Cookies Must Die features awesome slo-mo action, but suffers from having a repetitive structure.

Early Worm uses a proven gameplay formula but then fails to build something particularly compelling around it.

The White Door is a brief adventure with some frustrating puzzles, but a really awesome vibe.

Swag and Sorcery can be rewarding, but only if you can put up with its inelegant design.

Simulacra 2 struggles to get you invested in its shallow, clumsy narrative.

This roguelite feels tuned for distracted play, which makes it feel pretty flat.

This pretty puzzle game gets a lot of things right, but ultimately doesn’t feel that satisfying.

If it weren't for its pretty terrible free-to-play model, Overdox would be (and sometimes is!) one of the most thrilling battle royales out there.

Undead Horde has a lot of ideas for how you can manage your dead army, but doesn’t really provide situations that let you do much with these options.

SimpleRockets 2 celebrates and rewards tinkering, experimentation, and lots and lots of patience.

Dear Esther is a bit of a conundrum. Its extremely slow pace is key to making its tone work, but it can also irritate you to the point that it takes you out of the experience. It also creates an incredibly impressive and intricate set of contrivances to deliver its narrative, but said narrative turns out to be somewhat underwhelming. It’s clear that Dear Esther is a special game, and it deserves praise for going so far outside the lines of what games traditionally try to do. But in doing so, it also sets you up for a grand revelation that never really materializes.

Football Drama is an ambitious and experimental management sim that is both alluring and a bit maddening.

Again, there are plenty of great pieces to read on the ins and outs of what makes Dead Cells a great game. This mobile version is that exact game, but it’s a little harder to enjoy on this particular platform. So, unless the iOS version of the game is the only way you can play Dead Cells or you want to have yet another way to play it, I’m not sure why you’d get this version over the ones that came out last year.

GRIS is a visually arresting experience, but otherwise not particularly memorable.

The ideas in Farm Punks have a lot of potential. I can see a good version of this game hiding somewhere inside of it. It’s not just the monetization to blame, here. Even if Farm Punks was a fully premium experience, its underdeveloped gameplay undercuts its interesting premise.

Telling Lies an ambitious expansion of Her Story’s ideas, which makes for an engrossing—but sometimes messy—experience.

It’s really tricky to create satisfying traversal challenges when you put players in control of an object that can move freely in any direction. I have a lot of respect for Witcheye for taking on this huge design problem, especially since there are times when the game really feels like it delivers compelling solutions. Unfortunately, these moments are spread across an uneven experience that is hard to control.

I’m not sure Journey is best experienced on mobile, but it’s still a fantastic game. If this is the only way you would play it, you should definitely do so. The compromise in bringing Journey to the App Store didn’t significantly impact my enjoyment of it. All of the most important stuff is still there, and that’s worth celebrating.

If Hamsterdam was a little tighter and shorter, I think I would have enjoyed its prompt-based gameplay a little more. There are times where it does really fire on all cylinders, but by that time, you’ve already played so much of it that the payoff doesn’t necessarily feel worth it.

Battle Chasers: Nightwar feels like an rpg that doesn’t know what it wants to be. In its pursuit of trying to have every classic rpg system crammed into it, it doesn’t take the time to tell you about them or why they might be important. It just creates a digital checklist for you that’s miles long. For an rpg that you might want to play on the go for a good long time, that might not be such a bad thing, but it could be better.

If you want to take your loot shooting on the go, I can’t think of a better game to pick up than Gigantic X. It’s top down shooting is fun and satisfying in its own right, and the game has varied and interesting gear to keep you on the grind.

I’m glad that Hyper Light Drifter is on mobile, but it doesn’t exactly seem like a great fit. Between the slow ramp up and performance problems, it’s probably best to play this game elsewhere if you can. If you can’t, it’s still possible to enjoy the game on iOS. I did, but I probably would have had more fun with it on console or PC, assuming those versions don’t have similar issues.

There are definitely some rough edges to P1 Select, but the core of what’s here is so cool and creative that they’re easy to look past. Do yourself a favor and go play P1 Select. It’s hard to imagine a more imaginative roguelike in such a tight little package.

I can’t even begin to imagine how Sky was made. It’s ultra-smooth visuals and seamless multiplayer feel like they can’t work on a mobile device, yet they do. This is indeed an achievement, and I cannot deny that. Once I start playing it though, it feels like I’m smearing a painting. Everything is so beautifully composed, and then I come along to fly into a wall or get hung up on a ledge. This happens so frequently that I don’t really like spending time in Sky, which is a real shame.

TEPPEN is a surprisingly fun collectible card game that makes good use of Capcom characters.

Although it doesn’t end in an especially satisfying way, I still really enjoyed my time with Forgotton Anne. It builds a really cool world and animates it beautifully. It even contains quite a few touching character moments and explores interesting ideas. These things are rare in games, particularly on the App Store, so its flaws are worth looking past.

Minit has some neat tricks up its sleeves, but I lost interest in looking for them before I finished it. The looping mechanic is one that makes for a great pitch and first impression, but it gets old very quickly. This isn’t to say there aren’t things to enjoy about Minit, but they were probably far more enjoyable a year ago when the game was fresh and you were playing it with a controller

Serial Cleaner is a flat stealth action experience with few redeeming qualities.