The mobile games worth your thumbs — and the ones that aren't.
We're a two-person desk that actually plays the games before writing about them. No press-release rewrites, no inflated scores. Every game gets at least ten hours and a plain-English verdict, marked out of 10 on fun, depth, value and polish.
Latest reviews
Six games we've put real hours into recently.
Monument Valley
An hour-long architectural daydream that nobody else has matched. Short, but unforgettable.
Subway Surfers
The genre's comfort food: instant to grasp, impossible to put down, slightly relentless on the prompts.
Among Us
Magic with the right four friends, a lobby of bots without them. Still the best lie-to-your-mates app going.
Brawl Stars
The most thumb-friendly competitive shooter on mobile. Generous now, but the roster is a long climb.
Stumble Guys
Cheerful, chaotic 32-player tumbling. A great five-minute laugh that the ad breaks keep interrupting.
Candy Crush Saga
A genuinely clever match-3 wrapped in a decade of relentless monetisation. Fun until the difficulty wall.
Flow Free
Refuses to add anything, and is better for it. Thousands of levels, no timer, no currency.
Badland
One button and the best-looking silhouette art on the store. Short, strange, tense.
Stack
Tap to drop a block. Miss and the tower narrows. A small thing that knows what it is.
Paper.io 2
Loop around ground to claim it. Brilliant for a week, thin after that.
Sonic Dash
Smooth, well made, and hollow at the centre once the upgrade wall arrives.
How we score
Every review carries one number out of 10, built from four sub-scores we mark independently: Fun (is the core loop a joy?), Depth (is there a reason to keep playing?), Value (how fair is the free-to-play deal?), and Polish (does it run and feel good?). A 7 is a good game with caveats; an 8+ is something we'd recommend without hedging. We buy or download everything ourselves and take no payment from developers — more on how the desk works.