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Best new mobile games on iOS and Android – August 2024 round-up-GameCentral-Entertainment – Metro

A battle between official and unofficial Olympics game has a clear winner in this month’s batch of new smartphone gaming apps.

Olympics Go! Paris 2024 vs. Sports Sports (nWay/Netflix/Metro)

A battle between official and unofficial Olympics game has a clear winner in this month’s batch of new smartphone gaming apps.

While console and PC gamers soldier their way through the traditional summer games drought, on mobile the schedule’s as busy as ever. From the face-off between the official Olympics™ Go! Paris 2024 and Netflix’s rival Sports Sports to the baffling re-emergence of Godus, and the arrival of retro-fest Antstream Arcade on Apple devices, it’s another big month for touchscreen gaming.

Olympics Go! Paris 2024

iOS & Android, Free (nWay)
After kicking Sega’s licence into touch, nixing future instalments of the console war-defusing Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games series, what we get instead is the officially licensed Olympics™ Go! Paris 2024.

Starting with a small and distinctly offbeat set of events, you gradually unlock more sports as you compete in its uniformly dull, screen tapping fixtures, set against blandly competent backdrops.

There are multiple currencies, including energy required to actually play the game, in what has become a standard for exploitative long-term mobile games. The problem is nobody in the world will still be playing once the Olympics ends, rendering all that would-be fan fleecing moot, which is possibly the best outcome for everyone.

Score: 3/10

Sports Sports

iOS, Included with a Netflix subscription (Netflix)

With its pleasingly stylised good looks and jaunty tunes, Sports Sports is a delightful counterpoint to the insipidly corporate official Olympics game.

Events are neatly differentiated in the techniques you use to play them, and most require a decent degree of skill to master, with practise creating noticeable improvement in your scores.

More importantly, you can play against friends or family in local multiplayer over Wi-Fi, which is exactly what you need to bring a sports game to life – and make the entertainment last longer than the Olympics itself.

Score: 8/10

Lego Hill Climb Adventures

iOS & Android, Free (Fingersoft)

The Lego version of the 2D side-scrolling driving game, Hill Climb Racing still has its control scheme intact in this cute revamp. Use accelerate and brake to speed up, slow down, and tilt your car left and right in the air to help land on your wheels rather than your roof, after jumps.

It brings a sprinkling of Lego magic to the old Hill Climb formula, namely destructible cars that gradually degrade as they smash through props and pieces of scenery, and a world made of cute, brightly coloured plastic bricks.

Other than that, it’s business as usual: a drip feed of upgrades that you will absolutely need in order to progress through grindy levels, a ‘fuel’ system that takes time to recharge, and absurdly over-priced microtransactions hawked at every available opportunity.

There’s a solid game buried under the monetisation, but you’ll need deep pockets to find it. You expect more from Lego than lending their brand to this shameless cash grab, lightly disguised as entertainment.

Score: 4/10

Unnamed Space Idle – looks aren’t everything (JDOG Corp)

Unnamed Space Idle

iOS & Android, Free (JDOG Corp)

With a little strip of the screen dedicated to a vertically scrolling representation of your spaceship, shooting its way through sector after sector of unexplored space, this beautifully pitched incremental game is a lot more entertaining than it looks.

The rest of the screen is taken up with detailed menus that let you select, tweak, and upgrade your ship’s systems, so there’s a lot going on. The game does explain itself to a degree but you’ll have to find out the rest as you progress, your occasional prestiges resetting your progress while cementing in multipliers for the next run.

While it works perfectly on an iPad, the tiny onscreen text and buttons will challenge both eyesight and dexterity, but even then its expertly metered sense of progression is worth the fiddliness.

Score: 8/10

Anstream Arcade

iOS & Android, £5 per month or £39.99 per year (Antstream)

Already available on console and PC, Antstream Arcade’s retro gaming smorgasbord has now launched on mobile. All you need to do is download the Antstream app and play any of its games instantly from the cloud.

Arcade classics like Pac-Man, R-Type, Metal Slug, and Galaga are joined by dozens of titles from the SNES, Amiga, Mega Drive, Commodore 64, and Sinclair Spectrum. For lovers of antique gaming it’s a powerful draw.

The touchscreen controls work better on simpler titles, but with a controller connected it’s excellent, with no latency problems. You will, of course, need an internet connection, but with a rotating roster of ageing classics there’s plenty to keep you coming back.

Score: 8/10

Kingdom Rush 5: Alliance TD

iOS & Android, £7.49 (Ironhide Games)

The king of Tower Defense returns and after a few Ironhide titles that strayed into the world of real-time strategy, this is back to basics: turret building, albeit still with a strong emphasis on peripatetic heroes and support units.

Its familiar art style and consistent level of polish are as welcome as ever, as are its light upgrade trees and unlockable extra heroes. What’s less appreciated is the large number of premium purchases in a paid game, even if you won’t need any of them to complete the game on normal.

Higher difficulty levels are another story, adding longevity to what is a relatively short game, and also tempting players into dropping cash on microtransactions. While it lasts it’s superb, but such prominent in-app purchases in a premium game is grating.

Score: 7/10

Godus

iOS & Android, Free (22cans)

Originally released on mobile a decade ago, and permanently removed from Steam at the end of last year, Godus has just received what its creators call a major update. Quite what’s going on at developer 22cans, founded by the infamous Peter Molyneux, is anybody’s guess.

Re-downloading the game and having to start from scratch, it’s amazing how its core land sculpting, population-expanding gameplay still feels fresh, although bulldozing hills and erasing forests to build houses doesn’t sit as comfortably as it once did.

The update adds an overworld of floating islands, on which gameplay varies relatively little, albeit with a crop of modest additions. It still has bugs (one of which forced a hard reset of our iPad Pro) and its deliberate imbalances, designed to encourage use of microtransactions, still rankle.

Score: 5/10

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