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[Folly]

A '7 Deadly Sins' mobile game recently launched, based on anime/manga of the same name.

It's presented as a gacha game, though the mechanics are relatively light, with optimal units being fairly easy to obtain and power up.
Combat is handed through a turn-based card system, which allows for some real strategic thinking. Although I've yet to encounter an opponent who really requires much effort. I will probably find more challenge once I get further into the game.

The most notable aspect of this game is the faithful retelling of the story. Everything is rendered in 3D, and scenes play out pretty much exactly the way they do in the show. Definitely worth a look if you're into the shonen genre and want to play the story instead of watching or reading it.

[sambojin]

I figured since there's plenty of people self-isolating or out of work, I'd make up a little favourites list for mobile games, for little gems that stand the test of time (and boredom). With a little comment of why. Feel free to add your own list of stuff that stays on your phone, whatever genre, maybe with a little comment of why as well.

Favorite Idle Game:
Event Horizon : Frontier
So much fleet and ship customizability, so many actual options available, so much of a collectathon. It's just really, really good, and actually free to play as well. It's very hard to cap out this one, all grind is a noticeable improvement on your fleet, but perfection would take forever. It's still fun to try. It's also a fairly competent space shooter, but you can just autopilot it and watch all the explosions occur as your fleet massacres stuff. I've probably got 100s of hours racked up on this one. And if you do kick in some cash, you get a lot for it. You start out flying your ship, but the moment you find/put an autopilot on it, you can play it as a fun idle game (where you can immediately take control of your ship if you want too. The AI isn't that smart, but it's mostly a better pilot than you). You also never lose anything, everything is transferable to the next ship, unless you tried to make that ship a super-ship (you still keep all the stuff you put on the ship, it just has more slots to put stuff on, and you can chuck that ship to one of your AI commanders). 1-2 minute "click 1-2 buttons" game, repeat five times, *then* work out what to do with the grind. You now have more stuff. Rinse, repeat, enjoy. It's horribly fascinating just to watch, grind, or to tinker, or to personally fly in. It's that super-balance between "actual game" and "idle game" and "collectathon" that I've never seen in any other product. You can also murder top ranked player's starbases in PVP Arena (enemy is AI controlled) if you control your own ship (with enough energy, dps and energy-cheap cloaking to ignore their entire fleet and just invisible-missile-splat them), so it's not ptw in that way either. You just get lots of everything, paid or played. So does everyone else.

Favourite Roguelike:
Pathos: the Nethack Codex
Does everything a proper roguelike should do, with very differing classes and races to try, even party combos, but also has a very good interface on mobile. All the options, all the difficulty, with none of the obscure BS that nethack-likes often have. Pretty much the gold-star standard of how these things can be done. Hardcore, but still fun to play. Free-to-play as well.

Favourite Roguelite:
Cardinal Quest II
Gives you all the fun cooldown-based ToME4-like rogue'ing you could want, but with a handy interface on mobile. I just like it better than the Pixel Dungeon derivatives. Makes you feel more powerful, while still being light and fun and with a slight difficulty curve. As mentioned below, kinda bridges the gap between roguelike and roguelite, and does it well. Not simple, but not hard to get into either.

Favorite Twin-Stick Shooter:
Virexian
Has a cool retro/neon aesthetic, is fast paced, is hard enough to feel like you're doing stuff, but easy enough that progression isn't out of reach. Just a nice little adrenaline surge, which is what a twin-stick should give you. There's a free version, but the paid version is cheap too. Hard, but not that hard. Except when it is. And worth it.

Favourite Single-Stick Shooter:
Soul Knight
Has auto-aim, so is single-stick. But with the range of shooty weapons (there's *so many* guns...), melee options, bosses, character classes, etc that makes it worth it to play a fair bit. Still has a certain skill level to play well, but is lighter and easier than Virexian above.

Favourite Turn-Based War Game:
Age of Fantasy
It's not particularly well balanced (orcs are best, always), but all the races feel different enough and there's enough maps and strategic options that it's fun. Can get pretty damn hardcore in multi-player. This is a good thing. Oldskool turn/production war game, where taking a city 1-2 turns earlier is a huge boon, and movement/ unit skills/ attack ordering is paramount for higher level play. Overall foresight and unit match-ups are key, but so is the wonderful cascade of events on your own turn that lets you wipe enemies from areas of the map, even if it looked like you couldn't. Just a very good warlord/fantasy general type game, even if the graphics are shit.

Favourite Turn-Based Squad Strategy:
Templar Battleforce
It's a nicely polished game, with lots of options, and you can respec your characters to try out different things with no downsides. Very playable, very good. I don't like all of the mission pacing (I still haven't finished it though), but it does make it feel that the important decisions and turns really do count. One of those purchases that you feel that you got every cent from the purchase. Worth it. If you like wh40k, and having an awesome squad of "totally-not-space-marines", give this one a go. There's a free version, so you can try it out if you're not sure, but it's a good game from a good developer, so it's an easy buy once you've worked out that you do like proper squad based strategy games.

Favourite Business Sim:
M.U.L.E (on a NES emulator).
It's one of the grandaddies of the genre, and is still fun to play today. Just enough back-stabbing and market volatility that you have a plan, but you profit by decisions you make each round. But sometimes you just have to support the planet's colony to win, even if you could just crush everyone and profit immensely by doing it. Quick to play an entire game as well (which isn't something normally associated with business/ trading sims).

Favourite Action "RPG":
Stick Ranger
OK, it's not really an RPG, but you have a party of four people, they have swords and bows and magic and stuff, and you control them. I didn't know what else to call it. But it's here, it's on the list, and it should be on your phone. Whatever it is, it does it well. Has guns, punching, angels, priests and whips as well. There's builds and teams that are just plain for funsies, but you can make nearly anything work if you want. Or just skip a lot of the bits you don't like (often to your peril).

Favourite "actual" Action "RPG":
Dungeon Quest
Again, it's hard to say it's an actual RPG. But it's kinda like Diablo, the levels loop with +difficulty, and it's a collectathon, so that's kinda action RPG'y. Will you ever have the amount of stuff they talk about on the forums? To make that "essential" build? Hell no! But it's a really low-end/low-thought zap/slash 'em up, and while it gets pretty samey, and you get sick of the basic gameplay loop, what it does, it actually does pretty well. I have no friggen idea why the camera isn't zoomed out by about 50%. It's still strangely good for all that. You can pay for stuff, but you certainly don't have to.

Favourite "Easy" Top Scrolling Shoot'em Up:
OpenTyrian
It's old, I've finished it tonnes of times, but it's easy and fun. You can keep your weapons, you can keep your cash, you get super weapons (Sonic rear weapon whatever (once you've clicked on the side-panel thing during a level) and Plasma sidekick thingo are best-in-slot in many ways) at lvl1, but it's still a fun little adventure to play through. No, you can't get a better main weapon than the Laser. No, it doesn't matter too much by the time you do. Even your basic starter Pulse Cannon can loop the game. But it has secret codes, and side games, and a story, and discreet ship weapons, and all the other shit that a basic shoot 'em up doesn't need, but this one still has. It's free, it's good, and it's still one of the best games in the genre, even if you've got all the muscle-memory from the mid-late 90's to make it a cakewalk. It's still a very good game, even if it is pretty easy to finish repeatedly.

Favourite Screensaver Game:
Genghis Khan II (on a SNES emulator)
It's not a bad game once you download the manual, so you know what the little pictures mean. But it is awesome as a CPU vs CPU AI game, just to watch little EUIV/CKII-like wars continue on, forever, on your phone. Japan is OP as hell, and usually "wins". Samurai everywhere. There's a coding glitch that means the AI can't win/conquer the globe (without *very* unlikely events occurring in the final turn. It can happen, but it almost certainly won't most times). So it goes on forever. Still makes for an excellent screensaver. Think of it like "watching" a 5-day cricket test. You just check up on the scores, and who's in, from time-to-time. But on a Civilization/ Europa Universalis/ Crusader Kings style playing field and wicket.

Favourite App:
Magic Dosbox
It lets you play damn near any dos/win3x/win95-98 game on your phone. And you can setup incredibly versatile and powerful touch screen interfaces for them. Another one of those things where the paid app it actually worth it. Has a large'ish user community making templates for games, so you might not have to do a single thing other than play your favourite games from yesteryear on your phone (take a look here, work out if you like any of these games, and if it's worth $5 to you to be able to play them properly on your phone: http://magicbox.imejl.sk/forums/forum/mgc-files-sharing/). There's even stuff for X-Wing and TIE-Fighter, Elite 2&3, etc, and they're all better 3D space combat/ possibly trading sims than anything on the playstore, so this is a cover-all. I even made a Stars! win3x thing for it (which is an old/ crunchy 4X space game), and it works great. It can do anything.

Favourite File Manager:
ES File Explorer
It does everything a file manager on your phone should do, and a bit more as well. Is it Chinese government spyware? Does it have an ad in a foreign language now when you load it? Is it still a really good file manager? Probably, yes. Has a download manager integrated, and can let you "open as" a tonne of file types for any other apps you have on your phone. Can also resume dropped downloads, assuming the file server on the other end still has it as an open/possible channel. Makes your phone a lot more like a PC, so is a good thing. I'm lost without it these days when I buy a new phone.

Favourite file compressor:
RAR
It's just better than anything else, faster than anything else, supports more formats than anything else, and integrates easily into file managers (like the one above). Has a reasonably long "recent directory to unzip to" list, so whether you're doing an emulation binge, want to sort your dosbox'ing easily, are doing an MMDarchive model/scenary-type directory run, or just need a thing that can unzip nearly anything quickly, it can do it (even on batch runs) well. Good and free.

Favourite "other" App:
PocketMQO
It's because of boobs. Dancing anime boobs. I'd love to say it's because I love music, or Japanese culture, or MikuMikuDance, or that I am just a creative soul, but I'd be lying. It's because of MMD boobs. They're great. And it's free. Wash your hands though!
(yeah, it can get worse)

Best "isolation" Web Browser:
Opera Classic
Did you know that an incredibly old web browser doesn't have any native .mp4 support? Did you also know that all of Pornhub's 320x240 previews are in .mp4 format, if you press that button? And that this web browser just gives up, and sees it as a file, and downloads it? And so, free porn for all! (even at very low resolution). No account needed! It's still free! It's like you're in Italy, but you're not dying of the most recent plague!
Wash your hands, thoroughly and regularly...
(also works fine when there isn't any plagues, and has for years. You might need to reload some pages repeatedly for it to work though. It doesn't do proper modern security protocols well either. It will work, but it might take a few page reloads. They don't have to hand out free accounts if you know what you're doing. Bless them that they did though )

(I'll probably add to this list as I think of them. But make your own, so we can all discover those hidden gems in the app/play store, or wherever on the web)

[Aoi]

Favourite Roguelite:
Cardinal Quest II
Gives you all the fun cooldown ToME4-like rogue'ing you could want, but with a handy interface on mobile. I just like it better than the Pixel Dungeon derivatives. Makes you feel more powerful, while still being light and fun and with a slight difficulty curve. ose hidden gems in the app/play store, or wherever on the web)

I'd actually say that's a straight-up roguelike, not a roguelite. I mean, it's fairly slim compared to a traditional full-bodied roguelike, but it's a true one. I can't get the hang of it on my phone though; I'm around a rank 35 on my old tablet (which requires consecutive wins on Hard), but I can't seem to even pull consecutive wins on normal on my phone.

In other news:
Look Your Loot! and Dungeon Cards have earned permanent spots on my phone, having never been removed since they were placed and still get booted up on occasion. They're both in the same genre of game where your unit has some amount of life, maybe a weapon or shield, and they traverse a grid of cards that are filled mostly with monsters or traps that will negatively increment some kind of counter. Play until you die!

Both are free, with additional (or faster) unlocks for pay.

[Parsely]

Just started playing a bit of Global Defense Forces 2 Portable (ie Earth Defense Force Portable 2). It runs surprisingly smoothly on PPSSPP, even on my crappy old android phone,  and isn't too bad to control even with just touch controls instead of a gamepad.

I can't find the link to this ROM, could you shoot me a link in a PM?

[sambojin]

Been playing a bit of Dark Quest 2. It's kinda like Hero Quest (the tabletop RPG by GW) except you can only see one board section at a time, all your characters *will* be on that board section, and your characters can level up their skills between maps. I bought it on sale, so it was pretty cheap.

What it does, it does pretty well. I mean, it's not great, but it's not bad if you loved Hero Quest as a kid. It's pretty easy, and even though I've only played a bit, the different characters do fulfill different archetypes. The Barbarian hits stuff hard, the Mage has a godawful amount of section-wiping spells (and is probably the most powerful character once skills are levelled and you give him items and +spell potions), the Dwarf tanks and finds things, and the Ranger shoots stuff and does a bit of healing. There's other characters, but I haven't bothered to unlock them yet.

It's a bit min-max'y as far as items are concerned, just making your character do the thing it does even better (with little variation). Sometimes the UI is niggly (you can't really choose where you attack from, just that you attack a particular creature) and you need to be sure you definitely double tapped on a character and that they are the one selected, but the levels are fairly varied and there is some thought needed on how you approach any particular encounter. So it's pretty good at what it does, but it's not necessarily an amazing game. Probably worth the money if you happen to be stuck in isolation (Australia isn't now, but I worked all the way through Covid-19 anyway) and liked GW's consumer-end board games while you were a kid.

There's also a probably intended glitch where you can cancel a level (even after you've got all the goodies) and go back to town, then redo it. There's a treasure room level early on that gives you a bit of gold, and four skill points, as a one room dungeon. If you don't mind wasting 20-30mins redoing it, you'll have enough skill points to Max any character's skills for the rest of the game. It kinda ruins progression for you, but it's nice so that you can try out what each character does and what various items really do, etc. I wouldn't use it on my second playthrough, but it's handy when you're learning stuff. It's not exactly a complicated game, but having maxed chain lightning is fun.

Worth a look if you like this sort of thing (I do, even if it's mostly for nostalgia reasons), or want a really simple turn-based adventurer-party RPG on your phone for something different to do sometimes. Not sure if I'd pay full price for it, but at half-price sale, I feel like I'll get my money's worth out of it.

[sambojin]

Oh, and Baldur's Gate 2 is currently on sale. *If* (and yes, this is *absolutely* necessary) you're playing on a tablet with a fairly large screen, and have a gig or three of storage spare, then this is a very worthwhile purchase. It's a proper cRPG, and you can definitely get your money's worth out of it at half-price, as long as you've got the screen real-estate available to be able to read the text.

I wish this was easily playable on phone, but the UI just doesn't really do that well. But it's one of the better investments for tablet gaming that you can make.

[Reelya]

A '7 Deadly Sins' mobile game recently launched, based on anime/manga of the same name.

Unfortunately there are two series with virtually identical titles that could apply to. Nanatsu no Taizai or Sin: Nanatsu no Taizai. Both mean 7 deadly sins, and the second one is spun off a franchise by a game company, though I'm guessing you mean the first one, since it's much more popular.

[sambojin]

Been playing a bit of TIE-Fighter through Magic Dosbox, and slowly setting up an awesome touchscreen interface for it.

There's gotta be a market for skills like that, doesn't there? It plays great on a phone

And is a better space-combat sim than anything on the play/iosstore.

(yep, that'll be our first truly licensed title on the playstore)
(if I've got to just go "Click, drag on-screen joystick to top-left, click, repeat for bottom-right, click, can play game, I'd be fine with it.)

[sambojin]

Huh. Now I've been playing PyroII through it as well (pyro][ or pyro22). I just wanted to see if a low-end phone platform could get actually low latency keyboard controls through the touchscreen interface.

Yep, turns out they can be fairly low latency. So at worst, pyro22 can now be played on mobile. Not with sound though. Not yet. For now it just makes screeching and then burning sounds, through the pc speaker emulation. One of those things isn't meant to be there.
(fun fact: there's rumours that the guy that helped make Battlenet a thing for Blizzard, made this game. Which explains why Battlenet was so good for so many years. He's probably an executive or retired by now)

[Scripten]

I've been playing a lot of the game Merchant recently. It's pretty solid, with elements of tycoon games, RPGs, and idle games. The ads are not intrusive at all, and the expansions are reasonably priced and (AFAIK) fairly extensive.

Available on Steam as well: Here.

[Reelya]

I've been playing a lot of the game Merchant recently. It's pretty solid, with elements of tycoon games, RPGs, and idle games. The ads are not intrusive at all, and the expansions are reasonably priced and (AFAIK) fairly extensive.

Available on Steam as well: Here.

I had a look at this and it was alright, however I ended up uninstalling it. Not being able to queue up or repeat a quest action was the kicker in the end. If it had something like "go collect from that bush until I tell you otherwise" and it became a resource flow situation then I would still be playing it. Was a fair way in and the queues were getting longer as these things do then decided to make an additional character, and now it was back to repeatedly telling him what to do every 15 seconds. It slightly fails the test for idle games.

Although one strategy for this game would be to just have one character and have them collect from the bush on each map. Since the bush doesn't fight back then they can just sell potions until they're on the final map and it's a lot less hassle than otherwise.

[tnc]

Slay The Spire finally got released for iOS. Android version is also in development.

[Folly]

Tales of Crestoria has arrived.

I've not yet tried it, but it's from the popular Tales series, so might be worth a look.

[sambojin]

Been playing a bit more of Soul Knight, a fun little roguelite run'n'gun top-down shooter (single-stick shooter with auto-aim).

A bit has changed over the years. More characters, more levels, more weapons. More options. More random stuff each level for loot or decisions.

I did delete it off my phone, so I lost the $10-20 I threw at the game in its early days, but I'm pretty sure they gave everyone +10 luck from the initial adoption of it anyway.

I mean, seriously. Every game, every run, you'll always find cool shit. There might be tonnes of extra cool shit in the game now, but by about level 1-4, you're deciding on exactly what you want to shoot people with. You can make a "build", just on balance-of-overpoweredness, yet still die due to stupidity at lvl2-2.

This is good game design. Or at least, really fun game design.
So yeah. If you haven't,  give it a go. If you have, give it another. There's a few tiny hoops to jump through, but between getting the crate opened, and working out that the book pile is near the wizard and you should do it up (+crit% is nice), it's fine.

I haven't spent anything on it on this phone. Yet. But I probably will. Because I like supporting games with a business model of "yeah, sure. Have heaps of cool stuff. Every time you play it, if you're not hopeless. Honestly, sometimes even if you are. It's free-to-play, free-to-win, but you can pay for lazy."

[Uristides]

I've tried out quite a few mobile games in the past few months due to lack of time to sit down and play "proper" games, here's some of the highlights:

I'm afraid I didn't enjoy the recently released Soda Dungeon 2 as much as I expected. The addition of a simple scripting system to customize your party's AI is really nice, but it's not something I feel like toying with right now. Every other new feature just doesn't feel that great to me.

Idle Skilling is pretty much the Path of Exile of idle games. There are just so many, pretty deep, and nearly, but not quite completely, orthogonal systems going on in this bad boy, it's bewildering both in a good and a bad way.

Space Arena: Build & Fight is a pretty entertaining, and hella grindy, space combat thing. You just build your ship from a variety of components and then sit back and watch it go ham on an adversary Gratuitous Space Battles style. Ultimately all the grind and the fact that I enjoyed pushing the limits of the small, early game, ships much more than progressing to the upper tier behemoths did get the best of me.

In the very aptly-named Hero Park you build and manage a typical fantasy RPG town catering to adventurers, which might as well be an amusement park for heroes. The gameplay loop is pretty simple: you stock up your shops/dungeons, call heroes over and then ensure all their needs are met while they enjoy their stay. Nevertheless, the lighthearted humor and daily challenges did keep me hooked on it for a while.

Moonshades is a really good looking first person dungeon crawler. I didn't get very far on it, but the progression up to that point felt really natural and not reliant on daily quests/rewards or some sort of stamina system, unlike most other mobile RPGs, which is a big plus for me.

On the other hand Vampire's Fall: Origins feels like a grindy slog. The skill trees and combat system look really cool, and there's even spears as a weapon class(not enough games give spears and polearms the love they deserve!), but the progression is such a mess. Taking down even early game enemies is a massive effort for little gain. I don't know, I must be doing something wrong here.

Last but not least Triglav is a work of art, the craftsmanship in the pixel graphics is just wow. The gameplay however felt like nothing out of the ordinary from the little I played, such a shame.

I've been playing a lot of the game Merchant recently. It's pretty solid, with elements of tycoon games, RPGs, and idle games. The ads are not intrusive at all, and the expansions are reasonably priced and (AFAIK) fairly extensive.

Available on Steam as well: Here.

I really loved it back when I played it, but much like Reelya I just felt like it sat really uncomfortably in a grey zone between your run-of-the-mill RPG and an idle game.  I'm not sure if the expansions tackle that but after a while I felt like it was pretty shallow mechanics-wise, there was just not much to do other than slightly tweak battle formations for bosses and strive for ever bigger numbers on my crafted items.