hellish fruit machine that you’re forced to play to pay off escalating debts. Fail to earn enough in a limited number of rounds and you’re dropped through a grate in the floor to your doom.
Avoiding that fate means playing the diabolical one-armed bandit, assisted by stacking Balatro-style multipliers in the form of charms. They provide perks that can do anything from encouraging particularly high scoring symbols to appear more often, to increasing your overall luck, a factor that makes a very noticeable difference.
Like Luck Be A Landlord, its oblique (and bleak) social commentary at least partly makes up for a slightly lower level of complexity. It’s still an enjoyable interlude in your day, its roguelite rounds proving just right for mobile play.
Score: 7/10
TR-49
iOS, £6.99 (inkle)
From the people who made Overboard! and 80 Days, comes a game about the Bletchley Park code breakers. Its core is the uploaded content of numerous books and secret documents that have been broken up into small pieces in the facility’s prototypical computer, leaving you to search for commonalities in their language.
The resulting interactions are reminiscent of Sam Barlow titles like Immortality and Her Story, letting you stumble across key phrases that lead to new documents, and a gradually emerging underlying story.
It’s beautifully made and works really well on a touchscreen, which makes tapping on codes and sentence fragments intuitive, leading you through more of its surprisingly dark plot. Like the games that inspired it, TR-49 manages to make you feel as though you’re making actual breakthroughs rather than taking a predefined path.
Score: 8/10
Mindcop
iOS & Android, Free – full game £4.99 (Plug-In Digital)
Mindcop and his unusually tall assistant, Linda are a distinctly offbeat detective team, solving crimes with good old-fashioned police work, Mindcop’s telepathic skills and Linda’s quiet admonishments when he starts going too far.
Every action you take uses up a chunk of time, forcing you to be judicious with what you do and don’t investigate, and who you talk to. Given the extraordinary richness and dry wit involved in its conversations you can’t help being aware of the huge amount of joyously perfected content you’re missing as you work your way through the game’s case load.
Presented in cartoonish 2D and requiring genuine detective work (it gently recommends you make your own notes but doesn’t press the issue) Mindcop is a weird, fascinating little gem of a game that’s well worth your time if you fancy a bit of surreality with your crime fighting.
Score: 8/10
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