Saw a game on Google Play that had great reviews (4.6k AVG with 77k reviews) so downloaded it thinking I finally might have found a good mobile game only to find it was trash like almost every mobile game I’ve ever tried.
Is it me, am I the problem, or are virtually all mobile games terrible?
Edit
Thanks for everyone’s feedback and suggestions, I’ve been trying out some of your recommendations as well as trying out Steam Link to play my steam PC games
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There are a few hidden gems (I enjoy Plague inc. and Rebel inc. on occasion, for example), but for the most part, the majority of mobile games are mtx-laden cash grabs. So the actual quality is commensurately low because the devs figured out they don’t have to put in real effort to implement gambling and hook addicts.
IMO, smartphones had the chance to revolutionize the gaming industry, but ended up wasting almost all of that potential on skinner boxes riddled with ads and microtransactions. Most of the best mobile games are ports from other systems, like the mobile edition of Minecraft and whatnot.
I think Pokémon Go was possibly the closest any major publisher has come to actually realizing the full potential of mobile games as a format, but it still fell painfully short with massively dumbed down mechanics and an absolute grindfest of a progression system.
There are still a few good indie projects out there (I like Soul Knight) but generally the mobile gaming market is so full of absolute dreck that I usually just don’t bother.
Or did it revolutionize the industry to it’s endpoint, that we just don’t want to admit was the natural conclusion of capitalistic society video games?
There’s an Android app called “minireview” which has tons of reviews of games on Google Play and helps filter out the garbage.
There are good mobile games out there. World of Goo, Little Inferno, Angry Birds, The Room, What the Golf?, Plants vs. Zombies, FTL, Genshin Impact, Jetpack Joyride, are good examples. There are also some ported games that are fantastic, like Minecraft, Papers Please, Roblox, and I’m sure countless others.
However, mobile devices don’t have enough resources for many triple-A PC/Console games, they also don’t have the ergonomics of a controller, and the screen is inherently too small for some games. Even if the technical issues could be mitigated, would you want to play something like Elden Ring on a phone? Likewise, would you want to play Angry Birds on your television? I think the best compromise is when mobile games are specifically tailored for the platform they are on. FTL and Plants vs. Zombies come to mind as great implementations. But if those type of games aren’t something you like, then you’re out of luck.
Wait FTL is on mobile? That sounds amazing… dang it looks like it is ios only.
Afaik its for iPads only. Into the breach, however, is on mobile.
Commenting in here so I can try out some of the games listed because I have found very, very few games that weren’t totally trash - either shit quality or an endless begging for money.
The very few that I do enjoy are Word Feud, The Kingdom Rush series, Flow Free, Block Puzzle and only a few other ones.
Wordfeud is awesome! I had to uninstall it for a while because of the addiction, but I’ll be back…
It legit is a great game - had it faithfully installed for years and had many games going on at once and then one day I just had to uninstall it. I hit the limit of the number of times I had to come up with words like Qi or Ki and then on the flip side having opponents that would endlessly cheat.
oh my gosh… your comment totally confused me until I looked up Wordfeud. I was thinking of Wordhero! Have you tried that one? Think of it as MMO Boggle. 🙃 Wordfeud is great too though–I definitely played that too, just mixed up the two in my head.
Wordhero
Never heard of that one. If I want to get back into scrabble/boggle-like games I might give it a shot. I’ve been on a tower attack (whatever the Kingdom Rush type of games are called) kick for a while now but then I’ll get sick of those and then want to swtich to something else again.