Badland

You hold the screen and a small round creature flaps upward. Let go and it falls. That is the whole control scheme, and Badland builds a genuinely tense hour out of it by putting increasingly unpleasant machinery in the way. It is also, without much competition, the best-looking game of its kind on a phone.

How it plays

The screen scrolls right at a fixed pace and you cannot stop it. Your creature flaps to gain height and drops when you release, and the level is a gauntlet of saws, crushers, rotating gears and narrow gaps. Power-ups change your size, your speed or your number — cloning you into a dozen copies at once, most of which will die, which is fine because you only need one to reach the end.

What's great

The art is the reason to install it: everything is a black silhouette against a lit forest background, and it looks like nothing else in the genre. The clone mechanic is quietly brilliant — losing eleven of your twelve selves to a saw blade feels like a near miss rather than a failure. Checkpoints are frequent and generous, so death costs seconds, and the whole campaign works offline.

What holds it back

It is short if you only play the story, and the co-op mode needs people sitting next to you, which is a hard ask. The one-touch control is precise enough but genuinely unforgiving in the later chapters, where a single mistimed flap in a moving crusher means a restart. And the silhouette art, gorgeous as it is, occasionally hides a hazard until you have already flown into it.