SOTM is easily my favorite superhero game - free is an incredible price for the base game! It jumps you right into epic superhero team vs villain boss battles! There’s tons of heroes to mix and match into teams and villains to fight (and which all play out differently!), and more in the expansion packs - plus the whole game series is complete now so no waiting for more releases. Reminds me I still have to fight mega epic Oblivaeon game mode!
I have decided to stick with just simple games like sudoku or solitare. However, these apps have advertisements. I have also run into several other game apps like this. I would purchase the apps, but I do not see any obvious way to do this. They are just “free” in the app store and I have looked at the menus and stuff and I have not seen anything obvious about registering or paying for the app.
Is there some trick to this or are many apps in general add driven and you can never actually pay for them?
That is the bulk of mobile apps, yes.
Many, but not all.
If you’re looking for a Sudoku app, this one is excellent and the paid version is ad free:
If you want traditional solitaire, this one is FOSS and has a huge collection:
For a modern take on solitaire, try this one (the paid version is ad free):
Thanks
Good Sudoku, by the creator of Really Bad Chess, seems to be getting raves at the moment if you’re into that sort of thing, and I think it’s a premium app. Personally I can’t go back to Sudoku after discovering Picross.
Good Sudoku is not on Android, AFAIK.
Huh. Maybe not, I haven’t looked. I just assumed it would be as Really Bad Chess is.
I second the recommendation for Enjoy Sudoku. When I got into Sudoku earlier this year it was, by far, the most enjoyable experience I had on Android of the many implementations I checked out.
Having said that, I also dropped playing Sudoku when I discovered Hungry Cat Picross which is my current comfort game on Android.
So I take it Picross must also be a math based game? I wonder if there’s a demo I can check out.
I wouldn’t really call it math, it’s more logic with some numbers involved.I’m sure there are free versions available, though I can’t vouch for their quality. Unless Paint It Back has a free tier, that’s a good one.
Come to think of it, that’s a good description for Sudoku as well.
Picross is no more mathy than minesweeper.
Also, it was mentioned before but bears repeating that Simon Tatham’s Puzzles, a free/adfree Android mobile exclusive, is worth checking out by anyone who enjoys picross, sudoku, or minesweeper. It’s a tiny package containing tons of unique yet similar logic puzzles.
Civ Vi has been released on Android. Base game is 20, expansions are $30 and $40.
Cool. Too bad it took so long after being on iOS for years. For some reason I have no interest in playing this on PC or console, but I’d play it on mobile.
There’s even a 60-turn demo you can try before unlocking the full game.
Looks like current device won’t run it. Maybe a future me will give it a shot.
I defy anyone to beat my current Seven Scolls topscore of 200.
It happened fairly early on and I hadn’t realized what an outlier it was.
Warhammer Quest currently free on the Play Store. There’s a ton of IAP but the base game is good for a few hours of fun. Also…it’s free.
Dark Mist is a roguelike deckbuilder with some interesting and unique mechanics.
- Well, it’s not really a roguelike. There’s no metaprogression at present. You always start with the same deck depending on class and try to clear 5 floors of enemies. That means no unlocks necessary to win and no grinding. You just have to get better at playing your class.
- Your health consists of the cards in your deck. When enemies deal damage, they remove cards from your discard pile, then draw pile if the discard pile is empty. You can recover those cards by defeating the enemy who took them. There are a slew of interesting mechanics around this, e.g. stuffing your discard pile with extra cards that are sort of useless but buffer your damage.
- There are currently 6 classes, each of which is unlocked by clearing the first floor (which is easy) using the previous class. And there’s a second difficulty unlocked by clearing all 5 floors with a class. Also, daily challenges and custom modifiers for a run.
Top 5 Android games of all time for me as of July 2022, in no particular order.
- Cell Lab - a cellular-based evolution simulator that has a real game attached and is the most accurate simulation of evolutionary processes I’ve ever seen in a game.
A tale: I was trying to complete a challenge that has you keep a population of cells alive in a petri dish where the sides of the dish kill any cell that touches them. I had a population of flagellates (cells that can move around to eat by whipping a flagellum), but they kept hitting the sides of the dish and I couldn’t keep the population high enough. I tried making the flagellate organisms heavier by adding attached cells, hoping they’d slow down enough to give me more population density, but this didn’t work either. So I imported my heavy cells into the experiment tab, set the petri dish there to have deadly sides, and turned the radiation up to high. I let this run for several minutes to introduce a wide variety of mutant variants, then I turned the radiation off to stop mutations and dropped the nutrient density to produce a competitive environment. After a couple of minutes I noticed that most of the remaining cells were flagellates that had attached cells arranged in a boomerang shape so that they spun in circles as they swam. I imported these to the challenge and immediately completed it. This blew my fucking mind . This ‘game’ is able to simulate natural selection . Through random mutation and then differential success, it produced a solution that is retrospectively obvious, but that I certainly didn’t think of
- Baba is You - best port of a non-mobile game ever, and ideally suited for mobile play. I’ve spent many hours waiting for my son to get out of school with steam pouring out of my ears overworking my brain trying to figure out the next Baba puzzle.
- Cytus II - One of the best rhythm games of all time, featuring a complex, weird, and fascinating meta-narrative with many twists and turns. Great original (and non-original) songs, compelling characters, rock-solid mechanics. I spent nearly $100 on DLC for this game over a couple of years. It’s all on Google Play Pass now though for no extra cost.
- Paragon Pioneers - The absolute best mobile idle game and a really good production game too. Attractive, slick, compelling gameplay with nearly zero friction for the player. No ads, no IAPs, no nag screens, and has a free demo. Ideal for spending a few minutes optimizing trade routes or village layout while you wait in line at the DMV.
- Drill Down - The absolute best mobile production game (i.e. Factorio-like.) Perfectly optimized for small screens. Has subtle twists on the production formula pioneered by Factorio. Lots of optimization and layout problems. Many dozens of hours of hyper absorbing playtime. And it costs one whole dollar.
I just bought all 5. I haven’t played a proper android game since Kingdom Rush Vengeance, so it’s been a while. Thanks MattW!