I mean it looks like an Atari game, just a two-tone background with a white dot for a ball, blocky white numbers and a small yellow flag.
I can go on about how Desert Golfing is a knowing deconstruction of the mobile game, how its series of simple and repetitive swipes boils the entire form down to its most basic parts, with barely any embellishment at all. Not since Super Hexagon have you had so much fun while being so utterly stressed out.- MA 5. The Infinity mode really is the big new thing here, and the classic Eliss gameplay absolutely shines in this new mode. It’s a simple idea, but things get hairy really fast-especially in the high score Infinity mode. In Eliss Infinity, you’re tasked with the mission of combining planets of the same colors that pop up and “scoring” them in same-colored portals, all while keeping them from touching other planets of different colors. While you’ve got one ball in the air, you need to be thinking about the one you are catching, as well as the new ball that is about to get thrown into the routine. Playing Eliss Infinity feels like juggling. It’s an absurd puzzle game built around gravity effects similar to Angry Birds Space, with an adorable retro aesthetic and stoner charm.- GM
A ship full of scientists and janitors and house pets breaks up in space, and the captain floats around, collecting the survivors and killing them all.
Sunburn is basically the movie Gravity if George Clooney decided the only thing to do was grab Sandra Bullock and commit suicide via the sun. It’s light on story despite the comic presentation, but it’s a novel hook for a game that’s custom suited for the touchscreen interface.- Garrett Martin 7. You have to slide them in the right order so your shadowy characters can successfully avoid the many cops trying to catch them. Short and stylish, Framed turns the panels of a comic book into interactive puzzles. The experience, at once meditative and mentally stimulating, is satisfying in either short spurts or at length, and is suitable for youngsters and grown-ups alike.- MA 8. Using only these primary colors, Watercolors players are tasked with painting hundreds of tiled stages, all laid out in unique and increasingly complex patterns. That’s the maxim behind Watercolors, a puzzle game based on the rudimentary relationships between red, blue and yellow. After using my finger to dig out a key from under a pile of rotten bones, I knew that Techland had mobile in mind with this title from the get-go.- Matt Akers Even more, the game does a fantastic job of implementing various functionalities of the touch screen.
One particularly memorable sequence involves learning and playing a simple piano tune. One minute players will be mixing ingredients to make a potion, and the next they’ll be playing chess. Hellraid: The Escape’s greatest success is its diverse gameplay.
(And yeah, we let Hearthstone slip through because, even though it came out on PC and Mac a few weeks before the iPad, it’s clearly much better on a tablet than a computer.) 10. Here are the ten best mobile games of the year, focusing on games that exist exclusively or at least originally on mobile platforms like iOS and Android. What I played, though, was often fantastic. I’ll say it: I played less mobile games in 2014 than in any year this decade. It’s like somehow over the course of 2013 we finally came to terms with tapping through a game on our phones or on touchscreen computers the size of magazines, accepting the future as our rapidly aging present, and making the mobile game world of 2014 feel surprisingly mundane. It’s taken years, but the mobile game no longer feels weird, new or fresh.