Mobile Gaming: The Definitive Review
Never, ever pay
Whenever I go on holiday, I make great assurances to myself that I’ll definitely make headway in some kind of deserving mobile game, most notably something on the Switch that I’ve promised to devote the appropriate amount of time to when the conditions allow it. Invariably, I fail and end up putting maybe a couple of hours in before regressing, via the path of least resistance, to something on my phone. I was recently on holiday for ten days but a really quite spectacular fuckup on the part of my eldest child meant were not allowing the Switch to come with us, so I couldn’t fool myself that now really was the time to make an earnest dent on a Disgaea or think about carrying on with Breath of the Wild1. Instead, for the flight I had my retro handheld and my phone. Lo and behold, it was the phone that won out as I’d accidentally put the pretend Gameboy at the bottom of my cabin bag and I really could not be fucked with the ungainly cajoling required to fish it out. But then, if I’m being perfectly honest, my phone is my most played device. I play something on it every single day and there is a neat set of games that have been daily companions for years and years.
I’m not talking about ‘acceptable’ mobile games, but completely unimaginative cash-ins on bigger brands. Instead of Candy Crush Saga, I have Toon Blast. I recently got into the oddly Katamari-reminiscent Triple Match2. I fell for the ads to install one of several thousand variants of the test-tube colour matching game called Water Sort and even got slightly delirious and paid to remove ads from unscrew-to-deconstruct puzzler Wood Nuts & Bolts. I still maintain a balls-v-numbered-squares Breakout puzzler too. The thing I find most darkly amusing is how when lost in the endless seas of clones, it almost doesn’t matter which one you plump for. Wood Nuts & Bolts came via a Toon Blast ad watch to gain additional moves, but Water Sort was via TikTok. But I genuinely think I could pick one of the 20+ clones for each and have an incredibly similar experience. It’s oddly reminiscent of Amazon, when you get all those nonsensical brand names selling the same object fifty times. Bumbling around in the back pages of my phone are Two Dots3 and Galaxiga4, both of which proves themselves to be absolutely insufferable with the sheer amount of non-play menu whizzing between actual playtime. In Galaxiga’s case, there’s way too much arcane superstructure to make any commitment worthwhile. It’s all daily this and that, upgrade this currency to make more currency for the currency that really matters and so on. Mystifying. I assume there’s a player base somewhere that loves that shit, but I have no idea why they do.
Of the lot, it’s Peak’s Toon Blast that gets most of my attention, being a match-popper par excellence, in which I am some 2,735 levels deep5. Now I feel reasonably proud to be supporting a non-Western, non-Asian game developer (Peak is Turkish), though I suspect they’re less proud of my unshakeable commitment to never pay a penny beyond the ad removal fee. Even though I still willingly watch adverts inside the game (as mentioned earlier, to get extra turns). My journey with Toon Blast has been every bit as dramatic as anything AAA, although arguably much less transportative. Nonetheless, I’ve been through incredibly close calls, wild gambles, horrific misfortune, quasi-divine beneficence, incredibly skilful payoffs, tragic accidents, the lot. And what’s more, I’ve been through these events multiple times. That’s what you get from completing nearly 3,000 levels. And I’ve never given up, the wonder being that in the generally-accepted hellscape of mobile F2P, the worst thing a game can do is make you stop playing. Keep the faith, for the game’s algo gods will smile upon you eventually. Otherwise you might play something else! Hilariously, in a brutal drought of ‘luck’ in Toon Blast, I opted to install its sequel, Star Blast, only to find a game with far more aggressive seeds and call-to-action roadblocking. Although it’s somehow prettier with better eye-candy, it’s evidently more cruel, being much keener to have turn counts low and puzzles near-intractable without additional (purchasable) powerups. This of course being a terrible idea as it hasn’t supplanted Toon Blast at all. I quite love the psychopathology at play - while being very much engaged in dragging me across a sunk-cost event horizon of sorts, Toon Blast has made me invest so much that Star Blast’s apparent cruelty means I’ll stick with the one where I’ve made the most progress, thanks. The one that seems nicer, where I feel it’ll be an easier grind. And what a fucking grind it is! According to various accounts, Toon Blast is now at 9,250 levels. The game’s subreddit places it at over 10,000. This means if I can clear 9 levels a day, I can reach 9,250 in two years. And that’s really quite optimistic. There are times where you can finish 15+ a day, but sticky levels can take weeks to clear depending on how nasty the seed is feeling. I think settling on 4.5 levels a day with a finish some time in 2028 is more realistic. I can’t think of many other games where I can plan that far out. At this point, Toon Blast has been through no less than two phones, meaning I must have been playing it for at least four or five years. At long last I can be proud to have a game with a decade-long play arc, should I want to rub shoulders with dedicated MMO heads and ascend to the ranks of people still playing Bejeweled on Xbox 360.
I’ve got deep enough into Toon Blast that I’m really quite au-fait with the strats for success and truly feel locked into its groove. Having recently unlocked the unbridled joy of MAGIC DISCO, the game’s done a quite spectacular job of keeping me invested. It’s quite something to consider that each level seems to support skillful play as well as allowing seed-based caprices to fuck you around, but then games like Toon Blast are extraordinarily well-evolved. The brutal optimisation that is a necessity of the market makes these games a kind of pinnacle beast, an ultra-refined best-in-breed. In a private Discord chat, a renowned figure remarked that mobile development at this level is incredibly demanding. The skill it takes to design not only the game structures but also the graphics and sound is exceptionally high. There’s so much to do that has to be very, very right and that’s not really something you can just take from a YouTube tutorial or a Chat GPT prompt. Naturally, we hardcore gamers will ignore these efforts, but perhaps we should devote a bit more attention to quite how hyper-evolved the puzzle game has become thanks to F2P. As for Toon Blast, it’s interesting that Magic Disco, a means of doubling-up the screen-clearing disco ball (and boosting its combos with other powerups), comes only when players have really got to grips with how to create and effectively use the disco ball as a main strategy for open stages. Magic Disco is activated once you’ve cleared ten stages, then remains active until you lose. Often this is heartbreaking, as it feels like Magic Disco also affects the RNG seed to make it easier to create disco balls, so therefore everything is lost and we’re plunged from some elevated position back into the mire of the raw grind. I have to crack a wry smile when the game spikes you with a chaotic seed that drops you out of Magic Disco, only to clear the same level easily on the retry, and without any starting power ups. You are always at the mercy of the seed and the algo, and as such, superstitions reign supreme. The game tightropes between player indulgence and punishment with quite some verve. In some ways, F2P puzzlers are like entering a pact with the devil. He’s gonna give you thousands of satisfying levels, but you have to dance to his whims to get through them. Or, of course, spend lots of money. By thinking of spending as cheating, one can weave a virtuous path of defiant refusal. It’s this that makes the idea of actually finishing Toon Blast a top-tier achievement. To get through it all au-naturel, so to speak, would be something to be genuinely proud of.
I distinctly remember, a few years ago, Jeff Minter talking on Twitter about why he doesn’t do mobile games any more. As you can probably guess, it was the shameless selling-out, lowest-common-denominator marketeering and economic fundamentalism that fucked him off. The investment was never worth it, the discovery aspect a fucking nightmare, any payoff disgustingly minimal. And, of course, that’s what we should expect when videogaming decides to get extremely pally with something as principled and virtuous as unregulated gambling. At the time, as the likes of Farmville heralded a new gold rush of broken and morally-ambivalent monetisation, I remember arguing that I couldn’t think of a worse alliance for the good of videogame culture. This was when we heard the first wisps of unease about how much money Activision, Ubi or EA were paying to arms manufacturers to feature real-world weapons, and the realisation that iPod Touches might start displacing the DS and PSP as the portable gaming platform of choice for Generation Z. A change for the corporate, a change for monetisation-first was in the air. In a sense, Free To Play was just part of a general darkening of those Sega blue skies - but it loomed as perhaps the biggest cloud of all. Jeff lamented the effective loss of a wonderfully open, versatile, democratic platform to raw market forces. There is a sense of tragedy that the most novel gaming medium since the GameBoy, and perhaps the most democratic platform ever, had so quickly succumbed to pure capitalist exploitation, even though the seeds of this had been sown by Apple and its App Store low-ball pricing of 79p. If you’re old enough to remember the horror days of pre-App Store mobile gaming, it’s unlikely you ever lamented leaving the messy hell of J2ME Java-based games where the very best thing was always the pixel art. The early years of both were full of hope for small console and handheld developers to carve £4.99 - £9.99 niches, much as the 8-bits had, with a second tier of shittier games sitting at £1.99. But the App Store 79p bottom line became the de facto price for whatever you’d made, irrespective of input or dev budget. One developer I did PR for had spent quite some time and effort trying to attract clothing brands to an extreme sports title. This got interest when they could position it as a premium game on the Apple platforms, but as the 79p basement became the norm, the clothing companies pulled out. Shit looked cheap, yo. And thus, the cheapening of media began in earnest. I doubt we recognised at the time that mobile F2P was a harbinger for what would happen to music, TV and movies. But then who ever notices the start of colossal econo-cultural shifts like that?
I don’t want to demonise mobile F2P entirely, but I can’t say I’m happy with contemporary reports that 83% of mobile games fail within three years. Baity as those kinds of headlines are, it’s mad to think that in the 16 years since the App Store launched, we still have a market where the vast majority of products are considered failures. Yet that market of losers is insanely broad and rich. It does remind me of those 8-bit days in a weird way. There’s that sense of a free market, wild frontier spirit in the ever-expanding catalogue of ‘all the mobile games ever’. Like the 8-bits, cloning is standard practice. Like the 8-bits, caveat emptor is the ruling watchword. There’s a specific delight in finding out a random game you’ve tried isn’t some brutally predatorial conversion funnel, and as such this is unique to the platform. Maybe you got it back in the MMO goldrush days, but then you needed to sink 50 hours to find that out. Now a mobile game will show its true colours in 30 minutes. And of course, it’s all optional, it’s all fleeting. Maybe there’s some profound allegory to be read in the F2P mobile market about blind consumerism, about how nobody cares about that 83% of losers in this most bitterly fought of commercial battlefields. We cry about massive cuts to the workforces behind ‘proper’ games, but we say nothing about a giant market segment where this is all part of the process. Probably because we gave up on it a long time ago - it was kinda sad to hear Apple friends bemoan their dwindling interest in Apple Arcade, where even the cautious, thoughtfully curated spaces can’t find the games to make itself worthwhile. But then, why should I care about anything new when I’m 7,000 levels off completing something I genuinely enjoy? As long as I have Toon Blast, 250+ Solitaire Collection6 and Wordle, I have all I need to extract a good hour of gaming for my quotidian diet. And maybe that really is the point. Away from the Las Vegas strip of the App Stores, and the bombardment of mobile game ads in the sprawling supermalls of vertical video social media, I have happily corralled a suite of things to please me for an extremely long time, provided I have my phone and some charge. It may not be Raid Shadow Legends, Fortnite or Warzone Mobile, but it’s my little collection and it works so well for me. And thank fuck it’s not Evony: The Kings Return7, right?
[21]
Even on my deathbed, I doubt I'll be able make time to pick up where I left off in Breath of the Wild. It'll eternally be my guilt-game, where I know I've never given it the time it absolutely deserves.
Triple Match: Clear up a massive mess of polygon models dumped into a screen-sized box by finding sets of three. With a huge variety of things and surprisingly complex physics, Triple Match is something of a technical wonder. It can almost make you believe in those adverts where business management idle clickers have RTXed objects and accompanying realtime AI-generated influencers telling you what to level up for max gains. Surprisingly satisfying, the voodoo of being able to select a blue aeroplane from the four faces that are visible underneath a pile of moons, backpacks and tables (etc) is almost magical.
While I have been repeatedly assured, by several people, that Two Dots is ‘one of the good ones’, I found it to be an appallingly twee, mightily pedestrian puzzler where the general vibe is infuriating smugness and self-satisfaction with its post-Hygge visual style. It’s as if cursive singing had an official game.
Galaxiga: A bewildering, overly-gamified golden-age Shmup. Obviously created to ensnare Gen-X nostalgianauts, the pixelart visual style is captivating, and the gameplay is pretty decent for the formalism it operates within, but by roadblocking and quantising free play to fit into readouts of currencies, unlocks, showing you things you can’t have yet and so on, it utterly squanders any momentum to progress. I want to shoot things, not be asked several times if I want to spend cash money on five different in-game currencies. The upshot is generally “fuck this, I’m going to play actual Galaxians instead”.
I am reminded of a social media post I saw, comprising a screenshot of the poster's Mum's ultra late-stage Candy Crush level. It was filled with objects so arcane and indecipherable to anyone who hadn't done 2000+ levels that it seemed like an alien game to most of the commenters. The idea that a middle-aged woman had been right to the outer edges of the Candy Crush universe instead of eager post-adolescent content locusts, much to the youthful commentators’ disbelief, amused me no end. The filthy casual had gone so much deeper than the FPS bros could ever imagine.
Ten years ago, I wrote about this for Eurogamer, asking if Solitaire was original Roguelike. In a fit of outrageous pride, I was unbelievably happy to have it picked up and lauded by both RPS and Critical Distance. Solitaire never dies.
Honestly though, taking a ruthlessly generic, hyper-grindy Clash of Clans clone and crowbarring in side mini-games for whatever novel gaming vogue is getting likes on social media is an act of genius. When all's said and done, perhaps it'll be fucking Evony that serves as the best living document of F2P mobile gaming fads.