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75 Mobile Games You Should Be Playing Right Now

Delete Words With Friends. Forget Flappy Bird. And for goodness' sake, get rid of Candy Crush. These are the mobile games you want on your phone

By William Herkewitz
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Bear Grylls//Digital Spy

It's easy to get into a rut of mobile game-playing, trying over and over again to raise your score in Crossy Road or conquer the world in Clash of Clans. But there's a whole world of great games out there waiting for your to try, some of them decidedly under the radar. It's time to load up your smartphone or tablet and get ready for some better gaming.

Xenoraid

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You may think you've played shoot em' up games like Xenoraid before, piloting a spacecraft through oncoming waves of enemies. But Xenoraid offers a delightful and game-changing twist on the genre. You control not one, but four separate spacecraft—which you switch between. 

As the game progresses you upgrade and evolve each craft to your liking. So you might find yourself swapping between a clunky monster brimming with missiles, a quicker craft adept at dodging, a ship built for spraying shotgun shells, and one that takes forever to overheat. Or, you know, just four clunky monsters. It's up to you. 

Be warned, when one of your spacecraft loses all its health, it's gone for good. And it's devastating. You will be missed, Ensign Hubble. 

Platform: Android and iOS

To The Moon

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This will likely be the least mechanically complex but most narratively rich game you'll ever download on your phone. Because To The Moon is a point and click story (not quite a game with only a few puzzles sprinkled along the way) spoiling the plot here would be remiss. So we'll just tell you how it starts. You are in the future, employed by a company that has the technology to rewrite a person's memories. You arrive at the deathbed of an old man, ready to travel into his mind, starting at his most recent memories, reliving and reworking them, then moving farther backward into a mercurial past. 

Platform: Android and iOS

Steredenn

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A pure and beautiful side-scrolling shoot em' up from start to finish with enough punch and story to make the whole experience feels like an epic space opera. You navigate your starship through a maze of randomly-generated barriers, enemies, and oncoming ordnance, upgrading your ship as you go and fighting from boss battle to boss battle. 

Steredenn has just one peculiarity that makes it shine above others in the genre. The very few, randomly dropped weapons each boss releases are often...weird. Like a literal boomerang of blue energy, or a short-range flamethrower—and they're the only weapons you get. So much of Steredenn revolves around mastering what you're randomly given and not what you want. 

Still, this is the best pure shoot em' up we've ever played. 

Platform: iOS

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SPACEPLAN

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The year is 2017, and evil game developers across the world have developed life-draining software that transfigures a person's time and physical energy into absolute nothingness. The software are called clicker games—and they're super addicting. 

SPACEPLAN is definitely my favourite so far, a weird mix of idle and active incremental game that slowly unfolds a story. For those new to the genre, a clicker/incremental game is where you perform something inane over and over again, like clicking on a screen, to gain currency. You use that currency to make your clicks more productive. 

In SPACEPLAN you are growing potatoes, the currency, and unraveling why the Earth has been destroyed. The game won't take you more than a few days to beat, and it gets weird rather quickly. Eventually you're building potato-based towers and Spud-nik satellites, and inventing potato time travel.

Platform: Android and iOS

Slayaway Camp

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Peel away layer after layer of disconnected themes, and Slayaway Camp would be a ridiculously good sliding block puzzle. After a lot of careful thinking, you repeatedly swipe your character across a board, bouncing off walls and obstacles to navigate to various waypoints. But it's the excessively weird theming that sets Slayaway Camp apart: it's a 1980s, cinematic, blocky, horror game. 

Seriously. Each puzzle's waypoints are innocent block characters (à la Minecraft) which you aim to brutally murder. Your characters are '80s horror film villains/monsters, and the game's levels are chapters of a VHS tape, which you have to cinematically rewind. Seriously strange, but definitely worth your time.

Platform: Android and iOS

Planescape: Torment

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Eighteen years young, Planescape: Torment was not a commercial success when it popped out in 1999, but it has since become a cult classic—and for good reason. Like a late-night pen and paper role playing session, it's unabashedly dorky and unforgettably fun from start to finish. You are The Nameless One, an immortal being who inhabits the Dungeons & Dragons' unearthly planes of existence. Your quest: to learn who you are, and why you can not die.

Sure, the game is light on combat, but it's basically a D&D campaign with throwback 2nd Edition rules. Who doesn't need more D&D in their life?

Platform: Android and iOS

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Old Man's Journey

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This platform adventure game is as visually arresting as they come. From one scene to the next, the idyllic, hand-painted backgrounds vary from gorgeous to breathtaking as you walk your way through sun-drenched hills to quaint countryside towns. Because beyond the visuals and slowly unraveling narrative, there's little 'game' in Old Man's Journey

Sure, there's a few light puzzle elements, almost all of which involve finding ways to manipulate the background to create a walkable path for your elderly protagonist. But with no tutorial or game text Old Man's Journey feels more like a picture book than a mobile game. Oddly, that's the main reason we love it. Sink even a moment of time into this relaxing game, and you will be whisked away into the story.

Platform: Android and iOS

Death Road to Canada

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Like Oregon Trail meets Shaun of the Dead—yet somehow better than both—Death Road to Canada is undoubtedly the greatest zombie survival game there is. You're embarking on a journey from post-apocalyptic Florida to the save-haven of the cold north, and as each day passes this 16-bit sprite RPG throws everything at you. You're constantly running low on medical supplies, ammunition, food, and fuel, which you find by breaking into shops (with names like Y'all Mart) and fending off zombies.

Adding more refugees to your journey helps immensely, but each new addition quickens the pace at which you run low on supplies. You'll run into trials on the road, like breakdowns and traps, which you solve according to each of your character's skills. You'll be sieged by zombies, where you'll lose ammunition, break your melee weapons, and lose beloved characters. Your original character will probably die. But the doom and gloom is counterbalanced by hilarious dialogue, offbeat characters, and one ludicrous shop name after the next.

Platform: iOS (Coming soon to Android)

Causality

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With its sheer complexity and obtuse logic, Causality is a brain melter of a puzzle. Each round, you guide multi-colored astronauts from their starting squares to properly colored ending squares, as fast as possible. Rather than moving the astronauts directly, you alter their ever-forward paths by changing the directions of arrows on the game board. 

Here's where the mind melting comes in: Causality leverages weird time-travel logic, where you're constantly speeding up and reversing time, and transporting your astronauts through portals to moments earlier or later on the timeline. The logic's not immediately rational in the least. Beating all 60 levels requires the level of insight of someone who understood Primer after only one viewing. 

Platform: Android and iOS

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Card Thief

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Here's a game best described as a distant, darker relative of Solitare. In Card Thief you play the role of a medieval rogue that's slipping around a 3x3 mat of trading cards, which is continuously replenished from a deck of 46 cards. Your goal is to eliminate cards, and eventually steal a treasure chest hidden somewhere in the deck. 

To eliminate cards, you move into them. Some are challenges: you can cold clock castle guards and extinguish lamps, but this costs you stealth points. Run too low on stealth points and nearby guards can spot you and end the game. Luckily, you can regain stealth points by moving into special sneak cards, ending your turn on hiding cards, or clearing the board in one go. 

Like Card Crawl, the aesthetic is sleek—Dungeons and Dragons meets a colorless Adventure Time. As the game progresses, you can assault new castles and you gather new helpful thief tools, giving Card Thief hours and hours of replayability.

Platform: Android and iOS

7 Mages

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Here's a first-person dungeon crawler that feels like it's been yanked right out of a golden era of PC gaming, that nostalgia-inducing epoch when Myst and Doom filled the shelves at your local Best Buy. In 7 Mages you take control of a rag-tag legion of seven adventurers (although you start the game with only one mage) hurling headlong into epic battles and traversing gigantic maps that often feel like frustrating labyrinths. Beyond the gameplay itself, there are many reasons you could fall in love with 7 Mages—the detailed in-game art, the enthralling S&S lore, the beautifully paired music and scenery. This is one RPG you shouldn't let yourself miss.

Platform: Android and iOS

Beyondium

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Bear Grylls//Digital Spy

Beyondium is one of those delightful games with a surprisingly simple premise. In this dark, atomic-themed line-drawing puzzle, you're tasked with quickly destroying the colored particles pulsating out of a central atom. Connect 'em with lines and they disappear. The conceit is that you can only connect the ever-moving particles of one color. Mess up and, say, let a blue particle wander into your red line, and that line breaks. Beyondium requires quick thinking and a quicker finger.

Platform: Android and iOS

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Quantum Moves

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As we reported in April, Quantum Moves is not just a video game, but also a complex quantum physics experiment helping scientists develop next-generation algorithms for future quantum computers. Really, we're not kidding. Your task is to master the game's sole puzzle, in which you guide a choppy liquid (technically "water," but really a probabilistic atomic smear) that destabilises and spills if you move it too fast. You're gunning to move the water across the screen as fast as you can, spilling as little as possible. You'll find that over time your brain will slowly and intuitively grasp odd destabilisation physics. That's great, because the researchers behind this game are studying the best player's strategies, and developing methods to program quantum computers that adapt to the same weird physics. Citizen science has never been so fun.

Platform: Android and iOS

Captain Cowboy

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Captain Cowboy's 8-bit graphics and flip-screen play may evoke an earlier era of PC and arcade classics, but rest assured nothing about the game feels even remotely antiquated or tired. You guide an astronaut through a massive, sprawling space cavern, with the sole responsibility of finding your way out of the maze. You'll dig tunnels through boulder-filled dirt, learning how to avoid avalanches that can kill, or (worse) trap you. You'll dodge lasers and aliens, constantly check your map, and thrust yourself across unknown expanses of empty space.

Platform: Android and iOS

Mini Metro

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Do you ever curse the transportation gods, swearing you could build a better transit system? Well, now's your chance. Mini Metro is a mobile game that lets you decide how your city runs. The game offers 13 different maps to play through of real cities around the world, like New York, Cairo, and Osaka. Each cities also has its own types of transportation, mirroring the real world. For example, cities in Japan have bullet trains while other cities don't. If anything, the game will likely make you appreciate how hard a job it is designing a transit system for millions of people.

Platform: Android and iOS

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Swapperoo

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This is, hands down, one of greatest—if not the greatest—pure mobile puzzle games we've ever played. The game builds upon a familiar foundation where (a la Candy Crush) you shuffle around a grid of tiles to delete matching-colored groups. But Swapperoo brings more than just fresh blood to this puzzle genre.

Like all legendary pure puzzle games, Swapperoo fulfills what we think of as the Tetris trinity of requirements. First, the game's minimalist, simple conceit (that each tile moves in just one specific way when pressed) is inversely proportional to just how friggen hard it can be. Second, advancing in Swapperoo is a result of mastering the game's subtle mechanics and tricks, and knowing how to chain moves, not just the process of crunching through various levels. Lastly: When you close your eyes after playing a few levels of Swapperoo, you may very well find that your brain hasn't stopped playing.

Platform: iOS (Coming to Android soon.)

Momoka: An Interplanetary Adventure

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It's hard to describe the sense of enormity you experience while playing Momoka, a game that's part platform shooter, part adventure puzzle. While traversing the game's giant, open-world solar system in your rocket, you're free to visit pretty much any planetary body you want in whatever order you want. You really feel like you're exploring. And when you land and move about, each planet or asteroid's gravity causes the universe to spin around you. Momoka instills a certain childlike sense of wonder; it's a throwback to the delight of rummaging through the big worlds in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time or Super Mario 64.

Platform: iOS

Exploding Kittens

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What started out as a hugely popular card game developed by Matthew Inman, the cartoonist behind the The Oatmeal, has now reached its true potential as the mobile game Exploding Kittens. Strip away Kitten's offbeat theme, comedic sound effects, and wacky art, and what you have is a card game that mixes strategy and luck to a maddeningly effective degree. Players take turns drawing from a central pile of cards, hoping not to pull one of few deadly "exploding kitten" cards. Meanwhile, they use cards from their hands to skip their turn, peer into the deck, reverse play direction, make opponents move, and more.

There's two reasons why mobile so perfect for Exploding Kittens. First, the app continually reports the changing odds of pulling an exploding kitten card, which is a fantastic addition. Secondly, the online play with random players is fast and frustratingly competitive, but flawless.

Platform: iOS

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Crashlands

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If you mixed equal parts Minecraft with your favorite hand-held action RPG (say, Golden Sun) and topped it off with enough tongue-in-cheek dialogue to fill a novel, you'd get Crashlands. Easily the best game of 2016 so far, Crashlands may also be one of the biggest. You will easily spend 40+ hours scouring the game's massive worlds, collecting alien materials, fighting exotic monsters, and crafting an endless armory of weapons and gear.

Platform: Android and iOS

Reigns

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At first glance, Reigns is sort of like Tinder—except you're a medieval monarch. Your goal, whether through nefarious or benevolent means, is to make your reign last for as long as possible. Each card that pops up will be requests from peasants, bishops, and generals, and each decision will impact future ones. It's a tricky path toward finding the true good ending, which is where the game's real challenge sets in. Some gamers (like some online daters) might find the endless swiping and repetitive elements somewhat draining. But for such an inventive and fun game, the price is well worth it.

Platform: Android, iOS, Amazon, and PC

From: Popular Mechanics
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