Best new mobile games on iOS and Android – October 2025 round-up

The latest batch of notable new smartphone apps includes a Fire Emblem spin-off and a game you control with a pair of AirPods.

As Microsoft’s Xbox juggernaut lurches through the games industry, destroying much loved studios and promising unreleased games, along with decades of good reputation and shareholder value, it’s reassuring to note that the studiedly independent world of mobile gaming continues as if this inadvertent corporate apocalypse wasn’t even happening.

This month’s releases include the genre-bending Maze Mice, the mobile port of the wonderful Chants Of Sennaar, a genuine – and mildly peculiar – innovation in RidePods – Race With Head, and a game based on a much-loved Nintendo IP.

Although given how the new Fire Emblem spin-off slipped out without any marketing at all, you might already imagine that it’s not one of Nintendo’s best efforts…

Fire Emblem Shadows

iOS & Android, free (Nintendo)

Nintendo’s latest foray into mobile entertainment returns to Intelligent System’s venerable Fire Emblem franchise, reinventing its tactical turn-based combat (that typically comes with the heartbreaking permadeath of key characters) into a boring auto-battler.

Fights take place on a familiar grid, and still feature the series’ classic rock, paper, scissors strengths and weaknesses for each unit, but now instead of controlling your troops, all you can do is cast heal or attack spells once their cooldowns let you.

In a further misguided innovation, there’s now a traitor system, where one of your two compatriots in each battle is working for the other side. But given the fights’ extreme brevity and the lack of any social chat, your 50/50 guess as to which purported friend is actually an enemy is about as good as a coin toss.

It’s atrocious, failing both as a tactical combat game and a whodunnit, instead settling for charging you to win more frequently via its paid battle pass.

Score: 3/10

Maze Mice

iOS & Android, £4.99 (Trampoline Tales) – out 10th October

Playing like an unlikely sounding hybrid of Pac-Man, Superhot, and Vampire Survivors, your mouse takes to a maze populated by sleeping cats and edible dots. Your job is to eat the dots, which cumulatively earn you power-ups, and survive long enough to beat each level’s boss.

The twist is that time only moves when you do, so by default everything stands still and it’s only when you press a direction button that enemies also head towards you. Regular enemy cats need to work their way through the maze, to attack you while ghostly ones can move through walls, making teleport tunnels a useful last resort.

All weapons you unlock trigger automatically at the end of their cooldowns, auto-targeting the increasing phalanx of cats that follows you while you eat dots and do your best to survive, pausing whenever you like to plan your route.

New mazes, and mice with varying starter powers, unlock as you progress It’s fascinating to find out how each level’s distinct pattern of pathways interacts with your weaponry and the enemies you face, the game’s subtlety gradually showing itself as you continue playing. It’s a low key gem of a game.

Score: 8/10