Articles

A game designed for a thumb beats a great game wearing a virtual D-pad.

Aeroplane mode and a turn-based game will outlast any setting inside the game itself.

A great shooter with bad touch controls is a worse game than an ordinary one designed for thumbs.

The genre is excellent and the monetisation is where it gets decided. Check for timers before you invest a week.

The good ones are a puzzle you solve before the wave arrives. The bad ones are a timer with towers drawn on it.

A brilliant multiplayer game with an empty queue is a worse game than a mediocre one with a full lobby.

A good mystery makes you write something down. A bad one just makes you tap the glowing thing.

The good ones are a puzzle about efficiency. The bad ones are a slot machine with a progress bar.

Each run starts with a weak deck and ends with a clever one, or with a defeat that taught you something.

A phone is a surprisingly good horror device. The screen is close to your face, the sound is in your ears and nobody else can see.

Some of the notes you blamed yourself for missing were the Bluetooth headphones.

The easy ones are easy on purpose. Here is where the difficulty hides.

The difference between a building game and a waiting game is whether the timer is there for pacing or for payment.

Ten minutes buys a frame of pool or a half of football. It does not buy a season, whatever the menu suggests.

A board game night survives distance surprisingly well, as long as the game allows a move a day.

Holding a rail with one hand rules out most of the games people recommend for a commute.

The best writing in mobile games is rarely found in the games with the biggest budgets.

Some evenings the point of a game is that nothing in it can really go wrong.

The problem is rarely the app you chose. It is the advertisement inside it that leads somewhere else.

A puzzle you can pay to skip was never a puzzle.

Graphics sell the screenshot. The handling model decides whether you keep playing.

If the game punishes you for not opening it, it is managing you rather than the other way round.

The emulator is not the legal question. The game file is.

The best co-op number on a phone is two, and most games are not designed for it.