Best new mobile games on iOS and Android – June 2026 round-up

Nintendo has released a brand new game exclusively on mobile, as this month’s new releases also includes Slime Rancher and a new bullet hell shooter.

This month’s mobile games include that rarest of treats, a completely original Nintendo game, and Pictonico! certainly does not disappoint. There’s also a mobile port of cosy indie sci-fi farming sim Slime Rancher, excellent chess-based roguelite Gambonanza, and the peculiar but slightly broken Mystic Motors: Car Racing Game.

Pictonico!

iOS & Android, £6.99 and £5.39 (Nintendo)

Nintendo’s latest foray into mobile ignores all the Japanese game giant’s in-house IP and mascots in favour of using the contents of your phone’s photo album as the basis for its joyous, WarioWare-esque microgames.

It harvests all kinds of pictures, but is particularly fond of people’s faces, which are animated to laugh, cry, chat, smile, or chomp down canapés, in games that last a maximum of three seconds. It’s underpinned by Nintendo’s typically self-assured engineering standards, the pictures chosen and the way they’re animated never failing to amuse and impress.

Games are prevented from getting samey after extended play via cleverly integrated increases in difficulty. Initially it’s just figuring out what you have to do against a strict time limit, but soon enough actual skill is needed, and since each time you play a different friend or relative will be featured in its quick fire rounds, it keeps proceedings remarkably fresh. It may not be the sort of game you’d play for hours at a time, but it’s ideal for a swift, invigorating break in your day.

Score: 8/10

Perchang World

iOS, included with Apple Arcade subscription

Released 10 years ago, Perchang was a simple physics-based puzzle game about getting a marble into a funnel. The sequel takes that basic idea and really runs with it.

Now you’re rolling a series of marbles through sets of obstacles in multi-coloured 3D landscapes, triggering various pieces of scenery to boost them along their way. Flippers, columns, magnets, see-saws, and plenty more, gently roll or hurl marbles in the direction of their destination.

There’s a pleasing quality to its physics, with marbles flying and rolling consistently with the way they’re hit, and while it may not demand all that much creativity on your part it looks nice and does provide an increasing test of dexterity and timing. There’s even an enjoyably OTT plot that incorporates your marble flinging antics.

Score: 7/10

Gambonanza

iOS & Android, £5.99 (Stray Fawn Studio)

Along with Shotgun King, Pawnbarian, and a clutch of other recent releases, games subverting chess have been having a real boom period. Gambonanza is the latest.

Another roguelite, each of its levels is a puzzle that gets you to use chess pieces and moves to wipe out your computer-controlled opponent. Captured pieces disappear forever, but you can buy more between rounds, along with perk conferring gambits that stack, creating powerful combinations.

Your AI adversary occasionally makes confusingly foolish mistakes in early rounds, but that doesn’t diminish the significant challenge, in this highly polished and mentally taxing game that feels as though it was made for touchscreen.

Score: 8/10

Slime Rancher

iOS & Android, £7.99 (Playdigious)

First person space-based farming simulator Slime Rancher makes its mobile debut. Once again, you’ll be using your vac-pac to Hoover up friendly-looking slimes, along with their favourite food stuffs, before firing them into transparent walled pens and harvesting their freshly excreted ‘plorts’, which you can sell for cash.

Consuming the plorts of other slime breeds turns them into bulkier largos, but if they happen to then eat a third variety of plort, they’ll morph into aggressive monsters, so you need to take care when hybridising your flock.

Buy yourself a jetpack, water cannon, dash boots, new map areas, and cosmetic decorations for your ranch as you expand and automate your operation, in this quirky and modestly compelling game, whose mellow pace makes it ideal for touchscreen.

Score: 7/10

What’s the Password?

iOS & Android, £4.99 (Trampoline Tales)

Well, not a password so much as a PIN, but the premise of this single-minded puzzle game immediately lends itself to mobile, its keypad and clues fitting neatly on a single screen. Your job is to work out what four-digit number each clue is pointing you towards by simply keying it in.

Clues are pretty diverse, ranging from the extremely obvious to the cryptic, with some comprising clever conceits to obfuscate what is at heart quite a simple string of numbers, the game letting you skip and come back to any that truly stump you.

While occasionally head scratching, there are slightly too many of its levels that feel a little obvious, undermining the sense of satisfaction. Still, it’s a neat – if fleeting – distraction and solid use of a phone screen.

Score: 5/10

Phoenix 2

for iOS & Android, free (Firi Games)

Phoenix 2 is a vertical bullet hell shmup of the kind made famous in the late 1980s, although with a thoroughly modern high resolution 100Hz presentation. Originally released a decade ago, it’s recently received a game-changing update that lets you upgrade its 100 tiny, wonderfully detailed collectible spaceships with individual mods.

While not all of those add-ons are particularly useful, some prove spectacularly powerful, letting you augment abilities in genuinely new ways, adding an extra level of challenge to the game’s speed runs now that players are all equipped slightly differently.

The game’s high production values are typified by graphically diverse ships, each of which comes with its own main and auxiliary armaments, and exquisitely designed sound effects that are even more impressive wearing headphones. If you’ve ever enjoyed a 2D shooter this one’s well worth your time, and for PC owners it’s also just come out of early access on Steam.

Score: 8/10

Mystic Motors: Car Racing Game

iOS & Android, free (Tec Ventures)

Mystic Motors’ twist on standard driving games is that you can cast spells from behind the wheel. Why that is, and exactly what’s added a dash of Gandalf to motor racing, is never even addressed.

Instead, you just jump right in with a clutch of three spells you’re allowed to bring with you to each race event. Unfortunately, the ham-fisted attempt at arcade style car-handling is only the first of many problems.

Technically, it’s shaky right from the start, the first crash for us occurring on the loading screen for the tutorial race, the next when opening our inaugural loot crate. Spells launch and land without sound effects, and the whole enterprise has the air of something abandoned half-finished.

It’s abysmally poor, and exactly why its developer was optimistic enough to release it with a monstrous £199 microtransaction is a mystery for the ages.

Score: 2/10

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