Top 25 best iOS and Android games of 2018

Where else are we to start but the one mobile game in 2018 that secured our prestigious 10 out of 10 award? New Star Manager is a dauntingly absorbing combination of sports management and flicky arcade game.

Indie genius Zach Gage hits gold with his take on the humble game of pool. The key to Pocket-Run Pool's success is its clever rule twists and score multipliers, which serve to turn it into one of the finest physics puzzlers of the year.

Asphalt 9: Legends was flat out one of the most gorgeous games of the year, and a true technical showcase for the 2018 class of flagship phones. It's also a really fun, extremely rapid arcade racer.

In a year where Nintendo went eerily quiet on the mobile front, it was left to its pals at HAL to come up with the goods. That it did with Part Time UFO, a super-playable grabber claw-based physics puzzler with charm to burn.

In a year filled with artistically ambitious mobile puzzlers, Evergarden managed to stand out. It's an enchanting twist on the Triple Town formula, with a beautifully stylised nature theme.

Donut County sailed through our sky high expectations with contemptuous ease. It turns out gobbling up cute critters with a movable sinkhole is exactly as fun as it sounds.

Alto's Odyssey is a fairly by-the-book autorunner when you get down to it. However, with graphics and gameplay polished to an uncommon sheen, it comfortably transcends this lack of originality.

Adding Game of Thrones's epic world building to the decision-making algorithms of the Reigns series was a bit of a no-brainer. Reigns: Game of Thrones was a predictably awesome casual RPG.

Pocket City turned out to be the premium city builder we didn't realise we needed. Tactical yet intuitive, inviting yet deep, it's the kind of mobile strategy game we need more of.

Oddmar stands proudly with all of the other eye candy that landed in 2018. It's a stunningly beautiful 2D platformer with a vivid cartoon-viking world - and it plays great too.

Ovivo looks like a pretty unassuming, starkly designed platform-puzzler. But it's packed full of great ideas, and its plane-switching mechanic is brilliantly implemented.

The Room: Old Sins gave us more of the same intricate locked-box puzzling, but with greater focus and a creepy new dolls house premise. It marked a masterful return for one of the all-time mobile greats.

Florence provides a brutally short running time and minimal interactivity. Yet its emotive tale of love, loss, and finding yourself proves stunningly effective.

As a translation of a game famous for its unwieldiness and its hardcore demands, few expected PUBG Mobile to be any good. Amazingly, it works a treat, making for one of the year's biggest multiplayer shooters.

It would be remiss of us to include PUBG Mobile and not follow up immediately with its greatest competitor. Fortnite is arguably a bigger technical achievement, providing a compromise-free version of the biggest battle royale game around.

Here's a game that manages to capture the considerable charm of its Cartoon Network source material, then bundles it into a wonderfully whimsical RPG. It's really quite brilliant.

A brilliant single-player card game that manages to give the mighty Card Crawl something to sweat about. Heading into RPG-lite battle with a deck of cards has rarely been this much fun.

Released right at the very start of the year, we almost forgot about Antihero. Which would have been a crime, as it's one of the most accessible and polished digital boardgames available.

An unapologetically deep and involving strategy game that will chew you up and spit you out if you don't give it your full attention. Chaos Reborn: Adventures is brutal, but we love it for that.

Card Quest is a dungeon-crawling card game of uncommon balance, managing as it does to be accessible and deep at the same time. It leaves you free to experiment, and there's a great sense of progression to it.

Alongside The Room: Old Sins, Kingdom Rush Vengeance had to be the most eagerly anticipated return of the year. Its tower defence action hasn't changed all that much over the year, but it remains a perfectly balanced casual strategy experience.

Slydris 2 takes the basic components of Tetris and gives it a more cerebral, mobile-friendly edge. The ability to shuffle the block pile below the top line remains an ingenious touch.

Rymdkapsel dev Grapefrukt has created a casual puzzler with the instant appeal of a Voodoo game - but way more polish and depth into the bargain.

Sneak Ops is a stealth game that even those who suck at stealth games can enjoy. It strips the genre back to its fundamentals to produce a taut arcade score chaser.

This technically impressive shooter gives mobile gamers their very own Destiny, combining a meaty single player campaign with an enjoyable multiplayer arena blaster.