Best new mobile games on iOS and Android – June 2021 round-up

GameCentral takes a look at the month’s best smartphone games, including the latest from the makers of 80 Days and Divinity: Original Sin 2.

With the end of lockdown in sight, and the sun causing inconvenient glare on the screen of your mobile, there’s still plenty to play this month, ranging from the spectacular port of Divinity: Original Sin 2, which remains one of the best role-playing games of all time, to Flocks’ offbeat brand of laidback puzzle-solving and the mobile release of Huntdown – a love letter to early ‘90s arcade games.

Infinitode 2 – Infinite Tower Defence

iOS & Android, Free (Prineside)

Free-to-play tower defence games are usually terrible, with overlong levels engineered to be slightly too hard to complete without coughing up hard currency.

Infinitode 2 skirts those issues by making each level effectively endless, limited only by your tactical skill and the strength or your towers, with rewards increasing the longer you survive.

Watching ads is never enforced, offering a modest 25% uplift in bonuses, and there are no perceptible pay walls after several hours of play, in this hypnotically compelling game.

Score: 8/10

Simon’s Cat – Story Time

iOS, Apple Arcade (Tactile Games)

Story Time has been out for a couple of months, but has just received a big update, adding new levels and a daily tournament. Although its notionally about Simon, his parasitic feline companions, and home improvements it’s actually a match-three puzzle game.

Or in this case match-two, although tapping larger constellations of tiles of the same colour creates helpful special effects, which stack to create additional explosive combos if you manage to trigger two or more in close proximity.

Despite cute graphics and a high level of polish, its gameplay feels as though it was intended to be freemium, with later levels requiring either a vast amount of luck or large numbers of boosters, which you earn slowly and can’t buy more of.

Score: 6/10

Huntdown

iOS & Android, free to download, full game £8.99 (Coffee Stain Publishing)

Flush with success from its PC and console incarnations, Huntdown arrives on mobile with its trademark brand of tongue in cheek 16-bit style entertainment.

It goes full ’90s, with chiptunes, a mix of 2D platforming and shooting, and perfectly observed cyberpunk trappings that feel as though they’re torn straight out of a cigarette burn-strewn arcade cabinet.

You can adjust the touchscreen controls to your liking, and although they’re less responsive than hard buttons they work just fine in this splendid piece of action nostalgia.

Score: 8/10

Letter Rooms

iOS, £1.99 (Klemens Strasser)

With a chunky, colourful interface, cheerful sound effects, and a wonderfully tactile feel Letter Rooms has you dragging letters into place to make words based on a clue given at the beginning of each level.

While some early clues are a bit on the nose it quickly adds complexity with letters you can switch on and off and others that can’t be moved, as well as longer, harder to guess words.

Each level’s brevity makes it a pleasant diversion when you’ve got a few minutes to spare, which is just what you need from mobile entertainment.

Score: 7/10

Overboard!

iOS, £5.99 (Inkle Studios)

It’s 1935, you’re on a steamship due to arrive in New York in a matter of hours and you’ve just murdered your husband by lightly tipping him over the rail of the promenade deck. Your job is to get away with it, in this neat reverse whodunnit from the makers of 80 Days.

Weaselly words, planting evidence, stealing the chapel’s collection plate for orphans, killing anyone who suspects you – it’s all fair game in your absolutely unheroic bid for freedom in the New World.

Playthroughs take about half an hour, but it takes multiple attempts to get even close to success as you tangle yourself in your own amusingly multi-layered web of murder and deceit.

Score: 8/10

Divinity: Original Sin 2

iPad Pro, £23.99 (Larian)

Divinity Original Sin 2 is one of the best role playing games ever made and also one of the most complex, giving you carte blanche to do exactly as you please, from assembling a party or not, to deciding your approach to each of its multitude of encounters, moral dilemmas, and battles.

Although you’ll need a recent iPad Pro to play, absolutely everything here is present and correct from the previous versions, including voice-acting and graphical flourishes that leave it all but indistinguishable from the console editions of the game.

The touch interface works perfectly well, but if you’re pining for a controller it’s set up exactly as it was on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, making this a perfect recreation of a pretty much perfect game.

Score: 10/10

Flocks

iOS, £2.99 (Nada Studio)

Each of Flocks’ levels has you controlling a group of stick men, either solo or en masse, to solve the problem presented to you.

That could be pitching a tent, posing for a photograph, or working out how to get your camper van over a ‘no exit’ barrier. Each is introduced without words or instruction, leaving you to tinker until you find a solution.

Mellow, often surreal and frequently demanding feats of lateral thinking, Flocks is a beautifully designed game filled with hand-drawn charm.

Score: 8/10

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