Best mobile games of August 2015 (pictures)
Looking for a new game to play on your mobile device? Here's our pick of the best released in August 2015.
Race the Sun
Flippfly's Race the Sun borrows a concept from Tiny Wings: You have until the sun goes down to get as far as you possibly can. In execution, it's vastly different.
Race the Sun is a third-person racing game in which you pilot a solar-powered craft across an alien landscape, dodging obstacles and collecting multipliers and pickups that extend daylight, giving you more time to race.
Every 24 hours, the landscape resets and changes, which means every day, the game has something different to offer, while completing challenges allows you to add upgrades to your ship.
The clean, simple graphics combined with the responsive controls make the experience feel somehow serene, even when you're dodging for your life.
Platforms: iOS
Price: $4.99 | AU$6.49 | £3.99 (iOS)
Sentinel Command
Sentinel Command is a strategy game with a massive difference: You're commanding a small force guarding a strategically important resource, far from the front line of the battle. It's a bold choice, and an interesting one, since the game makes no bones about reminding you that bigger action is taking place elsewhere.
That doesn't mean Sentinel Command is boring, though. You have to fight strategic battles against guerilla raiders and strategically allocate resources to the frontline to aid the main war effort, all the while hunting out enemy bases in your zone and quashing them.
Platforms: iOS
Price: $3.99 | AU$4.99 | £2.99
Pac-Man 256
Hipster Whale of Crossy Road fame has teamed up with Bandai Namco for a sort of "endless runner" take on Pac-Man, based on the famous Map 256 glitch. How does it work? Really well, actually: It takes place in an endless Pac-Man map populated with ghosties and power-ups. You can go at your own pace, and even backtrack, but hard on your little Pac-heels is The Glitch, gradually swallowing up the screen. If you're too slow, you'll get all eaten up.
In all honesty, it's not as compelling to play as Crossy Road, but that leaves it in the "still pretty compelling" category. Of all the Pac-Man titles that have been tried over the years, it's the freshest and most interesting take on the little Pac that we've seen in some time.
Price: Free
The Guides
If you're the kind of person who likes to keep a notepad on hand while you're gaming, The Guides will be for you. It consists of a series of cryptic puzzles, a rabbit hole of maths and translations and conversions, with a set of clues that, in some cases, serve only to make the experience more confusing before you hit upon an answer.
If you like the experience of diving into an ARG, The Guides is a brilliant way to experience the sort of problem solving involved without ending up smeared across the web. It also comes with a separate companion app, The Guides Compendium (Android | iOS), which offers a separate narrative and its own mystery to unravel while providing clues and background about what's going on in the main game.
Price: $1.99 | AU$2.71 | £1.52 (Android); $1.99 | AU$2.49 | £1.49 (iOS)
Final Fantasy VII
Final Fantasy VII is widely regarded as the best game in the entire Final Fantasy franchise. It's due for a console remaster, but if you're looking for a version you can fit in your backpack and play on the train, a nostalgia trip, or if you've never played it and have always wanted to, the original has made its way across to iOS.
Platforms: iOS
Price: $15.99 | AU$19.99 | £11.99
Dead Synchronicity
Michael has woken up, memory lost, in a post-apocalyptic world in terror, where humans huddle in refugee camps and a mysterious sickness brings vast telepathic powers, madness and death. This bleak and darkly atmospheric point-and-click adventure explores a world on a deadline and a confused man racing against it to try and stop reality itself from disappearing.
Platforms: iOS
Price: $3.99 | AU$4.99 | £2.99
Galactic Keep
Galactic Keep is the deepest iOS game from developer Gilded Skull to date, and it's an utter delight, combining those luridly coloured, hand-drawn visuals with a pretty magnificent old-school tabletop RPG experience. You roll the dice on a sci-fi adventure to complete missions, moving across the board and engaging in combat with a variety of foes, alien and robot alike. As is appropriate for a good RPG, though, it's not dependent on the luck of the throw: You also have to be able to use the numbers you get strategically to put yourself in the best position to win.
Platforms: iOS
Price: $3.99 | AU$4.99 | £2.99
Dungeon of the Endless
Your space ship has crashed and it's being overrun by hostile aliens. In this procedurally generated permadeath dungeon crawler, you and your crew have to defend your ship's crystal core from enemies while exploring to find an escape.
As you progress through the game, you unlock new ships and new crew members with different stats and abilities, as well as capacity for a greater number of crew members to deploy on exploration missions and protect the crystal, gathering resources to try and keep them alive.
Most actions are automated, such as repairs and attacking, which means your main role is to make sure resources (such as crew deployment and upgrades) are allocated correctly. It's surprisingly complex for something that requires so little micromanagement.
Platforms: iOS
Price: $4.99 | AU$6.49 | £3.99
Calvino Noir
Stylish stealth puzzler and noir adventure Calvino Noir puts you in the role of several actors in a play about revolution in 1930s Europe, inspired by Blade Runner. Gameplay is pretty simple, and your objectives are clearly labelled, with each character bringing specialities to the table to advance the plot in various ways, but it's as much about atmosphere and storytelling as it is about your actions as a player. It's quiet, peaceful, poignant and beautifully animated.
Platforms: iOS
Price: $3.99 | AU$4.99 | £2.99
Whispering Willows
Whispering Willows comes with a little bit of a caveat: The floating controls are a little fiddly to work with and are probably best suited to a larger screen, such as a tablet, or a Bluetooth third-party controller. That said, it's a lovely little side-scrolling adventure game with a fun mechanic. You play Elena, a teen girl searching for her missing father. Along the way, you discover that you can separate your spirit from your body, which leads to using your "ghost" to solve puzzles in a spooky, seemingly abandoned mansion.
Price: $4.99 | AU$7.04 | £3.86 (Android); $4.99 | AU$6.49 | £3.99 (iOS)
Forest Spirit
Unless you've actually played Forest Spirit already, you've not played a tower defence game like Forest Spirit. The forest is under attack from nasty bugs. You're the benevolent druid whose job it is to save the forest by using your powers to plant upgradeable defensive flora that will keep the bugs away from the forest's heart tree. Other plants generate energy, which you can use to plant trees or cast spells, all set amidst a lush green forest.
Price: $2.74 | AU$3.81 | £2.09 (Android); $2.99 | AU$3.79 | £2.29 (iOS)
Gathering Sky
If there's a word to describe Gathering Sky, it's joyful. The aim is to control a flock of birds as it soars through the sky, following slipstreams and gathering up stray birds, growing bigger and bigger, swooping around obstacles over the changing landscape. The music has been created especially for the experience by the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and the result is an exhilarating flight into somewhere far removed from mundane concerns.
Price: $2.99 | AU$3.93 | £2.36 (Android); $2.99 | AU$3.79 | £2.29 (iOS)
The Path to Luma
The Path to Luma is an odd little game, developed by a power company ostensibly to raise awareness for solar energy. Although the majority of NRG Energy's power plants are fossil-fuelled, it has been making efforts towards more sustainable options, so this makes sense.
To the company's credit, the game, made by developer Phosphor of Dark Meadow fame, is actually really good, from its stylish low-poly graphics to its puzzle-driven gameplay. SAM, a sort of astronaut robot, is deployed to restore life to sad planets by filling them with solar power. This is accomplished by solving puzzles, opening gates and crossing chasms on tiny 3D worlds to reach the goal. It's an unusual surprise, but welcome.
Price: Free
Sniper Who Forgot to Open Eyes
I'm not entirely sure how, um, "good" this game is, but it gets top marks for originality. It's about a sniper who forgot to, well, open their eyes, and it takes place entirely on a black screen. You just sort of have to fire aimlessly and hope for the best, at least in arcade mode. In Pro mode, you're given a four-character Morse-style code, and you have to feel around to find the vibration that matches, which makes it a little less random, though no less silly.
We're keeping our fingers crossed for a multiplayer mode.
Platforms: Android
Price: Free
Salad Fingers Act 1
Because Five Nights at Freddy's wasn't scary enough, here's a point-and-click escape adventure starring David Firth's creepy animated creation Salad Fingers.
You're welcome.
Platforms: Android
Price: Free
Ski Safari 2
Following the original Ski Safari launched in 2012, and Ski Safari Adventure Time in 2013, comes the official sequel, Ski Safari 2, bringing more endless skiing, snow stunt fun.
The basic gameplay is the same. You race through the snowy landscape to escape an avalanche, picking up power-ups in the form of animals and objects, and trying to avoid obstacles along the way. The more tricks and stunts you perform without crashing, the better your multiplier and score.
The new game brings a playable female character, swipe-based stunts and a new multi-device multiplayer mode so you can try to out-ski your friends.
Platforms: iOS
Price: $1.99 | AU$2.49 | £1.49 (iOS)
Demon's Rise
Inspired by old-school isometric RPG dungeon crawlers, Demon's Rise is a stellar effort from a small team out of Canada. Inspired by games like Neverwinter Nights and tabletop wargaming, it sees you leading a team of intrepid explorers through a series of dungeons with all the trappings: turn-based combat, upgradeable character classes, loot and 24 heroes for seemingly endless party configurations.
Platforms: iOS
Price: $2.99 | AU$3.79 | £2.29
Lara Croft Go
In 2000, a side-scrolling Tomb Raider game was released for the Game Boy Color. Lara Croft ran around collecting keys and artefacts, killing snakes and monsters, and solving puzzles. I spent hours and hours playing and replaying. Whether or not Square Enix Montreal intended to channel that experience with Lara Croft Go, it's exactly where I go in my head as I play, and I loved every minute of it.
The game is similar in style to the runaway hit Hitman Go, a strategy game where you move Agent 47 around a board to take out targets without them seeing you. In Lara Croft Go, the experience gets more complex: Not only do you have to take out enemies from behind or the side, you have to navigate crumbling ruins and solve obstacle mazes. Luckily the move counter has been removed so you can take your time, and each level is short enough that you don't lose massive amounts of time if you have to start again. It's a fresh new take that manages to capture the old-school spirit of Tomb Raider, and I suspect it will end up being played again and again.
Price: $4.99 | AU$6.49 | £3.99 (Android); $4.99 | AU$6.49 | £3.99 (iOS)
Out last month for Android
Waiting for a particular game that got an iOS release a while ago?
Card Crawl (Free)
Fallout Shelter (Free)
Oddwings Escape (Free)
Zoombinis ($4.99 | AU$6.78 | £3.84)
A Day in the Woods ($4.99 | AU$6.50 | £3.80)
Lego Batman: Beyond Gotham ($4.99 | AU$6.74 | £3.85)
Framed ($0.99 | AU$1.05 | £0.58)
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