Best new mobile games on iOS and Android – November 2024 round-up

The sun may have gone away, but the mobile games release schedule rolls on, with this month’s releases including a total sea change for Bloons in Card Storm, Wizardry Variants Daphne’s old school dungeoneering, and Poly Bridge 3 – possibly the finest bridge-building game devised by humanity.

As changes of direction go, this is a pretty big one. Bloons Card Storm spins Ninja Kiwi’s bestselling tower defence franchise into a turn-based card collecting game with multiplayer at its core. It’s a brave move.

Bloons has always relied on strategy, but now you’ll need to think about both attack and defence, launching balloons that damage your opponent, while laying down monkey-based turrets to disarm theirs.

Progress is sedate, and at launch it does have some balancing issues. It’s biggest problem though, is that if your opponent’s losing and quits, during what can be quite protracted matches, you get a smaller reward than if you’d simply lost, which feels unfair. Still, with Ninja Kiwi’s customary polish and attention to detail there’s a great deal of promise if it can retain a decent player-base.

Score: 6/10

Poly Bridge 3

iOS & Android, £2.99 (Dry Cactus)

There’s a surprisingly high number of quality bridge building franchises, the most established being the imaginatively titled Bridge Constructor, but even amongst so many standout competitors, Poly Bridge 3 is noticeably better.

As ever, you’re required to help vehicles traverse a set of gaps, with increasing complexity and extra goals; planes flying through the level, tall ships sailing underneath your bridge, and other more involved intricacies as you gain experience. You’ve got to manage all that with limited materials and do it as cheaply as possible.

The interface is frankly gorgeous, and almost uncanny in its ability to know just where you wanted to drag each piece, its neat, chunky sound effects letting you know when things click into place, with a jaunty musical accompaniment to your civil engineering.

In a delightful twist, each level also has a global leaderboard, showing how creatively other players managed to do the job, letting you view and learn from their structures. It’s a beautifully made game, and the mobile port is pretty close to perfect.

Score: 9/10

Rather than an increasingly deep construction and military strategy game, what you get is a linear path telling you what to build and when, with waiting times that get progressively longer so you’ll pay to skip them. Battles are basic, relying almost entirely on the level of your units and gacha-acquired heroes rather than tactical cleverness.

Eventually you unlock a Vampire Survivors-alike mini-game that’s actually moderately entertaining, but the rest is a uniformly bland cash grab that is absolutely not worth your time.

Score: 3/10

Wizardry Variants Daphne

iOS & Android, Free (Drecom)

Like past outings in the Wizardry series, Variants Daphne is about as classic as dungeon crawlers get. Played from a first person perspective, you swipe upwards to advance along its narrow corridors one map square at a time. Older gamers will recognise it as being similar to Atari ST classic Dungeon Master but the Wizardy franchise is far older, going back more than four decades.

Explore, open doors, read strange inscriptions, find treasures and initially impassable objects, and battle countless monsters in inspiringly pacy turn-based battles.

Levelling is initially swift but slows considerably, to encourage in-app purchases. You can do without them but be prepared for an absolutely monumental grind. If you don’t mind splashing quite a bit of cash, this is a cracking old school adventure expertly refined for touchscreen.

Score: 7/10

Clash Royale (updated)

iOS & Android, free (Supercell)

Clash Royale was originally released in 2016 and has had a mixed reception over the years, resulting in quite an angry community on social media – and with good reason.

Developers have to pay their mortgages, but every update has seemed designed purely to milk more money from players. New characters were overpowered, offering a temporary advantage to anyone willing to pay, while the arrival of an additional card level, and powerful cash-only evolutions, seemed to come from the same spirit of profit over fun.

Royale’s latest update has now had a month to bed-in, and it’s a welcome change. The two-tier battle pass has been slimmed down to one – the free version now considerably more generous – and the shards needed to buy evolutions are easier to come by. A fix for the game’s creaking clan wars system is presumably in the works, but this already feels like a big step in the right direction.

Score: 8/10

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