Gubbins is a fun word game, it’s a one time purchase and apparently part of the profits go to charity due to Hank Green investing in it in a creative way.
I'm seconding Simon Tatham's puzzle collection, Nonograms Katana, and Stardew Valley, all of which are in regular rotation and fill different niches in my soul.
I also like, from f-droid, Tower Jumper, and from Play, hillclimb racing.
seen much praise of mindustry here on Lemmy, but not got into it myself
rabbit escape is like lemmings/pingus
I like go, but play casual. CrazyStone on Play works well for me. It’s doing something with the internet on startup, probably benign model updates, but I block its internet access.
I also remember Doom and Destiny being very fun and fairly casual. The free version is not too bad on ads. The second one I never got far in - felt like it was constant ads interrupting gameplay
Imagzle. There are “buy more levels” but there are plenty on the main one. It gives a picture, more or less, abstractly related to something. Art, movie, book, many random things
Man mobile gaming is such utter crap in general, I hope the handheld gaming PC trend picks up and people start developing actual competing games for Android instead of micro transaction filled pay to win pieces of shit games
The really good games I have played on mobile are mostly indie roguelike ports from PC, like Slay the Spire, Dead Cells or 20 Minutes Till Dawn. Or something more classic like solitaire, minesweeper or crosswords/nonograms/sudoku puzzles
The problem isn’t that no one is making good games, it’s just that the mobile market is dominated by too many large companies intent on keeping it the way it is and enough of the consumers are ok with that.
I’m not sure it fits 100% with what you’re looking for, but I’ll take chance and recommend Slice & Dice (Google Play, Apple App Store). Free demo, no ads, single in-app purchase to unlock the full version. This game is easily the best value-for-dollar mobile game I’ve ever purchased.
If you have a Netflix account, you can get Bloons TD6 for free on Android. It’s fun and the microtransactions are completely unnecessary and hidden away. Beware it’s a battery hog though
Also, if you like puzzles, look up the various variant sudoku apps from Studio Goya, particularly the one called “Cracking the Cryptic”
This isn’t exactly what you asked, but I highly recommend emulation. I have had ePSXe downloaded on every phone I’ve had for the past ten years to play PS1 games. There are so many good titles, all of them free, playable offline. You might like Intelligent Qube Mr. Driller Devil Dice for puzzles. I love playing final fantasy, legend of dragoon, suikoden, Spyro, crash bandicoot. I don’t care about graphics, but I am a sucker for playing through a story.
Magic DosBox, not a game. But in combination with www.old-games.com , it’s a pretty good selection of all the old games made for Dos back in the wild west of indie games back before they were even called that. There are, of course, also old commercial games that have transitioned to freeware now too. Should be able to find lots of awesome games there. Moraff adventure games are particularly interesting. Bit of a steep learning curve, but great to come back to now and then. The site has reviews of every game and sorts them into categories. It can be a little overwhelming just due to the sheer number of available games, but take it slow, and work your way through. It’s worth the time investment to find gems.
Sparklite, I don’t know what it looks like purchases-wise, it was free with gamepass and had no in-app purchases when acquired that way. It’s probably one of the newest games I’ll post about. New enough that it was possible to get it with gamepass, lol. The game sort of has a modern retro zelda feel. I don’t think it’s a particularly long game, but it’s certainly enjoyable and pretty casual. I think if it has transactions, reading other reviews it might be like a “purchase the rest of the game” style thing. So basically a free demo that you can then choose if you like the game enough to pay.
Hmm, I was gonna say moonshades, last time I played it there wasn’t much for things you could buy. But when I look now, there is. So I can’t say for sure how unnecessary any of it would feel now, but it wasn’t necessary back when I played last. It’s kind of like the old early 3D party dungeon/maze crawlers where you use the arrow keys to walk one “block” at a time. There is only 2 party members in this. So you still sort of get the group synergy stuff, but each character is a bigger share of the team power. You could do a tank/healer thing or magic damage/melee damage, or not have either one focus on anything in particular.
I hope it’s still not necessary to buy anything, it was a good game. But the store is pretty comprehensive now, so that has me worried.
bin.pol.social
Aktywne