GameCentral’s monthly look at the best smartphone apps includes a remake of Hitman: Blood Money and one of the best puzzle games of 2023.
This month’s mobile games include Agent 47’s move to mobile in Hitman: Blood Money – Reprisal, the wonderful factory builder Shapez, and the classic Downwell+ making its way to Apple Arcade. It may be ink-blot dark at 4pm, at the moment, but at least there’s a bit of fresh mobile entertainment to pierce the gloom.
Cube Quest – a QB Game
iOS & Android, Free – full game £4.99 (20 Edges)
Swipe to roll a black cube around a maze, using special squares to clear a path to the exit. Some hop the cube over gaps, others destroy obstacles, or collapse the square in front you, impeding progress.
There’s an unlimited undo button, which is a boon given the number of ways you can back yourself into a corner. It also lets you keep trying different approaches without fear of having to start from scratch.
Cube Quest is polished to a high shine, with many beautiful graphical touches and a wonderfully tactile feel. It somehow manages to maintain an atmosphere of relaxed experimentation even when you’re well and truly stuck.
Score: 8/10
Shadow & Bone: Enter The Fold
iOS & Android, included with Netflix subscription (Netflix)
Like Apple, Netflix has successfully extended its subscription offering to games, which on occasion also tie-in with shows on the streaming platform. Shadow & Bone is the latest example, in this case arriving some months after its second season.
Enter The Fold is a role-playing game in the choose your own adventure mould, giving you a selection of two or three options in conversations and action sequences, but keeping things simple enough to play one-handed on the bus.
The action and illustrations are all expectedly grimdark, and the interactions come thick and fast, but it suffers from bugs, sometimes failing to recognise completed objectives, spoiling what might have been a neat adjunct to its TV counterpart.
Score: 6/10
Hitman: Blood Money – Reprisal
iOS & Android, £12.49 (Feral Interactive)
Hitman: Blood Money, featuring the bald, barcode-headed Agent 47 was released on PlayStation 2 back in 2006. Reprisal brings a lightly updated version to mobile.
As ever, Feral Interactive prove to be a safe pair of hands, adding a mini-map that shows nearby guards, and Instinct Mode, highlighting useful items in the environment – both of which help smooth your progress.
It’s got a well-designed touchscreen interface that’s more than enough to handle the necessary stealth and occasional violence, even if the game’s graphics and core gameplay are starting to feel a bit creaky 17 years on.
Score: 7/10
Shapez Mobile
iOS & Android, Free – full game £4.99 (Playdigious)
Mine different shapes to order, building conveyer belts to deliver them to a depot, with the gradually escalating complexity of patterns you need to construct matched by new machinery to cut, rotate, paint, stack and distribute your creations.
Alongside its main goals, there’s a separate set of shapes to deliver that upgrade your collection of machines, making them faster and more efficient; balancing your time between delivery of both sets of requirements is a fascinating and demanding process.
Taking place on a map that turns out to be absolutely vast, Shapez has been superbly re-tooled for touchscreen, offering a significant and long-term challenge that will have added appeal for anyone who enjoyed Factorio and its many imitators.
Score: 8/10
Tiny Connections
iOS & Android, Free (Short Circuit Studio)
Sharing its premise and gameplay with Mini Metro and its sequel, Mini Motorways, Tiny Connections has you hooking up electrical and water supplies to houses, matching the colour of the utility with the buildings you’re supplying.
As your network gets more complicated, so does the job of working out how to make new connections with the spaghetti junction of existing pipework in your way, and a limited stock of wires and water ducts at your disposal.
There’s an elegant simplicity to its interactions, and even when the going gets tough, the ability to pause prevents it from becoming tortuous. Its only downsides are that it’s delicately slanted towards encouraging you to watch ads, and that it’s not quite as accomplished as the games that inspired it.
Score: 7/10
GUBBINS – It’s A Word Game
iOS & Android, Free (Studio Folly Pty)
Laying down letter tiles that come either singly or in groups of two or three, you make words horizontally and vertically on a grid, while applying randomly occurring power-ups, and revelling in the delightful music and art style.
Unfortunately, the game doesn’t live up to its look and feel, with letters proving tricky to place accurately, power-ups supplying confusing benefits – and often what feel like hindrances – while the gradual reveal of letter tiles makes it hard to plan ahead or play tactically.
You get one game a day for free, or unlock infinite play for £6, with various level packs available for between £2 and £10, making it quite heavily monetised for a game that never feels all that compelling.
Score: 5/10
Downwell+
iOS, included with Apple Arcade subscription (Devolver Digital)
Originally released in 2015, the deceptively simple Downwell became an instant classic. Falling under gravity, your pixellated avatar has a downward facing gun whose bullets destroy enemies and also temporarily slow your descent.
That’s important because this is a game built around combos. Tactical use of your limited ammunition helps make sure you don’t inadvertently land on solid ground, instead bounding from enemy to enemy, extending your combinations.
Addictive, tricky in all the right ways, and vastly more complex and subtle than it initially appears, the Apple Arcade version arrives with everything perfectly intact.
Score: 8/10
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