GAMES OF THE WEEK - The 5 best new games for iOS and Android - April 2nd
It's that time again! Time for another entry into our long-running GAMES OF THE WEEK series.
If you're looking for the best 5 games which have hit the iPhone, iPad or Android stores this week then you've landed yourself at the exact right place at just the right time. Lucky, lucky you.
With this article, we skirt around the droves of subscription services (Apple Arcade, Google Play Pass, GameClub, Hatch, and all of their friends) which have launched onto mobile platforms over the years. We also don't factor in things like Steam Link or Google Stadia which allow streaming to handheld devices - and would open up this list to almost every game under the sun.
What that means is that our list is a finely curated list of brilliant, fresh titles which you can download and play without subscribing to, or installing, any third-party initiative. Of course, there are some great games on those services, but, let's focus on the stuff that you can grab right now.
This week we've definitely got a tilt toward digital board gaming, but there's also explosive chicken, hurtling parcels and a little bit of government spying. Whatever takes your fancy, there's definitely plenty of games for you to check out this week - and we'll talk you through the best of them.
Remember, if you're looking to check through some of our previous selections then you can always do that at our Games of The Week Hub, it's a great way to find games to fill out that empty storage space on your phone. Or, if you like your news in bitesize chunks, delivered straight to your palm then maybe follow us on Twitter.
Anyway, without any further delay, click on the big, blue button below to find out more about our top five of the games which released on mobile over the last week.
1
Totally Reliable Delivery Service
If you're after hurtling yourself around sandbox environments, bumbling your way through delivering parcels then you might find Totally Reliable Delivery Service to your liking. It's a physics platformer with an air of ridiculous, and it's just launched for both iOS and Android. Watching the launch video, it certainly explains why the parcels I've had over the last couple of weeks have been in an awful state.
It's free to play, with IAPs for unlocks, and you can't argue with that price.
2
Sagrada
Dire Wolf Digital, the team behind one of my favourite digital board game adaptations (Raiders of the North Sea), are back at their digital adapting best. This time they've adapted the extremely popular, stained-glass dice-drafting game Sagrada.
Sagrada, for those unaware, has you rolling dice to assemble a stained-glass display. It's about drafting the best combinations of dice to score high, and about using your abilities at the best time to maximise that. While you lose the tactility of rolling dice (surely a key part), the artwork is exceptional and there's no clearing up to do afterwards - wonderful.
3
Bomb Chicken
2020 has been a year of social distancing and pandemics, but maybe, just maybe, we can make it a year for chickens who lay explosive eggs thanks to Bomb Chicken.
A standard chicken suddenly gains the power to lay bombs instead of eggs, but more than that they can also kick them at enemies and stack them high. That leads to amble shenanigans, and if you add to that the fact that it is from Nitrome (so you can expect a lot of juice and excitement) you've got an omelette recipe for success.
I played a little bit of Bomb Chicken when it released for Switch two years back and really, really enjoyed belting bombs at enemies. It was reminiscent of those later Bomberman games, but as a 2D platformer filled with poultry and explosives.
4
Carcassonne (Asmodee)
Not that long ago I took great pride in reporting that Asmodee Group had opened up their digital licensing for their IPs. What this news meant is that all sorts of companies should be able to rush forward and grab at the IPs for some of the biggest games out there - including a lot of modern classics like Settlers of Catan and Carcassonne. It was a bit weird, then, that when TheCodingMonkey's Carcassonne was taken down from the App Store it was to be replaced with one from Asmodee Digital.
Let's ignore that oddity for now though, and instead celebrate that one of the most important modern board games is back on iOS. Carcassonne is, as many will tell you, definitely a major contributor to the golden age we are seeing in board games, as well as the popularisation of the worker-placement and euro-game genres. Oh, it almost certainly birthed the modern meeple too -- goodness... can it make me a cup of tea too?
If you've not played Carcassonne then you might not understand the fanfare - or even know how to play the game. It's quite a simple game where players take turns placing tiles. Each tile can have a combination of roads, cities and monasteries. Each of these in different ways at the end of the game; Roads score based on lengths, fields based on the number of completed cities they touch, cities based on the flags within and city size, and monasteries by the number of tiles which touch them. However, you only get the points if you place a worker on them, claiming them throughout the game.
That's where it gets strategic, if you declare for a tile early then other players will likely change their playstyle to stop them giving you points. It's cunning, it's clever, and it is a classic.
5
Orwell: Keeping an Eye on You
So, working from home eh? How about that technology... be a shame if somebody was using it to spy on everything you did... right?
Well, don't worry about that. In Orwell: Keeping an Eye on You it's you doing the snooping and digging. It's a fascinating game where you snoop around restricted files and public information in order to draw associations and prevent (or solve) crimes. As with any 'hacker' style game it has an incredibly clean UI, that, when combined with the concept of the game, makes for quite a fun little experience. Little quirks like character profiles changing as you play really show how much care has gone into the design.
Orwell: Keeping an Eye on You plays out as a five-part series. Hopefully, we'll have the sequel (Ignorance is Strength) come to mobile in the near future too — it's equally fantastic.
