Rekindle your love of gaming with these five must-haves from the past 12 months
From its earliest days, iPhone gaming has been a mix of the innovative and the conventional. The nature of a touchscreen display often subverted traditional genres, making even tired formats feel exciting and fresh.
The past year brought us a plethora of delightful, engaging titles to ignite your gaming spirit. This once again proves you don’t need a console to lose yourself in immersive, electrifying games. From quick bursts of action to more thoughtful experiences, there’s something for everyone.
Winner: Subpar Pool ($4.99/£4.99)
With its whimsically grinning cue ball and irregular tables, Subpar Pool begins as an unconventional, charmingly cute interpretation of pool. This alone could have resulted in a good game. What elevates it to greatness is everything else.
The controls are excellent, allowing you to meticulously position the cue ball and set its direction before executing a strike with a double tap. This departure from conventional pool games, which tend to involve power levels and spin, works perfectly, providing players with the precision needed to conquer the puzzle-like set-ups.
Then there’s the card system. Each card presents a specific goal for a five-table run, such as pocketing the cue ball before another, or smashing crystal balls into dust. We found the initial missions tough. But once they were bested, we quickly found momentum.
Subpar Pool then became a relentlessly joyful experience, brimming with personality, and skillfully blending minutes-long sessions with thousands of card combinations that ensure no two games are ever quite the same.
Runner-up: finity. (Apple Arcade)
We thought we’d had our fill of match-three games – but then finity. arrived. Now we’re hooked. Before long, we’ll be seeing finity. in our dreams.
As with the majority of match games, the fundamentals are simple. Here, you slide tiles around, in this case within a wraparound four-by-four grid. Form a match of three or more and those tiles vanish, and more fall from the top.
The twist is that each tile has a moves countdown. As that runs out, a tile’s movement becomes restricted. Eventually, it freezes completely, thereby blocking you from being able to slide a row or column. This brings an added strategic dimension to the game.
Even then, finity. isn’t done. It keeps challenging you with new tiles and power-ups. And if you tire of the main game, there’s the intense Tempo mode that ramps things up further by demanding you make fast matches to a pulsating beat.
Also commended
Three more standout iPhone games from 2023.
Laya’s Horizon (Netflix)
Snowman is best known for zen-like side-on adventure titles Alto’s Adventure and Alto’s Odyssey. Its latest, Laya’s Horizon, offers similar chill-out vibes, but in an expansive and open 3D world. Instead of soaring on a snowboard, this game has you master flying, using a wingsuit to gracefully navigate winding rivers and deftly weave through obstacles in your path. The sheer joy of exploration is reward enough, but if you fancy a challenge, dozens of missions await that when completed unlock collectables and ability-boosting upgrades.
Super Cat Tales: PAWS (Free + IAP)
The Super Cat Tales series continues to be a showcase for how to do platform games on a touchscreen. You again direct adorable moggies in a pixel world that could be right out of early 1990s gaming. But the two-thumb control system is unique to these games, perfectly suited to iPhone, and unlike anything else out there. And the game itself is a joy – fun, challenging, and packed with mini-games and secrets that’ll have you return again and again.
Refind Self ($3.99/£3.99)
One of the strangest games we’ve played in recent years, Refind Self begins with a humanoid robot standing by the grave of the doctor who created it. Your job is to explore the robot’s small world, unraveling its various secrets. Once your limited energy reserves are depleted, the game ends and examines the choices you made. From this analysis, you’re then assigned a personality. It’s intriguing stuff, along with being accessible for adventuring newcomers and yet deep enough to support multiple playthroughs.