In The Pinball Wizard, your goal is to get as high up a tower as possible without dying. You play pinball, but your ball is a wizard, and your table is a tower floor littered with enemies and loot. This isn't the worst trade, to be fair, but it could be better. LEGO Star Wars Battles takes out some (but not enough) of the free-to-play design elements, but trades them in for annoyingly long animations for basically everything to add visual flair to a game that doesn't really need it. This game is fine, but mostly because Clash Royale is a great game. If no base gets destroyed, the player who controls the most towers wins. Players are competing to destroy their enemies base, but can construct towers at specified parts of the battlefield they control. There isn't a lot of depth here, but it is charming as heck.īuild decks of LEGO-fied Star Wars armies and battle live opponents in what is basically a Clash Royale-like experience. Your save even carries over so you can pop in to check out the additional scenes and challenges that have been added to the game.
Hidden Folks is a good game, and this subscription-based version works identically to the original App Store release. With lots of charm in its visual and audio design, this very basic game concept is more than meets the eye. The black-and-white hidden object game has made the leap from App Store hit to Apple Arcade entry. Just when I thought I was clearing the first section of the game, credits started rolling. My only real issue with the game is that it ended rather abruptly.
Part of this comes from establishing a game logic that’s pretty easy to follow, but it also helps that Pilgrims rewards players with funny little scenes and collectible cards for trying out cards that don’t specifically solve the puzzle you’re working on. Pilgrims reduces the trial-and-error of conventional adventure game design down to a small card game that rarely wastes your time. At new locations, you need to pull these cards out to solve light puzzles, witness bizarre hijinks, and play through a brief story. In it, you take a charater from location to location and you gather objects and companions who are kept as cards in your inventory. Pilgrims does exactly this and with all of the charm you can come to expect from Amanita Design releases. We’ve seen a lot of card-based games on mobile, but not really one that tries to emulate adventure games. This, plus its age don't make it the most attractive Apple Arcade offering, despite being occasionally a good time. It still can be a bit of a slow burn and rounds can be cut short with some poor luck, though. Mini Metro+ feels more intuitive than Mini Motorways, making it my preferred flavor of transit puzzling. All of this is presented in a simple geometric style that reflects classic transit map design. Link different subway stops together by dragging transit lines between them to try and plan out the most efficient way to get people to their destinations while being careful not to let any stops jam up with too many people. If building roadways in Mini Motorways wasn't exactly doing it for you, Dinosaur Polo Club's original commuter-puzzler has come over to Apple Arcade. It’s just a nice and inviting experience that feels well-scoped for a service jam-packed with long games fighting tooth-and-nail for your attention. Don’t Bug Me! isn’t especially challenging, or long, or deep, but it does what it does well, and presents everything in a pleasing and colorful low-poly style. This is very much one of those games that is more than the sum of its parts. This game merges the basic tenets of tower defense with resource management, real-time strategy, and light shooter elements. It’s a totally solid experience that is helped a lot by its audio and visual design, despite feeling a tad derivative.ĭon’t Bug Me! is a sort of off-kilter tower defense game where you play as an astronaut defending mission-critical space hardware. Of course, it has the signature Amanita Design style, but otherwise feels like their take on Inside (a thing quite a number of Apple Arcade games have done for some reason). The challenges here are ones of traversal, and most of your time is spent figuring out how to manipulate your environment to hit the right switches you need to move forward.Ĭreaks hit during a wave of Apple Arcade duds hit the service, and even then it’s nothing too fancy. Creaks has you playing as a young man who is lost in a mysterious world found through a crack in his apartment. This is part 4 of our Apple Arcade rankings.