If you want good mobile games, look out for paid ports of PC indies, like:

• Door Kickers: Action Squad
• Baba Is You
• Bad North
• Bridge Constructor Portal
• Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night
• Crypt of the Necromancer
• Dead Cells
• Don't Starve
• Don't Starve: Shipwrecked
• Downwell
• Forager
• GRIS
• Retro City Rampage DX
• Reventure
• ScourgeBringer
• Sparklite
• Teslagrad
• This War of Mine
• Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion

My hard and fast rule is, "Don't play freemium games." The second I see stars, coins, tickets, tokens, I'm out. I exclusively play what are mostly ports from console. Trials of Mana, The Alliance Alive HD Remastered, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy, Danganronpa, Spiritfarer, Oxenfree, Stardew Valley, Minecraft etc. I also have Apple Arcade from my Verizon package, and I play the Netflix games. Avoid freemium / gacha / IAP-riddled games, and some of the ports are at least decent.

there are good games. but they most of the time do not get promoted. you need other websites or like reddit or lemmy with lists from actual players to find them. in store only the moneygrabs get promoted.

Actually, if you have Netflix, there’s a decent number of good mobile games through that

Just download a SNES/Genesis/GBA emulator, no need to waste time sifting through the piles of shit that is mobile gaming.

Monument 1 and 2 are great puzzle games well worth the purchase price.

Mobile games aren’t games, or at least not what I’d consider a game. Mobile “games” are simple puzzles, swipe action fighters and click-and-wait builders. They are built around the concept of microtransactions and are in place to make developers money and to be a time-suck for the end players.

IMO, smartphones had the chance to revolutionize the gaming industry, but ended up wasting almost all of that potential on skinner boxes riddled with ads and microtransactions. Most of the best mobile games are ports from other systems, like the mobile edition of Minecraft and whatnot.

I think Pokémon Go was possibly the closest any major publisher has come to actually realizing the full potential of mobile games as a format, but it still fell painfully short with massively dumbed down mechanics and an absolute grindfest of a progression system.

There are still a few good indie projects out there (I like Soul Knight) but generally the mobile gaming market is so full of absolute dreck that I usually just don't bother.

Nope, you just have to dig...

• Minecraft
• Ocean Horn
• Terraria
• Don't Starve
• Neon Chrome
• Stardew Valley
• GTA III
• GTA Vice City
• GTA: San Andreas
• GTA: Chinatown Wars
• Bully
• Max Payne
• Star Wars KOTOR
• Limbo
• Roller Coaster Tycoon
• OpenTTD (Transport Tycoon)
• Portal

With some fiddling you can even run some PC games like Half Life 1 and 2, Doom 3 and Morrowind (not even emulated, their engines were actually ported to Android).

If you add emulation to the mix you can play everything up to the Wii if you have a half decent phone, which means an endless ocean of good games.

There are good mobile games out there. World of Goo, Little Inferno, Angry Birds, The Room, What the Golf?, Plants vs. Zombies, FTL, Genshin Impact, Jetpack Joyride, are good examples. There are also some ported games that are fantastic, like Minecraft, Papers Please, Roblox, and I'm sure countless others.

However, mobile devices don't have enough resources for many triple-A PC/Console games, they also don't have the ergonomics of a controller, and the screen is inherently too small for some games. Even if the technical issues could be mitigated, would you want to play something like Elden Ring on a phone? Likewise, would you want to play Angry Birds on your television? I think the best compromise is when mobile games are specifically tailored for the platform they are on. FTL and Plants vs. Zombies come to mind as great implementations. But if those type of games aren't something you like, then you're out of luck.

Try getting your games from F-Droid instead of the Google Play Store. Although a lot of them might still be bad, because everything F-Droid offers is required to be Free Software, you can at least be assured that they're the kind of bad that comes from the amateur dev not knowing how to make a good game, not the exploitative kind of bad that's a glorified Skinner box designed to addict you and extract microtransactions.

Games from F-Droid that I like include:

• Shattered Pixel Dungeon
• Mindustry
• Endless Sky
• Feudal Tactics
• Vector Pinball

There are also a bunch of the usual traditional sorts of games: card games, tetris, chess, etc. l won't recommend particular ones for those since it basically comes down to personal preference, but I'll point out that you can pick any of them without worrying about them being infested with ads and shit, unlike in the Play Store where trying to find that one implementation of Solitaire that doesn't try to monetize you is like finding a needle in a haystack.

Avoid Freeium games. If you known what to look for, it’s pretty easy. Combat Master is a pretty good CoD clone. Galaxy on Fire II is worth a shot as well.

Whilst the vast majority of shovelware on Android is a low-effort cash grab, there are areas where mobile gaming shines. I personally play a lot of board game adaptions and mostly text-based incremental games like Kittens Game. Here's a great curated list of Android adaptions of physical board games: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1HFYnQ95orfYCc3Vka1S66cL1GDgS6wfTR3uNwo8S37A/edit#gid=2025438514

There are some gems, but trying to find them is like trying to find a needle in a haystack and I gave up on it quite awhile ago.

There are a lot of good-amazing games but they are buried under a mountain of garbage, as @simple@lemmy.world suggested I suggest you give the MiniReview app a try I'm pretty sure you will like it, it is pretty much a hidden gem that deserves more popularity

There are a ton of good mobile games but the reason you can't find them is because 99% of what you see in app stores are paid advertisements. Every section is basically paid, and the few which aren't get botted by major companies. That app that has 5 million downloads and 4.6 average score? Most likely spammed with bots that give it 5 stars. Google Play is a disaster.

Here are some Android games I would absolutely recommend:

• Fancy Pants Adventures

• Data Wing

• The Battle of Politopia

• Sonny

• Plato

• Cube Escape Collection

• Pocket City (or its sequel)

• Bloons TD 6 (paid)

• Dicey Dungeons (paid)

• Dead Cells (paid)

• Downwell (paid)

• Baba Is You (paid)

• Levelhead (paid)

• Kingdom Rush series (paid, usually on sale though)

• If you own Netflix you get to play their catalogue of games for free. I recommend Into the Breach, Shovel Knight Pocket Dungeon, Oxenfree

I could go on, but the point is ignore everything you see on the store. The store is garbage. Try to look for games that are well-talked about online.

Edit: Forgot to mention, there's an app called MiniReview where you can browse game reviews from people who actually care. It's a good resource if you're looking for good games.

There are good games, but usually they don't have the advertisement budget of these crapware companies that oversaturate the market. Best advice would be to look for good mobile games using other media, then get them on the store; not looking at the store's suggestion.

Pretty much. Unless you're an anime/gacha fan there really isn't any 'good' mobile games since the entire world decided that premium mobile games aren't worth it. Which pretty much fed back into itself. So the only thing approaching good will be either emulation/ports of games from console, the your mileage may vary genres (incrementals/idlers, and gacha) and the occasional diamond in the rough.

Doodle Jump kids remember

Well... I have GTA: San Andreas on mobile and that shit is damn near as good as console or PC

I would suggest to use the website: darkpattern.games to find fairly designed games.

On the other hand, I fell for a pseudogacha but really engaging card game: Marvel Snap.

There are a few hidden gems (I enjoy Plague inc. and Rebel inc. on occasion, for example), but for the most part, the majority of mobile games are mtx-laden cash grabs. So the actual quality is commensurately low because the devs figured out they don't have to put in real effort to implement gambling and hook addicts.

I really enjoyed BloonsTD6 on my phone. I play it almost every day.

I find Dark pattern games site to be fairly informative on which mobile games are good and which are not. The Healthy Games section has bunch of good games while the dark games section has games you should actively avoid.

If game is listed as healthy and has a good rating there's a pretty good chance for it being actually good.

I'm a big fan of BuriedBornes. Great little old school rpg to pick up and play. Lots of in depth mechanics and replayability.

These are my picks.

Infinitode 2: Pretty good standard Tower Defence.

Gravity Box: Very simple platformer where your only movement is rocket jumps. People say it has occasional ads but I've never seen any.

God Field: fun tacky card battle game. Quick games. Can play bots, private lobbies, casual or ranked. Anywhere from 1v1 to 9ffa. I would look up a guide online to find out how to play, as it doesn't have a tutorial (just a glossary).

Arknights: DISCLAIMER - Gacha game, I play f2p though just fine. You're only allowed a certain number of missions per day. Unique Tower defense game with levelable Pokemon for towers, except it's waifus instead of pokemons. Has lots of story (though you'll get through slowly).

Emulation very possible (though I dislike touch controls):

• Dolphin (wii/gc)
• Citra (3ds)
• RetroArch (any older system)

I've seen these mentioned in other comments:

• Mindustry
• Slay the Spire

It's tough to find one that hooks you in but not all mobile games are bad..right I'm playing harry Potter magic awakened and it has me hooked

Vampire Survivors and Baba Is You

After trying bunch of Android games I found Nintendo DS games that can be entirely played with a stylus have been the best games to emulate and play on mobile.

Edit: Kirby Mass Attack is great and felt like a native experience.

Some others that might be worth trying.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/925329-nintendo-ds/65539209

Commenting in here so I can try out some of the games listed because I have found very, very few games that weren't totally trash - either shit quality or an endless begging for money.

The very few that I do enjoy are Word Feud, The Kingdom Rush series, Flow Free, Block Puzzle and only a few other ones.

If you want to play mobile games but don't want to wade through the shit to find the good ones, I recommend getting Google Play Pass, it's mostly premium games (and a few standard ones with ads removed). It makes it easier to find the good games cause you just look at the play pass games. I stopped playing mobile games for years until recently when I got this. There's some classics on it too so it's been nice revisiting some games I used to play on my iPod Touch as a kid.

A huge amount of them are.

That said there are a number of games from the flash era that are still great.

There's a lot of good tower defense games. Bloons and kingdom rush I like personally.

Then there's ports like Minecraft, Stardew valley, Terraria

There's no good mobile exclusive game, in my experience. There are plenty of great games that are 1:1 ports of their PC or console versions, with buy-once pricing and no microtransactions.

The ones I have installed on Android are: Baba is You, Slay the Spire, Peglin, Downwell, Super Hexagon, SNKRX, and 20 Minutes Til Dawn.

Simon tathams puzzle pack! They're all puzzles, all procedurally generated, but I challenge you not to find one you absolutely love out of the whole set.