The best mobile games of 2012
App2Top continues to summarize the results of the year. This time, our readers are waiting for a list of the most notable according to the editorial version of the game applications of the outgoing season.
Please note that we refused to form a top or any rating, but simply chose the ten most memorable projects for us.
Need for Speed: Most Wanted
A series of “rides” on beautiful cars has grown to the level of its older console brothers: in terms of graphics, dynamics, the number of available cars, the number of cool music tracks, in the end, the overall quality.
The game, of course, can be blamed for not the brightest tracks (where are neon and skyscrapers?), in the absence of a normal modernization of cars (with body kits and stickers are tight here), in the relatively rigid monetization of an already paid project. But all this is overlaid by the drive that you experience when at the last moment you slip away from a police car trying to pin your Chevrolet Camaro to the curb.
This is not a game of the year, not an original indie project, but it is an application for every day, perfectly replacing the same Most Wanted on Xbox 360 before going to bed or instead of it if tomorrow is suddenly a day off or New Year.
Clash of The Clans
The fact that Finland is something like a European silicon valley was guessed fifteen years ago, when Nokia was the largest phone manufacturer in the world. Nokia is out of business now, but we hear about northern developers regularly.
Supercell is one of the brightest Finnish newsmakers of recent times. A small team of professionals currently earns more money in the mobile market per month than anyone else, including EA, DeNA and Chilingo. In the fall, the figure revolved around $ 500 thousand a day, but now, most likely, it is much more.
Where did this success come from? The Finns were probably the first to successfully implement the midcore concept on the Western market. Plus, they gave the players the opportunity to compete directly with each other. Six months ago, this approach was called Japanese, now it is gradually beginning to enter the number of global standards.
If you take your mind off the fuss around Clash of The Clans and look at the project “through the eyes of a child”, then this is a very beautiful builder with a combat component, a kind of plot, a Nordic character, gloss and charisma. For the latter and love.
Angry Birds Star Wars
Rovio, by the way, is also from Finland, has been trying to surprise all year, to prove either to the players or to herself that she is not a one-game company. To be honest, it failed. The best that the Finns have released this year is directly related to Angry Birds. Neither Amazing Alex nor Bad Pigges became hits, unlike Angry Birds Space, which completely rethought the original gameplay, and Angry Birds Star Wars.
We had a choice between the last two projects. The first is original in a good way, the second is its continuation in the world of George Lucas. We preferred the Star Wars version for the favorite music and the rich imagination of the developers who turned one of the birds into Chewbacca. Besides, it was just nice to be back on Tatooine.
Punch Quest
Two games of 2011 contributed to the popularity of the runner genre: Jetpack Joyride and Temple Run. Their success and the apparent simplicity of the mechanics led to a whole wave of imitations in 2012. We remember the brutal Punch Quest the most.
The authors of the game from Rocket Cat Games, slightly changing the rules, turned an ordinary runner into a loose beat’em up with pixel graphics, a gnome jumping on wasps, a tame dinosaur shooting a laser, a delusional plot about revenge and a cyclops as a boss.
But, unfortunately, it was not without problems. Flaws in monetization deprived developers of money, and the lack of evidence of bonuses – the desire to buy them. But this did not prevent the game from becoming one of the brightest releases of 2012, even against the background of runners like Rayman Jungle Run.
Rage of Bahamut
The game is a trickster, an oriental stranger who broke the bank after sitting in the first position of the American box office top of Google Play for six months. We will write about the reasons for its success this week, but the name of the creation of the Japanese studio Cygames must be remembered by everyone for one important reason. It is with an eye on her that numerous hits of the coming year will be developed.
More specifically, because of the success of Rage of Bahamut in 2013, we are waiting for a huge number of collectible, card, multiplayer games with an advanced PvP model. Whether this will lead to a frenzied growth of the market, the emergence of new players and new mechanics going beyond the simplified gameplay model of Japanese projects is still a question.
Knights of Pen & Paper
The best role-playing project on mobile platforms, despite the release of Final Fantasy IV and Baldure’s Gate. The secret is that this is really a mobile application created for an easy game on smartphones and tablets, and not for the enthusiastic sighs of hardcore fans.
Knights of Pen & Paper is simple, intuitive, and not devoid of eight-bit charm. It has everything that fans of the role-playing genre love: dungeons, intrigues, spells, a good plot, a step-by-step combat mode, and there is no fiddling with the camera and tedious runs on maps. In general, it’s almost a hit, if not for one small but critical drawback: lack of balance and overly simplified customization of characters.
Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective
They ported a lot and qualitatively in 2012: Vice City, The World Ends With You, Max Payne, Bastion, and many other worthy projects. However, the story of Cecil’s ghost investigating his own murder has sunk into the soul most of all. A very bright, albeit visually archaic story, transferred by Capcom from the Nintendo DS, perfectly caught on on iOS. It’s just a pity that there will be no more similar projects. So it turns out that Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective is like a pearl, which, honestly, should not be missed.
Organ Trail
An alien from the 80s, a real text quest about a world that survived the apocalypse. Despite the almost complete lack of graphics, the game is capable of seriously captivating. Thanks to the music and, more importantly, the phenomenon of empathy for game characters, which is very rare in mobile games.
In addition, Organ Trail is the most hardcore project of 2012 on iOS, requiring the player to constantly monitor a variety of parameters, resources, and the situation as a whole. The game is constantly running out of ammo, game characters are sick and require care, the car breaks down, merchants raise prices, zombies and bandits constantly attack the squad. And you can’t be wrong. Any mistake is death.
Drawn: Trail of Shadows
Back in the year before last, many developers realized that tablets are the ideal platform for HOPA games. There is no need to modernize the mechanics of such projects for touch devices in any way. Take and transfer already made PC games to iOS and Android. Actually, this is where many casual developers have managed to rise well in the mobile market.
Drawn: Trail of Shadows is one of the best Hop projects in 2012. More precisely, not even so: this is a full-fledged quest a la Myst, pretending to be a hidden object. In the game from Big Fish, there is no need to engage in pixel-hunting and search, conditionally, for “ten dolls in the editing workshop.” It is built on logical puzzles. And the game immerses you in the atmosphere of a real fairy tale about the confrontation between an evil wizard and an artist.
Draw Something
The game is a phenomenon, an event, a bright star that did not leave the American box office top iOS from February to April 2012. She was promised the laurels of Angry Birds, but the graphic version of “Crocodile” was not so resistant to success. Whether users are tired of it or its success was ensured by cheating is an open question. In any case, Draw Something is one of the most resonant projects of the outgoing year.
This year has been rich in good releases. This is evidenced at least by the fact that numerous gaming publications have made up completely different tops. But that’s not the most important thing. Other. There will be more good projects next year. We are waiting for hardcore projects made with the expectation of a mobile platform, a lot of ports from consoles and PCs, beginner-friendly card battles, as well as, thanks to The Walking Dead and NARR8, interactive stories.
By the way, we did not include the Telltale Games project in the list of the best for the following reason: the game is multiplatform, and its mobile version leaves much to be desired. Playing The Walking Dead is more comfortable on consoles and PCs, where, it seems to us, she earns the bulk of her income. In other words, it is rather a general industrial phenomenon than a mobile one.
