The year’s first batch of new mobile games includes the excellent Gladiabots and one of the first action games for Apple Watch.
Now that the last of the tinsel has been stuffed back into its cardboard box, and the pine needles brushed neatly under the rug, it’s time to once again seek solace from the soul crushing reality of British January by finding something – anything – to fiddle with on your phone. Fortunately, the last few weeks have been kind to mobile gamers, with options like the wonderfully mellow Spring Falls to soothe your troubled brow, or the obsession-inducing intricacy of Gladiabots – which might well be enough to keep you distracted until Easter.
Space Grunts 2 for iOS, £3.99 (OrangePixel)
With its 8-bit-style graphics and roguelike trappings, Space Grunts 2 is every bit an OrangePixel game; only this time, rather than being about action, it’s a turn-based deck builder with an emphasis on speed and simplicity.
Every move you make enemies also get a turn, which means they move around the game’s procedurally-generated levels at the same time you do and take turns in the same way during battles. This lean process is let down by the speed with which cards cycle through your hand, giving you little chance to build a tactically viable deck.
You can exchange cards at special vending machines, but you’re almost always better off just toughing it out and heading for the exit to the next level. That reduces the enjoyment of what could have been a more involved and interesting strategy game, but an Android version is in the works if you’re interested.
Score: 6/10
Song Of Bloom, £1.99 (Philipp Stollenmayer)
A flickering, leafless plant appears with a cryptic subtitle. A tap takes you to an empty white square, another to a set of mysterious dials, a man looking at his phone, a scattering of symbols, a lonely figure climbing a diagonal line, and it’s all over.
The game turns out to be hidden within that brief series of abstract images, you just need to figure out how to unlock it, which you undertake using visual clues that are neatly summarised for you as buds growing from the plant on the opening screen’s formerly blossom-free branches.
Beautifully drawn and with a haunting soundtrack, the cyclical nature of the game and its oblique plot exposition make this a playful and constantly delightful experience.
Score: 8/10
Circuloid for Apple Watch, £1.99 (Beep Yeah!)
Although Apple Watch has become a prolific platform for apps to support your fitness regime, it’s yet to find its feet with games, which is why an action game designed specifically for watch-based play is such an interesting find.
In Circuloid, coloured bubbles float from the middle of the screen to the outside, where you catch them with a paddle, controlled by rotating the digital crown. As you catch more, the paddle extends until it forms a full circle, at which point it’s on to the next level.
As you progress there are multi-coloured bubbles; catch the wrong colour with your paddle and it shrinks, quickly resulting in failure. And given its 1980s arcade style difficulty level you’ll be doing a lot of failing. There may not be much to this tiny, snack-sized interlude between important tasks, but it’s the potential progenitor of a new breed of wearable games.
Score: 6/10
The House of Da Vinci 2 for iOS, £4.99 (Blue Brain Games)
In House of Da Vinci 2 you’ll be solving a succession of wooden and brass mechanical puzzles in a semi-mystical setting by dragging, pinching, and tapping the touchscreen. If you’ve played The Room or its sequels you’ll be on very familiar ground.
Although riven with countless similarities, from its sound effects to the hints system to its use of the room-transforming Oculus Perpetua, this focuses slightly more on exploration with a larger number of simpler puzzles spread over a wider area. It is less intuitive than The Room though, even though its mechanics seem to be reused more frequently.
In spite of its manifold similarities and some distinctly wobbly voice-acting it’s still good, its involving multi-stage puzzles taking quite a bit of teasing, prodding, and experimentation to figure out. Coming soon to Android, PC, and Switch.
Score: 7/10
60 Parsecs! for iOS & Android, £3.99 (Robot Gentleman)
60 Parsecs! is the sequel to the well-received and darkly comic 60 Seconds! You begin with one minute to go until the Earth is destroyed, giving you scant time to grab useful items and crew members before jumping into an escape pod.
Every day that follows requires you to make one decision, usually based on a nonsensical situation where your response effectively produces an arbitrary win or lose condition. Against this background you have to help your crew survive using the meagre supplies heisted in the opening seconds.
Even if you love the game’s sense of humour and art style, the quality of the interactions is so wafer thin it’s impossible to draw much satisfaction from them. Randomly surviving may be marginally less irritating than dying through no fault of your own, but neither is much fun.
Score: 4/10
Spring Falls for iOS, £3.99 (Sparse Game Development)
In Spring Falls your job is to nurture flowers by providing them with water. Initially that’s as simple as lowering a hexagonal block so that water flows next to a seed, but as the game progresses you’ll need to douse multiple flowers while making sure all your precious water doesn’t flow off the edge of the level.
Ported from PC, it feels right at home on a touchscreen, the minimalist interface complemented by elegantly simple guitar music to accompany your musings.
There are a few tricky puzzles in there, but the overall sense is one of gentle relaxation. An Android version is due for release later this year.
Score: 7/10
1000 Days to Escape for iOS & Android, £0.79 (Aleksey Kashlakov)
Once again, the Earth is scheduled for total destruction, but this time you’ve got 1,000 days in which to evacuate its 7 billion population. You do that by exploring nearby planets, terraforming them, and then sending rockets full of terrestrial refugees to their new homes.
Launching rockets and buying resources takes science points, which you earn by successfully landing on, exploring and settling alien worlds. They also let you upgrade your rocket and equipment, enabling you to colonise increasingly more extreme and far-flung planets.
There are no instructions and the English translation is a bit homespun, but the game is rock solid, its real-time gameplay loop proving hugely compelling. And there’s not a single ad or IAP in sight, a snip at 79p.
Score: 8/10
Gladiabots - AI Combat Arena for iOS & Android, £6.99 (Sébastien Dubois)
While there are innumerable arena shooters, Gladiabots is different in that you at no point control the action. Instead, you adapt the AI of your autonomous robotic team members to help them prevail on the field of battle.
In spite of a superb and detailed multi-tiered training mode, this is still a lot to get your head around. Luckily there’s an extensive single-player mode in which to hone your programming skills and refine AI sub-routines – that you can deploy across multiple bots – before moving on to the rigours of multiplayer.
The result is absolutely sensational and Gladiabots has a level of depth and complexity that will keep the right kind of stubborn logician busy for months.
Score: 9/10
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