Indie hits Sea Of Stars and Dredge come to smartphones, as well as a fun F-Zero clone and a game about a slice of bacon travelling through your digestive system.
Mobile games tend to be shorter, simpler, and easier to control than their console and PC based siblings. That’s fine for casual players, but if you prefer deeper, more complex interactions it can all start to feel patronisingly dumbed down.
That’s why well engineered ports are so welcome, even if they don’t happen often – not least because of the difficulty of knowing how much to charge for them. Nevertheless, this month has delivered a bumper crop.
There’s Sea Of Stars with its 90s RPG leanings, twin-stick shooter Nova Drift’s extreme builds, Dredge+ that’s newly available on Apple Arcade, and Merchant Of The Skies’ menu driven trading simulation, all of which play just as well on touchscreen as on a console.
Nova Drift
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iOS & Android, £9.99 (Chimeric Games)
Originally released on Steam in the summer of 2024, Nova Drift is a 2D space shooter that controls a lot like Asteroids, but layers on both a roguelite structure and role-playing style upgrades for each run.
Those include everything from main weapon to the style of shield and body type of your ship, meaning builds can vary between up close shotgun damage to making a space-bound aircraft carrier surrounded by drones, turrets, and interceptors.
Not unexpectedly for a mature PC game, there’s a huge amount of content to explore, which only grows as you unlock new power-ups and weapons on runs that are completely different from one another. Even the touchscreen controls work well enough, making this a great mobile port of an already accomplished title.
Score: 8/10
Dredge+
iOS & Android, included with Apple Arcade (Black Salt Games)
Dredge casts you as a trawlerman, your job to fish the dark waters of The Marrows, an archipelago with more than its fair share of eldritch horrors. Just make sure you’re back in port when the sun goes down or you might catch more than you bargained for.
Upgrade your boat, then buy lights and better angling gear as you set about unpicking the area’s sinister mysteries, fishing up far more than just seafood from the deep.
Although compelling, it was originally priced at a rather sporty £24.99 on iOS, which many found off-putting. Its release on Apple Arcade also includes its DLC, making this an irresistible bargain and easily the best way to experience the game on the go.
Score: 7/10
Sea Of Stars
iOS & Android, £8.99 (Playdigious)
Sea Of Stars is a faux 16-bit homage to oft-overlooked classic, Chrono Trigger, its 1990s JRPG sensibilities complemented by artfully recreated pixel art good looks, text-only conversations between characters, and a warmly familiar top-down perspective.
Its story of magic and unity in the face of an evil wizard, the Fleshmancer, is told across a decent-sized map harbouring many secrets. Combat is similarly refined, shunning random monster encounters and forced grinding, the twin bugbears of the genre to which this is a loving tribute.
The mobile port works beautifully, its timed button presses easy enough to pull off on a touchscreen and its cute, deliberately blocky graphics looking alluringly colourful on a small screen.
Score: 8/10
Merchant Of The Skies
iOS & Android, £6.99 (AstralRide)
Doing exactly what it says on the tin, Merchant Of The Skies makes you an empire building, airship piloting trader tasked with buying commodities low and selling them high, on a map you gradually defog as you move between its numerous trading hubs.
Before long you’re also acquiring sky islands to set up your own manufacturing facilities, that create resources without having to spend money buying them, accelerating your accumulation of wealth. This, along with the relatively minimal plot, is pretty much your only measure of success, given a total absence of combat.
It’s all extremely straightforward, and it doesn’t take long to fully upgrade your ship and earn enough money from your manufacturing facilities that you can buy anything you like, but then it turns out there’s not much you can spend it on anyway, making the end game a little anticlimactic.
Score: 6/10
Bacon In Zane
iOS & Android, Free – remove ads £2.99 (Philipp Stollenmayer)
The follow up to Bacon – The Game, which got you to flip a bouncy, slippery slice of bacon onto a series of objects without it sliding off, Bacon In Zane is a charmingly surreal fictionalised journey through the human digestive system.
From the prolific and enormously talented Philipp Stollenmayer, this also uses a slice of bacon as its subject, following it down the throat, through the stomach, and far beyond, exploring each part of its invented bodily processes via fun little touchscreen interactions, each of which is accompanied by amusing foley effects.
Its voiceover, a perfectly pitched mockumentary explanation of the different fleshy mechanisms at work, delivered in plummy Stephen Fry-style received pronouncing, is the perfect introduction and background to this deeply bizarre and offbeat offering.
Score: 7/10
Jetpack Joyride Racing
iOS, free (Halfbrick)
Jetpack Joyride was first released all the way back in 2011; its physics-based plunge through a long tunnel was intuitive to control and, thanks to a skilled art department, also looked about as good as mobile games get.
Its newly launched racing variant owes more than a nod to Nintendo’s F-Zero, although it does bring innovations of its own. The first of those is the significant boost you get when your hover car’s jets are close to the walls of the track, making the outside rather than the inside of corners the best racing line.
You’ll also find its steering model, which has you pivoting left and right while automatically accelerating, makes for races that rely heavily on anticipating upcoming bends, with tracks designed around the need to take all those corners as wide as you can.
It’s still in early access, so this is too soon for a full review, but it’s already worth a download, its peculiarly weighty feel making it a distinctive contender for your time, even if its card based gacha monetisation feels as though it may not win it many friends.
Star Overlord
iOS & Android, free (Noodle Games)
Star Overlord’s take on tower defence revolves around a small platform on which you need to pack as many turrets as you can fit. Each one’s its own size and shape, forcing you to fit them all together to maximise firepower.
Merging two of the same turret type levels it up, while you can expand your base and gain access to more favourable weapon upgrades by watching ads, its cartoony graphics and ambient music making the whole thing at least look and sound fun.
As is the case with too many free-to-download games, its main problem is that the gameplay is deliberately tilted against you, to encourage you to watch as many ads as possible, and buy upgrades from its paid shop to help with the eternal grind. It’s a shame, because it has high production values and interesting core mechanics underneath the tedious attempts to shake you down for spare change.
Score: 5/10
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