40. Reigns: Game of Thrones
Genre: Puzzle
Price: $3.99 / £3.99
Don’t you just love it when a game takes its name totally literally? Love You to Bits sees you play as a young astronaut whose robot girlfriend gets blown to pieces before his eyes in a crash. Her various parts - from head to feet and everything in between - get scattered across the galaxy in precarious positions, and you’ve got to go retrieve them in order to put her back together again. It’s a futuristic Humpty Dumpty love story all wrapped up in a brilliantly whimsical puzzle game full of strange critters, kooky planets and even the odd robot disco.
Download Love You to Bits here
39. The Walking Dead: No Man's Land
Genre: RPG
Price: Free with in-game purchases
The Walking Dead is one of those properties which, rather appropriately, refuses to die. I like it that way as a big zombie fan, and thus I also love the official RPG based on the AMC series. With all the characters you'd expect to find, plus a multi-pronged approach to building your characters and your settlement, it's currently the closest iOS games can get to simulating the zombie apocalypse, not that I'm rooting for the real thing or anything...
38. My Friend Pedro: Ripe for Revenge
Genre: Action
Price: Free with in-app purchases
Plenty of games get mobile spinoffs, but they don't always play in the same genre. Ripe for Revenge thus walks a thin line of feeling enough like the original console and PC game to be familiar to seasoned players while also playing differently enough that those players will still want to experience both versions. With thoughtful mobile-centric tweaks to the controls, Ripe For Revenge maintains the chaotic style of My Friend Pedro even as the artwork is more deceptively sweet.
37. Tetris
Genre: Puzzle
Price: Free with in-game purchases
Sometimes you just can't go wrong with a classic. Tetris is one of those times. This falling block puzzle game has withstood the brutal test of time that has claimed the relevancy of countless other games because, well, it's maybe perfect. Yes, in the App Store, it loses a bit of charm given the push to sell microtransactions, but at its core, the game remains one of the all-time greats, and a few ads don't derail this still remarkable, yet simple, masterpiece.
36. New York Times Crossword
Genre: Puzzle
Price: Free with in-game purchases
Calling all coastal elites, your app is ready. Kidding! The New York Times Crossword is famously tough and rewarding and now you can access its puzzles whenever you want without needing to carry around one of those old-fashioned newspapers or whatever they were called. Download this and you'll be asking your friends and coworkers what a five-letter word for "serious" is in no time.
35. 1sland
Genre: Battle royale
Price: Free with in-game purchases
1sland is a battle royale, but like no other you've ever played. In fact, it's the first game in the genre one could reasonably called zen. Rather than a mad dash to outrun the boundary and outlast 99 or so others, 1sland is played live, every four hours, as participating players race to be the first to discover an island in their boat. In between, you'll upgrade and customize your boat, but even when an event is going on, the game's pastels and peaceful audio cues make it all feel like a lackadaisical race atop comfy couch cushions.
34. Bloons TD 6
Genre: Tower defense
Price: $4.99 | £4.99 (with in game-purchases)
History would reveal otherwise, but some part of me attributes Bloons with starting the tower defense genre. So many sequels later, it's still one of the very best you can find on iPhones. Bloons' top-down, cartoon monkey-heavy approach to tower defense is second to none, and each sequel has been better than the last. This will likely be on our list until Bloons TD 7.
33. Rec Room
Genre: Social/maker game
Price: free with in-game purchases
Social hubs have been huge these past few years, but for my time, none are more inviting than Rec Room. With a unified art style that's both easy to understand and excitingly colorful, Rec Room is the maker game and social landing spot that I wish I had as a kid 20 years ago. Still, with games for all ages and tons of room for exploration, invention, and just basic unwinding after a day or school or work, Rec Room gives me hope that these massive social spaces can be welcoming, fun, and fresh.
32. Golf Odyssey
Genre: Golf/puzzle
Price: Free with in-game purchases
If the madness of What The Golf? Isn't your thing, Golf Odyssey offers a more tranquil golf-adjacent puzzler. Developed by just a single person, Golf Odyssey's color palette is cool and restful, like its music, and the central mechanic of lobbing golf balls over obstacles and into hole-in-ones is as tough to put away as the best App Store favorites. If ever you played the multiplayer Tanks growing up, Golf Odyssey looks and plays a bit like that, but without any explosions.
31. Sword of Ditto
Genre: RPG
Price: $5.99
While many games are called RPGs on iOS, the term is often a loose fit, but in the case of The Swords of Ditto, it really applies. Across many questing runs, players will carve out their own legend in a fantasy world that imagines something magical and medieval, but also modern and comical. It looks and feels like a Cartoon Network series, imbued with a childlike wonder, which makes it irresistible to a certain kind of player, I'm sure, as I'm one such player. Alongside inviting combat controls and an open-ended plot that lets you explore however you see fit, this "compact RPG" packs a lot of punch in its 1.2 GB download.
Turn to page three for our top 30 best iPhone games...
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