The opinions and thoughts expressed in this article reflect only the author’s views.
Fake mobile games have been a staple of online browsing since, well forever. But in the past few months, they’ve been excessive on TikTok and Youtube, with nearly every other video being some ad for a mobile game.
Whether it’s those weird mobile ads where a girl farts and gets divorced on the spot, that one pink dragon getting violently abused as TikTok cheers or State of Survival where the Joker runs away from zombies, the trend of mobile ads is that not only do they barely highlight gameplay, they feel like surreal fever dreams that definitely don’t translate over to actual gameplay.
What’s weird lately, however, is that a lot of these ads are of people playing the game, swearing up and down that their game is an actual legit one hundred per cent playable game. Even Shaq is in on it now.
Despite all this misinformation, mobile game ads are seriously some of my favourite ads just thanks to how chaotic and messy they can be.
My favourite example of this is Final Fantasy: War For Eos, where not only does the actor mispronounce the name of the game, but the ad manages to make real-life humans seem computer generated. They had actual professional actors read these lines as though they were text-to-speech captions from Siri and it is the most unironic Tim and Eric ad I’ve ever seen.
“Do I need another take?” Nah king you did great.
And because I forgot to top up my meds this week, I felt like it was the right time to finally take a stab at some of these games.
The hardware I used to play these games was a Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra, one of the best top-end gaming phones on the market. Not only does it have tremendous battery life, but the chip included inside can run games up to 60fps. If I’m going to play these games, I’m gonna go all out and see how the infrastructure crumbles when played on a genuinely good phone.
Rise of Kingdom
You have to continue reading because I have 50 million power in Rise of Kingdoms.
I’m not crazy about how many “flirt” prompts there are in this game. In this experiment, I definitely noticed a trend in these games having overt sexual themes that try way too hard and it made me genuinely upset imagining some poor person desperate for human connection spending a mortgage’s worth of money to have those “flirt” options pop up.
Wolf Game: Wild Animal Wars
Okay, what the hell is this? I have nothing positive to say about this. Wolf Game genuinely hurt my spirit.
It follows a very familiar formula to Rise of Kingdoms, except your kingdom is your wolf pack.
You play as wolf Simba after your dad, wolf Mufasa is murdered by a pack of hyenas that have dipped their fangs in venom before a vicious fight. How these hyenas have access to venom, manage to coat their fangs and not accidentally ingest the venom and die themselves is a mystery. Either way, your wolf dad is brutally murdered in front of your eyes as he’s betrayed by wolf Scar, I mean Loki.
The gameplay is exactly like Rise of Kingdoms, except worse. You build your den, summon wolves with a star level and then defend your camp or venture out for supplies.
The PvP aspect of the game comes in through raiding other players’ dens, which just boils down to the RNG of “Who spent more money for the better wolf?”.
I have a solid bone to pick with the wolf names as well. You play as Alpha (a wolf term thoroughly debunked), the son of Charlie the wolf, murdered by Loki. If this hasn’t already got you spontaneously throwing up I don’t know what will.
This game fundamentally broke me, but the vibe of the ad is exactly what the game promises: a bizarre fever dream where you wonder if any human being even worked on this thing.
Genshin Impact
I haven’t touched Genshin Impact in over two years, so I wasn’t sure what to expect when loading this up. I was a bit sad to see my profile was completely wiped and that the game had an entirely new intro cinematic. But hey, they drastically reduced the amount of time you interact with Paiyon which is a decent trade-off.
The game plays surprisingly okay on mobile despite the breadth and scope of the game. The framerate dipped in larger areas, but in dungeons, the game ran very smoothly. I definitely didn’t feel like the game played clunky despite translating all those controls from PC onto mobile. My only complaint was adjusting to how the sprint button interacts as your stamina bar will drain so fast.
Genshin’s clear gimmick is that you can play both on PC and mobile, so you can take your characters on the go and play on public transport or on the toilet. The port works perfectly for those reasons. My battery lasted around three hours playing Genshin Impact and didn’t run too hot either.
If you’re looking for a really solid RPG to play on the go and are suffering Breath of The Wild withdrawals, defs try Genshin Impact if you haven’t already.
Raid: Shadow Legends
The latest and biggest in the “Turn-Based Hero Collector” genre. I got curious a few years back and started playing Raid: Shadow Legends but quickly got turned off thanks to its overly cluttered UI. It felt like there was a pop-up of some new deal or something I had to redeem to get free loot. The actual game looks stunning, and seeing those models do big damage is heaps of fun. Although everything to do with resource management is an overstimulation that’ll leave you with decision anxiety.
Picking it back up two years later? The game definitely has fixed a lot of this, or maybe playing on a higher-tech phone with a wider screen has cleared up a lot of the clutter. Either way, I definitely had a better time with this one.
I’m personally a huge fan of turn-based hero collector games. I’ve been playing Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes daily for about four years. Most of that is thanks to the brand power of Star Wars though, so I’m a sucker for grinding for months to unlock Yoda with a hood. That grind is harder to justify for Raid: Shadow Legends though, and I can see myself getting burned on this after a few weeks.
Like Genshin Impact, the strongest feature of this game is its crossplay with PC. Being able to sit back and casually play this in the background while WFH is a huge benefit to the game.
Merge Mansion
Hello Neighbour, but a grandma has been scratching people’s heads lately. Mostly thanks to how the game managed to afford Pedro Pascal for one of their most recent ads.
The game starts similarly to Stardew Valley, with you cleaning up an overly messy garden. Although the game differentiates itself by letting you unlock new tools and gives you that immediate dopamine rush of levelling up and getting that energy. Although it quickly unravels when granny starts to come at you.
The gameplay is essentially just Candy Crush but with a twist.
Spiral Roll
Article long ah hell.
In all seriousness though, the game is exactly like it is in those South Park or Family Guy TikToks. What you don’t see is the number of ads waiting to assault you after every round. But that’s nearly every mobile game, and if you’re desperate to get back to the action, you can just pay $4.49 to get the full experience, which is the price of some full-length mobile games anyway.
My girlfriend saw me playing this late at night and she downloaded it on the spot and got very addicted to the game. In a lot of ways, this style of game reminds me of those really early mobile games like Jetpack Joyride or Doodle Jump in that you can really get lost in the simplicity of it.
Survivor.io
I was pleasantly surprised by this one as based on the ads, I was prepared for a cynical cash grab. Although credit where credit is due, this is a surprisingly fun game.
It is weighed down by the fact that Vampire Survivors is now available on mobile devices and is infinitely superior.
Survivor.io is a bit slow as well, with new weapon upgrades coming painfully slowly and the intensity of the game taking a while to ramp up.
If you’re a huge fan of infinite hoard-like games that you can mow down and see your screen clear up, definitely check out Vampire Survivors instead.
Top War
To answer the question everyone’s been asking, is Top War a real game? The answer is yes, disappointingly. It’s a game, but barely and also, it’s not really good.
A Youtuber has been taking a deep dive into Top War’s ads over the past year to uncover how much of the game shown in the ads is from the actual game. More recent Top War ads mirror games similar to Digit Shooter, a game where you shoot money and get upgrades.
The game is closer to the older ads of combining your soldiers into a stronger version and then base running from there. Like all of these mobile games, there’s a strange sexual element in this game that comes across as bizarre and desperate.
I can’t say I enjoyed my time playing Top War, and would not recommend anyone play it.
If you’re looking for a similar game, Lego Star Wars Battles is a far better example of the genre, is free, and infinitely more addictive. There’s also no weird sexual element. Plus you get to send an army of porgs to blow up tanks or light them all on fire with a flame thrower which is infinitely more satisfying than watching a cutscene play for combat.
So after playing all these games, what did I learn? Stronger mobile games need to be developed and platformed better as well. How Top War and Rise of Kingdoms can climb the charts and receive rave reviews is beyond me as the game design does not deserve a five-star rating at all.
At the same time, however, I had a great time with some of these games as well. Genshin Impact, despite definitely getting me on a federal watch list, is a really great and polished game, and being able to take it with me on mobile is a great feature.
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