This month’s new wave of smartphone games includes a new Hitman port, two interesting new tower defence titles, and an excellent new photography game.

The sad news that Netflix is continuing to gut its games division, which had previously supplied a steady stream of mobile classics, now includes the closure of Boss Fight Entertainment, whose most recent release was Squid Game: Unleashed.

The problems of triple-A console publishers may seem to have little relevance to mobile gaming but the smartphone market has its own problems, especially in terms of oversaturation.

Thankfully, there’s still plenty of interesting games this month though, including a touchscreen port of melancholy puzzle platformer Inmost, Rift Riff’s refreshingly different tower defence action, and the mobile port of the delightful Toem: A Photo Adventure.

Rift Riff

iOS & Android, Free – £5.99 full game unlock (Adriaan De Jongh)

Rift Riff has a fascinatingly original take on tower defence. Rather than building towers from a godlike remove, you control a small, hooded figure who has to sprint to each tower to build and upgrade it, firing at mobs as he goes.

Between levels you unlock new tower varieties, choosing a subset of them for each level you visit, a process that in later engagements may take a couple of attempts as you get the lay of the land.

It has minor technical issues, its explicatory text boxes sometimes appearing behind other objects, but it’s not a serious problem and wholly forgivable when battles are so unusual, overcoming the genre’s usual complaint of having to spend much of your time passively watching as your plan either plays out or fails.

Score: 7/10

Inmost

iOS & Android, £3.99 (Chuklefish)

With its delightfully downbeat, almost monochrome pixel art style, and three separate heroes who manage to be incredibly expressive despite being small and purposely blocky, Inmost’s side-scrolling adventure requires exploration, puzzle solving, and combat.

Its themes are as desolate as its atmosphere, taking in depression, familial neglect and suicide, but puzzles are well designed despite the simplicity of its scenery, and the soundtrack superb on headphones.

Its eerie ambience and moments of existentialist angst will stay with you long after you’ve finished its five or so hours of lugubrious adventuring, its few buttons and straightforward controls translating neatly to touchscreen.

Score: 8/10

Parabellum: Siege Of Legends

iOS & Android, £2.99 (Plug-in Digital)

Using a 2D side-scrolling format similar to Kingdom: Two Crowns, Parabellum has you building resource and troop generating villages, then commanding squads of soldiers in battle, in a tale that spans different commanders and their lands.

Its hand drawn art style looks great, even if its subtitled dialogue often coincides with action that makes it hard to follow. Sadly, it falters due to difficulties with its interface: village construction is hampered by troops standing in front of buildings, making it tricky to select them. Battles are an even bigger problem.

Even fully zoomed out you can only see a small chunk of the battlefield, leaving you frantically scrolling back and forth, using swipes that also often accidentally select troops or buildings you didn’t intend to. Despite an interesting setting, Parabellum suffers from too many issues to be enjoyable.

Score: 5/10

All Who Wander – Roguelike RPG

iOS and Android, free – £6.99 full game unlock (Frumpydoodle Games)

With its 10 character classes spanning the expected axis of barbarian, magician, thief, ranger, and others, All Who Wander is a miniature turn-based role-player, its hex maps taking in half a dozen biomes and a mix of above and below ground exploration.

Tap to move and attack any enemies you stumble across, although since battles offer no experience points or loot, they’re best avoided when possible. You’re better off seeking out treasure and buildings, where you can get hired help and additional skills to bolster the ability tree that comes with each character class.

Because it’s quick to play and effectively paused until you make a move, it’s perfect for those minutes-long interstices of life, even if its procedurally generated levels, with inherently random loot and encounters, can feel a little hollow during protracted sessions.

Score: 7/10

Kingdom Rush Battles: TD Game

iOS & Android, free (Ironhide Games)

Player vs. player games are a tempting gamble. If they work you can end up with an addictive game that has infinitely scalable difficulty through matchmaking, but if they don’t attract enough players it can create a rapid death spiral. Fighting bots is nobody’s idea of a good time.

Kingdom Rush Battles is off to a somewhat wobbly start. On one hand it marries Ironside’s polish and artistic flare with solid tower defence mechanics, each player guarding a mini-map while adding mobs and handicaps to their opponent’s. On the other, battles tend either to be tense and protracted or laughably brief, a sign that you may not in fact be battling a human.

Unfortunately, it has regular connection issues that are especially annoying near the end of a lengthy round, and while it gets a lot of the basics right it will need more players and better technical implementation to compete with incumbent PvP behemoths like Clash Royale.

Score: 6/10

Toem: A Photo Adventure

iOS & Android, free – £6.99 full game unlock (Snapbreak)

Toem gives you a camera and then unleashes you on its charmingly drawn black and white isometric world, on a mission to help its denizens by taking pictures for them. Tap on the camera and you’re taken to the viewfinder’s fully three-dimensional view, letting you zoom in and compose shots.

Completing jobs for characters involves looking around all the buildings and areas in each level, trying to spot the very thing they need, and while you’re at it completing overarching photographic tasks to fill your growing album.

It’s unexpectedly great, with a warm sense of humour, elegantly designed mini-challenges, and new photographic equipment to unlock. Its engaging, time pressure free interactions work brilliantly on a touchscreen.

Score: 8/10

Hitman: Absolution

iOS & Android, £9.99 (Feral Interactive)

Hitman: Absolution was originally released in 2012, when the Olympics came to London and the Queen celebrated her Diamond Jubilee. It feels like an eternity ago, but despite its superannuation Absolution still looks and plays like a triple-A game, although not much like more recent Hitman outings.

Relying noticeably more on action, an automatic bullet time kicking in as you take aim with your silenced silver baller pistols, its colourful good looks and globetrotting look good on touchscreen, although its profusion of buttons are only really suitable for iPad. As ever with games that feature occasional frenzied action, a controller is your best bet.

Its Achilles’ heel though, is that it doesn’t permanently save checkpoint data, so if you have to close the app and reopen it, you’ll need to restart the whole chapter from scratch, an egregious oversight for a mobile port with such long and involved missions.

Score: 6/10

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