Touch Arcade

It is an immensely flawed game with so many rough edges you’ll sometimes feel like you’re juggling angry badgers covered in Captain Crunch. But there’s a real appeal to it, a method to its mess, and you can feel the heart that went into all of it, even the parts that don’t work.

To be clear, Dungeon of the Endless is beautiful, fun, and crunchy enough to keep you on your toes. It is also brutally punishing, and utterly impenetrable for anyone who isn’t willing to keep trying after spending hours getting to the brink of success, and failing with little to nothing to show for it because of something entirely out of your control.

Final Fantasy 8 Remastered took its time coming to mobile platforms. The port isn’t optimal but it is adequate. Certainly well-done enough that you should be able to enjoy the game for what it is. Now, whether or not that game is going to be to your tastes is another matter entirely.

Despite its shortcomings, iOS is probably the best place to play Fury of Dracula. Rather than being tethered to computer for game night, you can pass around the iPad, or play on phones. Everyone has those, right? What about playing it physically, you ask? Well, the less said about trying to hunt down a physical copy, the better.

SteamWorld Quest is a single player card battling RPG and is instantly one of the best games you can play on mobile. It oozes charm and is super-polished.

It’s a good game, and it fits mobile quite well. I’d probably recommend picking up Castlevania: Symphony of the Night ahead of this game, but there can and should be room in your life for both.

I said it before, and I meant it: Moonlighter is a great game. It feels good to play, the soundtrack is great, and all my complaints are really quite minor. It is an interesting blend of dungeon crawler and shopkeep simulator, something not really delivered by other games that I have found. As a mobile port, it is excellent. Recommending it is easy, however with a twelve dollar price tag, it isn’t something everyone can or should pick up without second thought. Nevertheless, if you’re on the fence and have previously enjoyed games from both of the genres it pulls from, it’s definitely worth a shot.

Overall, Forager on iOS is a bit of a mixed bag. On its own, it is easy to recommend assuming you play with a controller because the touch controls aren’t great and there’s no real customization for them. However, if you already own Forager on another system and want a portable version, I’d recommend waiting for a patch to see if the control issues and UI get addressed.

Overall, this is by far the most impressive of all of Feral Interactive’s iOS conversions yet. Given how awful XCOM 2 was at launch on PS4 for me and how it runs on current consoles, I’m more than impressed with the iOS version and can safely recommend it above the consoles as an alternative to those who want the full XCOM 2 experience and don’t want to play on PC with the caveat about the visuals. The XCOM 2 Collection is a joy to play on iPad Pro and I can’t wait to see where the port goes over the next few months with potential updates and maybe even potential features brought in.

With several years between the first game and the third one, the 9th Dawn series now spans a number of eras in mobile gaming. But it has always been true to what it wanted to offer from the start, which is a world of adventures and memories on your mobile device with no nonsense weighing it down. 9th Dawn III is by leaps and bounds the easiest of the series to get into, and that’s an important step forward as once you get into these games, you won’t get out for a very long time indeed. Just one more quest, one more dive into that crypt, one more round of fishing, one more card game, one more tough monster defeated. And so it goes, until the sun rises on another new day. Don’t miss this one, my RPG-loving friends.