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Top 5 mobile games of 2019: Dann's picks of the year

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Top 5 mobile games of 2019: Dann's picks of the year

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Blimey, it's almost 2020, and you know what that means? Yep, it's time for us to reflect on the best games which have launched over the last twelve months.

It's actually an incredibly hard feat, especially considering the great games just keep coming, just this month we've had Black Desert Mobile and Oddman launch. Those two alone have been hoovering up my spare time, but they're just the icing on the exceptionally good cake that has been mobile games in 2019.

Of course, we say that it has been a great year for games every year because even if we have our doubts when January rolls around there are always pleasant surprises just around the corner. In 2018 we were talking about Motorsport Manager 3 Mobile and Asphalt 9: Legends - but this year we've had Mario Kart Tour, we've had Call of Duty Mobile and... goodness me, we've had the heavyweight that is Apple Arcade.

Apple's answer to the big curation question - or indeed, the fate of premium question - landed and achieved its 100-game milestone. They've built a £4.99 a month gym membership where you can solve puzzles, fight giant bosses and explore sweeping worlds (and more) rather than doing reps, squats, deadlifts and lats. I know which I'd rather spend my money on, and it's not the one that sounds like the ghosts from a cheap Pacman knock-off.

All of that said though, only one of my top five games is actually from Apple's new subscription service - I've left that one until the end of the list, so if you're curious then you'll have to make your way through the rest. That and the other four games are games which have stolen away the most of my time this year, and I'm quite proud at the mix of genres to be found here: There are strategy games, an action-platformer, a matching-tile RPG and more.

So, prattling aside, here are my top 5 mobile games of 2019.

 

Click Here To View The List »

Bad North

Publisher: Raw Fury Games
Available on: iOS + Android + Switch
Genre: Strategy
Find out more about Bad North
Bad North

Bad North, Bad North, Bad North. It's a game I can't get enough of - I'm actually playing it right now. It's a succinct strategy where you defend homesteads across a string of procedurally-generated islands. It's the best bits of those defensive missions which were injected into old RTS campaigns, the ones where you have limited units and have to be smart and careful with your unit placement. That, and it is incredibly visual.

What I mean by that is that the homesteads and units don't have health bars, instead, you can look at the unit formation or state of the buildings in order to see how worn down they are. After a particularly brutal battle there'll be allied and enemy corpses littering hillsides, staining beaches and collapsed near burning buildings.

There are rarely even half a dozen squads moving around on the screen, so it's easy to quickly reassess the situation - and if that's a struggle then when you select units there's a real-time, time-slow effect which puts the world into slow-motion.

There's progression too. Bad North is a run-based game - think FTL: Faster Than Light, Death Road to Canada or the classic Oregon Trail. You'll upgrade, gain and lose leaders (who give their squad abilities and are the last unit to fall in combat), you'll collect rare artefacts, and you'll unlock new leader traits which persist throughout your many attempts to outrun the Viking hordes. Oh, and it's beautiful too.

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Starbeard

Publisher: Game Insight
Available on: iOS + Android
Genre: Puzzle
Find out more about Starbeard
Starbeard

Despite having a platform on which to do so, sometimes we don't get to talk about the games that we really enjoy here at Pocket Gamer. Other times we manage to twist the topics toward them. At other times we wait until the iron is hot again, and during that time we strike. Starbeard has had to wait until the lattermost option, but the iron is glowing white-hot and its time to talk about one of the most interesting tile-matching games which I've had the pleasure to play.

That's right, to play, not 'to play this year'. Starbeard strafes the line between the run-based (like Bad North, eh?) sub-genre and the match-3 genre, and it does it with so many twists and turns that it ends up feeling like a Puzzle-RPG rather than a game of matching.

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For each run you pick a space dwarf to play as. Each has their own set of abilities - which you can twist and bend as you progress through the campaign - and most of them also fall into one of the three colour groups. These colours correspond to the tiles in each of the levels - and the dwarf counts as a tile too. This means that if you're playing as Doug, who is a yellow Dwarf, and you move your character to the top of a lane ending with two yellow icons then you'll complete the match of three and bank the yellow tokens as mana.

That mana is what fuels your abilities, and those abilities don't conform to the same move restrictions which normally define your turn. Normally you can only make a handful of moves, these can involve knocking something you're next to, moving your character or dragging an unburied mana tile to another stack. Using those movements and your abilities you need to complete objectives ranging from defeating massive bosses, destroying a certain amount of tiles or just wiping the board clean of enemies.

It's an incredibly smart twist on familiar things, it's cheaper than a bottle of wine, and it's definitely deserving of its place as one of my picks of the year.

Raiders of the North Sea

Available on: iOS + Android + Steam + Switch
Genre: Card/board game, Strategy
Find out more about Raiders of the North Sea
Raiders of the North Sea

As board games become increasingly popular we're continuing to see the rates of digital adaptation on the rise. A few years ago it was quite uncommon to find anything beyond the Hasbro/MB classics or Warhammer properties converted to the small screen. But here in 2019 not only are we seeing regular drops of titles from publishing giants like Asmodee, but also great board games from smaller companies, including Raiders of the North Sea.

Raiders of the North Sea sees you forming and leading a crew, your goal is to raid tactfully in order to secure enough victory points to win once the final round is wrapped up. This means that you'll need to carefully decide how you spend your turns - do you recruit more crew, trade for resources, or set out to raid? Worker placement has rarely been done so well.

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Not only is Raiders of the North Sea a great game, but it's also a great adaptation. Everything is perfect, everything is fluid, the tutorial is exceptionally well implemented and the whole game can almost be played without words - and it's not a simple game.

The team responsible for the digitisation of the worker-placement and hand-building game have managed to create a dynamic port-to-digital which actually plays out faster than that board game. It's rare where something can deliver the full art of a game, and delivery the full feeling of growth that such games have, and not just that but do it in a way where the game runs smoother in digital than physical.

Raiders of the North Sea is a success, a great adaptation of a great game, and one which oozes style and quality. Maybe it helps that the developers were tasked with adapting an already great game, but many have had such a task and failed before. They've succeeded because they are thorough and determined to create a great game, and that shines through.

Dead Cells

Developer: Motion Twin
Publisher: Motion Twin
Available on: iOS + Android + Steam + Switch
Genre: Action, Adventure
Find out more about Dead Cells
Dead Cells

Dead Cells is probably one of the greatest platformers to grace mobile screens, and that's something I'll stand by no matter how many times I am asked. Few games can wrangle the feeling of progression you find in a metroidvania title into the roguelike genre, and fewer still can do it as a platformer. But there's something else too. Dead Cells is all about timing, and at times it feels like a beatless rhythm game.

The diving, dodging, slashing and dashing of Dead Cells is all incredibly fluid. Every enemy from mindless grunt to heaving boss has movement and attack tells. Every weapon feels different - from DPS through range to speed. Every element of combat feels like it is laid bare to you once you've spent some time mucking around in the filthy hallways of the fallen island - every loadout feels personal, and every slight upgrade or unlock feels like something you're taking ownership of.

To some of you that might sound like I'm talking about a game from the Souls series, there's certainly a lot of people in that... devout following who praise the critical role that equipment, choices and timing play in the series. But, let me tell you something. I've not clicked with a Souls game since Demon's Souls, and of all of the Soulslikes its only The Surge which has really hooked me.

In Dead Cells everything feels perfectly deliberate, and even the shortest (failed) run still feels like it adds more to the metagame.

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It's for these reasons that Dead Cells really stands out for me. If you're still not sold though, do consider that the mobile versions have a variety of usability options, including an auto-attack option. Imagine a game which is frequently praised for fluid, tight combat making that combat automatic. It takes a lot of confidence in your secondary mechanics in order to do that - and they deserve that confidence.

Tangle Tower

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I said at the start of the article that I had a game from Apple Arcade here on my list, here it is: Tangle Tower.

Detective Grimoire, the previous in the series, was one of my favourite point and click adventure games of recent years. It fully captured the spirit of the Professor Layton series, but did it with a fun, child-friendly, cartoon art-style and setting. It was perfect bar two things, (1) it was a bit short, and (2) there was only one game. I was honestly ready for Grimoire to hit the road on a regular basis, to dive into misadventure and mystery in annual releases.

Ultimately I ended up giving up hope, but then Tangle Tower arrived. It's bigger than Detective Grimoire, it builds on the object-based sentence-solving of the original, and there is simply more of everything which was great about the first.

If you've fond memories of Professor Layton, or even just of point and click adventure titles, then Tangle Tower more than justifies a £4.99 dive into Apple's Apple Arcade. Hopefully, we'll see another entry soon.

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Dann Sullivan
Dann Sullivan
A job in retail resulted in a sidestep into games writing back in 2011. Since then Dann has run or operated several indie game focused websites. They're currently the Editor-in-Chief of Pocket Gamer Brands, and are determined to help the site celebrate the latest and greatest games coming to mobile.