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
I’m a big fan of BuriedBornes. Great little old school rpg to pick up and play. Lots of in depth mechanics and replayability.
Postknight :D
Nope, you just have to dig…
- Minecraft
- Ocean Horn
- Terraria
- Don’t Starve
- Neon Chrome
- Stardew Valley
- GTA III
- GTA Vice City
- GTA: San Andreas
- GTA: Chinatown Wars
- Bully
- Max Payne
- Star Wars KOTOR
- Limbo
- Roller Coaster Tycoon
- OpenTTD (Transport Tycoon)
- Portal
With some fiddling you can even run some PC games like Half Life 1 and 2, Doom 3 and Morrowind (not even emulated, their engines were actually ported to Android).
If you add emulation to the mix you can play everything up to the Wii if you have a half decent phone, which means an endless ocean of good games.
Just to nitpick, Morrowind’s engine absolutely wasn’t ported to Android. What actually happened is that we made an entirely new game engine from scratch that can also interpret Morrowind’s game data. That’s obviously massively more effort than ‘just’ adapting source code to run on a new platform, but unlike DOOM, the source code has never been made available to the public, so that was never an option.
Also, OpenMW’s Android port is technically not official and tends to lurch from maintainer to maintainer, so if anyone reading this wants to help bring it up to scratch so it can be absorbed into the main project, that might be good.
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.
