It doesn’t matter if you’re a PC gamer, someone who prefers a console, or an iPhone user who loves a cheap distraction, there’s a tie that binds us: We’ve all downloaded a game or two from the App Store.
Mobile gaming is all about convenience and quick dopamine hits, after all. Would you rather stand in line at the supermarket staring at the tabloids or fire up Marvel Snap? It’s a simple decision. Deciding the games to download isn’t quite as simple, however.
The Apple App Store is loaded with games, but avoiding the dregs can be difficult. Don’t fret, we’re here to help. We’ve highlighted the fun, well-made titles that deserve a home in your iPhone (especially since Fortnite is still nowhere to be found), so download these recommended games without worry. And hit the comment section to shout out your favorite games!
If you prefer to play on a device with more room to maneuver, we suggest heading over to the best iPad games. If you want to play a growing library of premium iOS games for one monthly price, check out the best Apple Arcade games. If you’re not an iPhone owner, check out the best Android games. If you’re a Netflix subscriber, you can download even more great games to your iPhone for no extra fee.
Alto’s Odyssey is the follow-up to 2015’s Alto’s Adventure. The new game continues the series’ ability to combine skiing’s breathtaking visuals with an endless runner’s smooth mechanics. Travel down the mountain while completing goals, collecting coins, and earning upgrades.
Among Us launched in 2018, but it inexplicably became super-popular in 2020. In this cooperative, multiplayer game, you work together to suss out the liar in the group, as you survive in space. We’re stuck at home right now, so this is the perfect game for keeping your social skills sharp (and your paranoia high).
This real-time strategy game puts you in control of a tribe as you expand its territory, fight enemies, and ultimately build an empire. The Battle of Polytopia lets you play solo, against a friend, or with strangers via online multiplayer.
Beyond a Steel Sky (only on Apple Arcade) is the long-awaited follow-up to Revolution Software’s 1994 adventure game Beneath a Steel Sky. This cyberpunk title honors the source material, but still recognizes the ways in which the point-and-click genre has evolved over the past quarter century.
Praised for its simple gameplay and minimalist art design, Blek is a puzzle game that tasks you with creating patterns using touch-screen gestures to complete each level. Released in 2013, the game proved to be a simple, popular addition to the iPhone’s game library.
If you like Super Smash Bros, but don’t have a Nintendo system, Brawlhalla is the next best thing. This free-to-play fighter puts tiny colorful characters, armed with wacky weapons, in grand brawls to knock each other off the stage.
The Call of Duty franchise’s AAA polish holds up nicely in this mobile conversion. Now you can enjoy Activision’s famous first-person shooter for free on the go. Even the battle royale mode made the cut.
Clash Royale combines collectible cards, tower defense, and online multiplayer to create a truly unique gaming experience. Since its worldwide release in 2016, Clash Royale has been nominated for many different awards and is now a popular international eSport.
Crashlands debuted in 2016 as an adventure-crafting RPG adventure with a wild plot. Stranded on an uncivilized planet, you must fight monsters, mine resources, and fulfill quests while trying to stay alive. The game has cross-platform support, so you have no reason stop playing.
Like a chicken forever crossing the road, we will never stop recommending Crossy Road. Its addictive, arcade gameplay and adorable voxel art style make it an indispensable mobile game.
This roguelike, dungeon-crawling game adds an element of beat-matching to create a fun, yet brutal, playing experience. You can only move or attack by matching the soundtrack’s rhythm, gaining multipliers for successful matches. The goal is to not only beat each level, but also gain better items and become more effective in each new level.
This brutal, roguelike game makes its way to iOS after a successful launch on home consoles and PC. It puts you in control of a small creature that can take control of dead bodies. Your goal is to escape from prison by gaining power ups and fighting enemies through randomized levels. When you die, you die for good, but you can use that experience to better prepare for the next run.
Death Road to Canada is a randomly generated RPG that tasks you with surviving a zombie apocalypse. Explore cities, recruit characters, make decisions, and try to stay alive on your pixelated adventure.
If you like the idea of golfing in a desert, you’ll love the 2014 arthouse game Desert Golfing. Courses are randomized, and the ball’s movement is unreliable because everything takes place on sand. The game has been praised for its simplicity, great visuals, and difficult levels.
A primarily text-based adventure game, Device 6 takes players through interactive puzzles and story elements in order to help the main character escape an island. The game has been praised for its unique style of storytelling, strong prose, and sound effects.
For a game that truly takes advantage of your phone’s vertical screen, try Downwell. As you endlessly plummet down randomized, monochrome dungeons, plummet in style by hopping on enemies and blasting them with your gun boots as long as you can.
In The Escapists, you must find a way to bust out of prison. You can roam through the prison, collect or craft items, take assignments from fellow inmates, and level up your character. When you escape, it’s on to the next prison. Don’t get caught, otherwise all the work you have done will be wiped out.
Enter the Gungeon tasked with you traveling as far as possible into the titular lair of firearms. Exit the Gungeon challenges you to escape. No matter the direction you go, you’ll blast your way through tons of projectile peons. Touch controls actually reduce the difficulty compared to using a controller.
Fallout Shelter puts you in charge of running a vault—a colony of survivors buried beneath the Earth, safe from radiation. In practice, it’s pretty similar to the countless other mobile resource-management games. However, clever and non-exploitative uses of in-app purchases, combined with the unmistakable feel of the Fallout franchise, help Fallout Shelter appeal to casual and hardcore players alike.
In Florence, players follow the story of Florence Yeoh through 20 chapters of interactive stories filled with minigames. The 2018 game takes only about 30 minutes to get through, but has been highly praised for its storytelling, character building, and art direction.
This narrative-based puzzle game tasks you with rearranging the panels of a noir-style comic book in order to ensure the player-characters escape their would-be captors. Released in 2014, Framed earned high praise for its strong visuals, subtle storytelling elements, and great music.
Genshin Impact is the smash-hit action-RPG that blurs the line between mobile game and AAA release. Explore the beautiful (but dangerous) land of Teyvat using a deep and creative combat system. You can have a good time with the gacha game, even if you don’t pay a dime.
This is one of the weirdest games you’ll play on your iPhone. Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy puts you in control of a character who has his legs stuck in a cauldron and uses a hammer as his only means of movement. You must use the hammer to scale a mountain, but there are no save points, so you can fall backward at any time, undoing all the progress made up to that point. The game also contains voiceover commentary from designer Bennett Foddy, who discusses philosophical topics, often based on the player’s in-game actions.
Gorogoa was in development for six years, but the final product, hand-drawn by developer Jason Roberts, is a visual masterpiece. There is no text in the game, leaving players to complete puzzles and explore themes of spirituality and religion on their own.
Grindstone stood out as a shining jewel during Apple Arcade’s launch because it put a novel spin on a standard puzzle game trope. Instead of just matching jewels to clear them, you match enemies for your beefy barbarian to smash into paste.
In 2014, the World of Warcraft franchise got a little bigger when it expanded into the realm of mobile gaming with Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft. Hearthstone is a free-to-play, turn-based, collectible card game that borrows from the existing World of Warcraft Trading Card Game. Its popularity has led to the release of numerous expansion packs and even an esports tournament.
This 2015 release is billed as an interactive movie in which you’re given pieces of a police interview and are asked to piece together the truth. Her Story uses live-action performances on a simulated desktop, and earned praise for the narrative, character performance, and gameplay.
Taking a page from the popular Where’s Waldo book series, Hidden Folks gives you interactive, animated scenes, in which you must find hidden elements. Tapping the hand-drawn art lets you interact with it as you search for characters, objects, and animals.
Translating existing game franchises to iOS has always been tricky. Not all games can make the leap from a console with controllers and buttons to nothing but a single touch screen. However, Hitman Go skillfully captures the essence of everyone’s favorite bald assassin, Agent 47, in a more mobile-friendly form. You’ll be shocked how satisfying this slick series of strategy board games feels as figures move across flat surfaces to take out their targets.
Playdead’s Inside is a puzzle-platformer set in a dark dystopic world of government experimentation and zombie-like creatures. Noted for its monochromatic, 2.5D graphics, Inside is a spiritual successor to Playdead’s Limbo.
If you like the Lara Croft franchise, you’ll love what they did with this mobile game. Taking cues from Hitman Go, Lara Croft Go went a step further and added elevations to the game board. It feels just like a true Lara Croft game, with her having to climb up mountain cliffs and maneuver around chasms.
Lego and Star Wars have always been a match made in galactic heaven. In this newest Apple Arcade game, you create your own custom character and live life in this brick-tastic take on the Star Wars universe. Socialize with smugglers, fight enemies, or just dance if you feel like it.
Back in 2010, Playdead released the black-and-white puzzle platformer Limbo, which saw you take control of a boy searching for his sister in a dark and dystopic world. The game stood out from the pack due to its challenging puzzles and gruesome depiction of the player-character’s demise, helping to elevate the conversation of video games as art.
The action puzzler Linn: Path of Orchards requires you to navigate through rotating platforms using the character’s flying and jumping abilities. The game’s appealing color schemes make it a pleasant gaming experience.
What awaits you in Lumino City may be the most innovative gameplay to reach the iPhone to date. It’s a point-and-click adventure, which serves as a sequel to the game Lume, but the art is what sets it apart from other iOS titles. Its visuals were built by hand, and they place you inside an intricate world of stop-motion animation previously unseen in the video game world.
The free-to-play Marvel Snap is one of the most surprising mobile hits in this or any other universe. It takes Hearthstone’s brilliant, competitive deckbuilding mechanics and combines them with Marvel’s heroes and villains, complete with creative abilities inspired by the comics. Once you download Marvel Snap to your iPhone, you won’t be able to stop making strategic plays as you climb the ranks and unlock even more cards.
Explore the world around you and try to break a curse—in 60 seconds. Minit is a black-and-white adventure game that requires you to play in intervals while you collect items and work to save the day.
Miracle Merchant is a truly unique solitaire-style card game that sees you act as a master alchemist’s apprentice. Your job is to use decks of cards to create potions for customers, and it’s all bundled together with a bright and charming art style.
In this take on the classic platformer genre, you control a Viking along his quest to secure his place in Valhalla among the greatest warriors in the world. Will your Viking have to do as he’s told and burn down the forest or can he prove himself another way?
Out There is something of a choose-your-own-adventure resource management game. Stranded in the middle of an unknown part of space, you must manage your spaceship and gather resources in order to survive. Only by interacting with alien species can you set your character on a specific path that ultimately determines the game’s ending.
This supernatural horror-adventure centers around a group of kids who must uncover the truth about a mysterious island. Oxenfree is presented as a 2.5D graphic adventure without cutscenes, where dialogue takes place during gameplay. The game is unique in that there is no way to obtain a game over. Instead, the outcome of the game is based on the decisions the player makes, meaning there are multiple endings to be found.
Taking its name from the Pac-Man Level 256 glitch, Pac-Man 256 puts a new spin on an old classic. Pac-Man consumes pellets and power-ups while also avoiding ghosts, just like the original game. However, this time the level is endless and the bottom of the screen contains a glitch that will consume the player. The game also adds new power-ups to spice things up.
Papers, Please is a truly unique as something of a paperwork simulator. You control an immigration officer in a dystopian country, where you process papers to determine which people you allow to cross the border, and who you turn away. The player is given an ever-increasing list of rules and requirements to check documentation against, and is also forced to make moral decisions that could go against the approved criteria. The game comes with a wide selection of alternate endings based directly on your decisions.
Pikmin Bloom is the latest collaboration between Nintendo and Niantic, the creators of Pokemon Go. It may not be quite as mind-blowing as that augmented-reality monster-catching phenomenon, but these adorable plant-like creatures also encourage you to get out of your seat and walk around your neighborhood.
In this game, the player creates and evolves a pathogen in order to spread a plague throughout the world and eliminate the population. Plague Inc is a strategy-simulation game that incorporates realistic variables in order to give the player a challenge in developing the ultimate viral weapon. You clear objectives as you evolve and adapt the plague to consume the world.
Nintendo took the next step with its Pokemon franchise in 2016 when Pokemon Go was launched worldwide. The mobile app combined location-based and augmented reality technology to turn the act of catching Pokemon into a social and physically active event. The game continues to receive updates, adding new Pokemon, items, Raid Battles, and other features. Check out our list of tips and tricks to help you become a Pokemon Master.
It was only a matter of time before the wildly popular Pokemon franchise tried its hand at the wildly popular MOBA genre. In Pokemon Unite, you and your partners control Pokemon teams, literally dunking on each other to score points. As far as MOBAs go, Unite has incredibly accessible gameplay, and the Pokemon themselves deploy all the wacky powers you’d expect.
PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds has been a big hit on the home console and PC gaming market, so it makes sense that mobile would be the next place to expand. Players can now come together in a giant battle royale mode right from their mobile device. PUBG has never been so easy to play.
In Reigns, you are a medieval king who must make decisions on how best to rule your land. The game is presented as a card game, and you swipe left or right to accept or reject the advice of your advisors. Your decisions have consequences that impact your standing with the church, military, economy, and people. If these four pillars of society are not kept in balance, your reign ends.
App Store gaming is so old at this point that many of its earliest hit games are no longer available for download. It’s the same reason why it’s so tough to play old games on new consoles; the tech is just too outdated. Few mobile gaming franchises found as much success as Angry Birds, which earned tons of money while spawning spin-offs and even feature films. If you want to experience the joys of launching rotund birds at green pigs, Rovio remastered the first Angry Birds for modern devices.
Rymdkapsel uses a minimalist art style to turn this real-time strategy game into a unique iPhone gaming experience. Players build a space station, manage resources, and defend against attacks while trying to conduct important research. There are special rooms on your base for specific functions, and the game ends if all workers meet their doom.
Sayonara Wild Hearts (only on Apple Arcade) is kind of a game, but it’s really an interactive pop music album. We don’t care what you call it, as you as long get your hands, and ears, on this trippy, transcendent, technicolor journey through a legitimately fantastic collection of songs.
Shadowmatic is a simple but popular game in which the player rotates abstract objects in a spotlight until the shadow becomes a recognizable shape. The game has been praised for its detailed and realistic renderings and impressive game mechanics.
Slay the Spire’s addictive take on collectible card game combat makes for a roguelite you’ll want to replay. Even after dozens of runs you’ll find new ways to combine spell cards and make the monsters suffer. Note that this game is published by Humble Bundle, owned by PCMag’s parent company Ziff Davis.
As a cooperative, multiplayer video game, Spaceteam represents something truly unique for the iPhone. Players connect via Wi-Fi in order to work together and prevent a spaceship from crashing. Because of the frantic style of gameplay, players often find themselves shouting instructions to each other, which in turn increases the stress levels.
Terraria is like a 2D Minecraft. It’s a sandbox adventure game that allows you to explore, craft, build, and fight inside a procedurally generated world. You can travel between different biomes and find various characters to interact with.
Remember 2048? The original version of that game still deserves your attention. Before it was cloned many times over, Threes! proved to be a popular iPhone game in 2014. Players slide numbered tiles and combine them according to multiples of threes. The game keeps going until there are no more moves, and a final score is counted. That frustrating need to achieve a specific numbered tile was only introduced by the copycats.
In this simple, yet memorable game, you control a beetle who travels at intense speeds along a track. Thumper demands that you maintain rhythm with the background music while also avoiding obstacles, fighting enemies, and bracing against turns. The haunting music, mesmerizing visuals, and brutal reaction times create a truly tense gaming experience.
Transistor was one of the finest console games of 2014, and while the game doesn’t control quite as well on an iOS touch screen, it’s still a gorgeous, intelligent, and mechanically sophisticated sci-fi action-RPG.
Ultimate Rivals (only on Apple Arcade) ups the silliness of arcade sports games by letting you mix and match athletes from across different leagues. If you want to see LeBron James play hockey or Megan Rapinoe toss an American football, this is the game for you.
This title lets you take control of an army and use turn-based strategy to defeat the opposition. Influenced by the classic Advance Wars tactics games, each unit in Warbits has its own strength and weaknesses, as well as unique power ups. The game includes a campaign, challenge mode, and online play, all wrapped within cute graphics and quirky dialogue.
The Witness follows Myst’s footsteps by placing you in a mysterious location and expecting you to figure out how to escape. You’ll be looking for clues and completing puzzles, but make sure you take in the scenery when you can.
XCOM: Enemy Unknown rebooted the classic strategy game franchise and became one of 2013’s finest games. XCOM: Enemy Within takes all that was great in Enemy Unknown and enriches it with extra side missions and enemy types. It’s the best version of an already-phenomenal game, and definitely worth picking up if you’re a hardcore strategy fan.
This iPhone game delivers a truly unsettling gaming experience. The plot is based on the Swedish Year Walk folktale, where participants compete a series of divinations along a journey in order to receive a glimpse of the future. There are secret messages and multiple endings to find.
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