:brace-cowboy:
My top picks:
-
Super Auto Pets: GOATed autobattler feature cute animals that mercilessly KO each other with blunt force trauma. Pausable at a moment's notice. Excellent entertainment when recovering from a bout of simultaneous salmonella and campylobacter. Available on iOS and Android with a free base version (Pet Pack #1 alongside a randomized weekly pack) and two paid expansion packs, costing $5 and $10 respectively.
-
Simon Tatham's Puzzles: A collection of 40 singleplayer logic games. Personal favorites include Net (non stressful version of the pipe connecting hacking mini game from Bioshock), Mines (minesweeper but without RNG that forces you to guess), and Untangle (arrange points so their connecting lines don't intersect). Available on iOS and Android for free. No ads.
-
SNKRX: Snake with autobattler characteristics and a bumpin soundtrack. $2.99 on Android and iOS . No ads.
-
10000000/You Must Build A Boat: A duology of fast paced match 3 games with upgrade progression. Largely the same game, but YMBAB has a little more polish, some additional mechanics, and a prestige/ascension mode. Fun to play through once in a while but lack of variation means it gets stale before long. $2.99 each on iOS and Android(linking to developer page for sake of brevity).
Honorable mention to emulators—thousands of great games across many systems for free! Post your emulator and ROM recommendations too, I guess.
Square Enix keeps doing this thing where they make killer mobile games but refuse to market them outside of Japan. The most recent is:
Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles. This is a remake of a GameCube game that was also released on console, with all four versions of the game able to play with each other online. There's even a Lite version, which is both a demo and a way to play with a friend who owns the game without having to buy it yourself. It's a simple action RPG where players explore dungeons, level up, fight bosses etc, the real fun is doing these things with friends if you got 'em. The game is a bop.
People have review bombed it on the Play Store for being $30, but the thing is it's a real fucking video game and not a "free" MTX hellscape. Squeenix seems to keep running into this problem with all of their games that don't have MTX, meanwhile their gacha bullshit games crush it because they're more in line with player expectations.
deleted by creator
Outside of a couple mistakes (art on the mobile versions of ffvi comes to mind), square-enix has a ton of great games ported to mobile which play better than emulators. The mobile port of final fantasy tactics is the best version I've played, and I've heard that Dragon Quest V on mobile is absolutely the definitive edition at this point in time