It is really hard to find good mobile games.

Most games are just blatant pay to win fronts. I especially despise those "idle whatever" style games where you wait for your 'money' to rake up. Boring stuff.

With smartphones getting more and more powerful, I miss sophisticated games on it. And I am not talking Skyrim here. Even most stuff we could play on Newgrounds 15 years ago blows most of the shit in the store out of the water.

There is just not a big enough market for it, it seems.

Slice and Dice is a solid phone game, easy time waster and a lot of fun rolling some dice to kill some baddies. In general though I do think they are quite trash, but ports and emulators are probably the best option

I would say that most are subpar. If you are looking for a recommendation then I've been playing Orna (search on the play store) forever now and it's a great time. As hardcore or casual as you like with an overall great community and a developer that is active and engages with us.

I would just like to share Cat Bird with all of you. An excellent mobile first platformer that shows that on screen buttons can work.

Highly recommend Dawncaster if you like Slay The Spire / deck builders. I think I paid $6 for it and I've probably played 40 hours or so. Just an honest to goodness straight up good game that happens to be on mobile.

No gache/gems/freemium nonsense/etc.

It could just be you are not the target market for these games and you see through the bullshit. A lot of them are designed with shitty dark patterns to keep you coming back for more. Also, a lot of those reviews are probably fake to draw in the curious.

If you try to search the Windows Store, you’ll also get a whole bunch of terrible mobile-esque games. I think the issue is having a “Game Store” integrated into a device, that cannot morally turn away games of any kind or enforce their own prioritization. iOS pretty much needs to allow any kind of app to stay fair.

If we could have a third party App Store on phones kind of like Steam, I think perhaps they could set a bar of quality that allows genuine, meaningful $10 games to be sold there. But, that’s a sizable barrier for entry when most tinkerers that would install a store like Steam are on Windows PCs.

I think perspective is key here. Setting aside the low barrier of entry that can't possible keep the truly dreadful garbage out, on mobile you're super limited on your input method (touch screen and not so great motion controls). This tends leads to devs gravitating towards the sort of genres that were historically plagued with low quality shovel-ware on platforms like the Wii. As others have said, true gems exist, although I'd argue that the best of the best do tend to ports from more capable platforms. Titles like Dicey Dungeons, Slay the Spire, and others along those lines have rich play mechanics underneath of the simple touch interface. It really all depends on how how far you want to dig, and how deep of an experience you want (there are hundreds of good enough match 3 games if that's your jam).

Yes, almost all of it is bad. But that's only because there's a lot of bad games on there. There are certainly great games on mobile, you just have to find them.

It's been years, and I see that it contains ads now, but I absolutely loved Super Stickman Golf 1 and 2. It is a simple 2D golf platformer with a ton of courses (at my time of last play you could download like 15 extra courses individually, on top of 6 or so to start). I'm sure it has been ruined by the freemium model, but it was a joy back in the day.

good pizza great pizza is pretty awesome if you want any suggestions

Your sample range of one that you saw out of tens of thousands of existing games means that no, you haven't seen every mobile game and cannot use that one experience to tar all titles. The barrier for entry is low so you will find a lot of rubbish, but there's plenty of gold out there which you maybe be familiar with such as Stardew, Final Fantasy pixel remasters, Slay the Spire, and some not so much, like Yellow, Stumble Guys and Deemo.

If you are into racing games, I can recommend these confidently:

• Rush Rally 3
• GRID Autosport

Both are quite challenging.

You can have my Word Cookies when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.

There are plenty of highly-rated indie games ported to Android and iOS. Why plays gatcha games and ads/microtransactions-laden mobile games when you can play Into the Breach, Terraria, Stardew Valley, Limbo, Samorost, etc for a small sum of money?

Moonshades on android is a good knock off of heros of might and magic

I once had an android port of dune 2,I think it was of questionable legality licence wise.

I don't remember if it was in the store or if I loaded it.

I lost it's source but later another version surfaced, but didn't work as well.

I played through all houses twice each on mobile. Was a great time remembering my 1990's gaming.

If you’re a football fan (American football that is), Retro Bowl is the best football game on mobile. It’s free, but the full game purchase is a whole $.99, and it’s the best buck I’ve ever spent. I’ve played that game more than any other on my phone. It’s surprisingly deep with quite a bit of strategy for a little football game, and it embarrasses the garbage that is the iOS Madden franchise. Here is a link to it.

And if you like futball, give Retro Goal a shot, it’s from the same developers.

Postknight :D

Space Marshals 1 and 2 Anomaly Warzone Earth and Korea ...

Holy shit I am not able recall anymore decent games I have enjoyed on mobile! 😂

Well definitely ports of old games from other platforms, like Professor Layton and Ace Attorney series.

I mean the bitter truth is, mobile games nowadays are completely plagued with the same cancer of trying to sell you stuff inside the game. Virtually every "worthwhile" game on mobile has become a flea market in on itself. So even the decent games a chore to get through to the actual meaty part. I used to enjoy PUBGmobile and CODmobile with my friends but even that I stopped playing because it was just rinse and repeat live service model of trudging through gutter waste. It became just an obligation to my friends rather than anything I would enjoy so I quit.

Problem is that nobody takes mobile as a serious platform for gaming. And somewhat sad reality is that the huge user base you see in mobile space, especially Android, is coming from people who are not going to spend a single penny on anything software.

No, you se-

Almost

Yes.

Yes they are.

Stay away from them on the whole, don't even bother discovering games through lists of mobile titles. Disregard any list that shows games that were not made mobile-first as a counter-example, those miss the point of the question.