The iPhone might lack a D-pad and buttons, but it’s long since earned its place as a gaming platform. And whether you enjoy casual fare or intense arcade thrills, the App Store has you covered. Here are our favorite new games released for iPhone in 2025 that we think you should try.
Winner: LOK Digital (free + $6/£6)
LOK Digital might resemble a crossword filled in by someone mashing a keyboard, but it quickly reveals itself as a deeply clever puzzle game built around a strange language.
Your goal is to color every tile by dragging across words, each of which has a special power, such as letting you fill an extra space. Learning these powers is essential for success, and deeply satisfying once you know them well and can plot paths through the game’s most devious puzzles.
A built-in dictionary smooths the learning curve, while unlimited undos let you experiment without the fear of starting again when deep into a puzzle.
If you enjoy word games but crave something different, LOK Digital is definitely that. Fortunately, it’s also fantastic.
Runner-up: Rift Riff (free + $6/£6)
This strategy game drops you into charming miniature worlds where you plunder land, fend off monsters, and perhaps occasionally pause to consider whether you’re the bad guy in a very good game.
But why is it good? Lots of reasons. It draws from tower defense, but feels more fluid than most. You’re constantly on the move, throwing up defenses as enemies scurry about trying to tear them down. It’s packed with character – no surprise, given that a co-creator made Hidden Folks. And it gently ramps up difficulty while encouraging experimentation.
If you’re burned out on more traditional tower defense games or never warmed to the genre because it felt too rigid, Rift Riff is an easy recommendation.
Also commended
The best of the rest from 2025, in alphabetical order.
Bullpen (free or $5/£5)
Imagine Sudoku meets Minesweeper, featuring angry bulls. That’s Bullpen. Across a whopping 5,000 levels (and daily puzzles), you’re tasked with placing bulls in colored, irregularly shaped pens, making sure none share a row, column or diagonal. If you’re into bite-sized puzzles, you’ll want to moo-ve this one on to your Home Screen.
Rogue Words (free)
Balatro wowed the world by bolting deck building onto poker. Rogue Words pulls a similar trick, but with a famous grid-based word game that rhymes with ‘babble.’ As you play, you earn in-game cash to buy rule-twisting upgrades, all in service of hitting ever-higher score targets in a limited number of moves. It’s clever, compulsive, and somehow entirely free.
Space Invaders Infinity Gene Evo (Apple Arcade)
For a few seconds, this is the Space Invaders you remember. But then it mutates, again and again, into a ferocious bullet-hell shooter capable of humbling even the most seasoned gamer. Add stylish visuals and a thumping soundtrack, and you’ve a superb reinvention of an arcade classic, especially when played with a controller.
Get Space Invaders Infinity Gene Evo
What the Clash? (Apple Arcade)
What the Golf? gleefully upended hitting a small ball with a stick. What the Car? did the same for racing. This latest effort in the series turns its attention to multiplayer minigames, adding game-changing cards that make everything even more unhinged. Table tennis with actual tables? That’s one of the more sensible ideas here.