The best iOS and Android games of September 2018

It's cute, it's verbose, it's full of cheeky wordplay and fuzzy bears. It's Alphabear 2!

Spry Fox's word jumble sequel is just a big ball of lovely, as you put words together and grow your bear collection. There's also the potential for some really rude random sentence generation, which is always welcome.

Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Champions is a card battler that doesn't try to ape Hearthstone's imperious template. It's the most refreshing game of its kind that we've seen in some time.

From its four-lane set-up to a neat twisting mechanic, this isn't the kind of generic CCG you've grown accustomed to. Which is great.

Here's a deep and involving strategy game that chews you up and spits you out if you don't put the hard yards in. It doesn't pander to a typical mobile audience, and we kind of like it for that.

Chaos Reborn's 3D hex-based battlefield yields some truly engrossing, multi-faceted turn-based scraps that reward a patient approach.

Light takes centre stage in Where Shadows Slumber, as you use your magical lantern to alter the world around you. It's an intelligent and incredibly engaging puzzler.

While it's bright and varied, simple controls and snappy levels ensure this is perfectly suited to mobile play.

Meowoof looks like a simple one-finger arcade game, but it's actually way more interesting than that. Mixing arcade gameplay with much deeper puzzling and platforming mechanics, it turns out to be something quite special.

You take control of a pair of entangled animals, with one always circling around the other. Around this core mechanic the game builds a surprisingly varied experience.

Wall Kickers is a clever mobile reimagining of the platformer, rather than the straight-up climber it initially appears to be. It's surprisingly refreshing stuff.

At the heart of this is a neat mid-air backflip mechanic, which makes for a much more agile and varied experience than you might initially expect.

Confusingly, there were two games set in the Warhammer Age of Sigmar universe released in September. Thankfully, they're completely different

Realm War is a midcore MOBA, with a dark fantasy take on the Clash Royale template. It's familiar stuff, but with sufficient embellishment to be well worth the effort.

We wouldn't recommend unchaining your bike in any sense of the word. It'll either get pinched or will deprive you of the necessary forward drive.

But we would recommend Bike Unchained 2, a downhill mountain bike racing game that almost plays like a 3D Tiny Wings. It's pretty rad.

If you know anything about the previous Cube Escape or Rusty Lake games, then you'll know whether Cube Escape: Paradox is for you. It's another slice of weird, brain-frying point-and-click puzzling.

It still veers into maddeningly vague territory at times, but this is a stylish adventure-puzzler with even higher production values than usual in the form of a tie-in movie.

This one has provoked quite a heated debate in the comment section over the relative value of 'premium' mobile games. Harry reckons £20 is too much to pay for a smartphone game, but others argue that it's a fully fledge JRPG with hundreds of hours of gameplay.

The game itself is a simplified, super-deformed take on Monster Hunter, but with turn-based battles and a more linear world. It's also a port of a year-old 3DS game, so it's not exactly built for mobile, but there's still plenty of fun to be had.