The best iPhone games that you can play right now

published 25 October 2023

Mobile gaming used to be a bit of a joke, a crude scattering of rudimentary time wasters played on glorified pocket calculators. Then the iPhone came along and shook the whole business up for the better - as these best iPhone games prove.

Nowadays some mobile games rival their console and PC cousins for sophistication and depth.

UPDATE: We've added 10 more classics to our list of the best iPhone games, including a bunch we consider all-timers regardless of what platform we're talking about. Lost dozens of hours to Hearthstone or PUBG? Or think you can't beat the smart puzzling of Mini Metro? Give our new additions an upvote below to send them up the ranking.

Of course, there’s also an awful lot of rubbish on the App Store. The rise to prominence of free to play mechanics hasn’t necessarily been good for the industry. But the following titles remain shining beacons of what the iPhone can achieve as a gaming platform.

As a quick side note, we’re not including any of the best Apple Arcade games here, nor will we be diving into Netflix Games.

These two subscription services are such rich provisions in their own right, they both deserve a shortlist of their own...

The best iPhone games

Monument Valley 2 is one of those rare video games that has managed to achieve true breakout success. It’s the kind of title even non-gamers will play, and which ends up being referenced on TV shows and in newspapers.Part of this success is because of the game’s stunningly unique isometric art style, any screenshot of which would make for a beautiful wallpaper. But it’s also down to Monument Valley 2’s ingenious, twisting, Escher-inspired puzzles and its emotionally rich storyline.

There are few things we’d rather spend £4 on than Mini Metro. For just slightly more than the cost of a meal deal, this BAFTA-nominated iPhone game delivers relaxing gameplay alongside brain-teasing problem solving by the bucketload. The premise is simple - connect stations with lines to help passengers travel to their desired destination. To start with things are simple as you reimagine the metro networks of London, Paris and New York City, but the challenges soon ramp up as you progress to Seoul, Santiago and beyond.

Everyone loves a game of Pairs, aka Pelmanism, aka the game where you keep turning over two cards from a face-down deck and try to memorise the ones that match. Bardcard takes that game and builds a charming roguelike RPG around it. Forming pairs will get you into deadly fights, award you powerful new weapons, uncover secret rooms, and bring you into contact with mysterious NPCs. It’s a quietly ingenious mish-mash of ideas that results in one of the freshest iPhone games of recent times, despite a resolutely retro aesthetic.

If you’ve never heard of Vampire Survivors, you’ve missed out on one of the biggest gaming sensations of recent years. This iPhone version offers the chance to correct that. At first glance, Vampire Survivors looks pretty amateurish, as you guide a crudely drawn pixel-art warrior around an open arena, auto-attacking the enemies that gravitate towards you. Pretty soon, however, you’re locked into a viciously compelling gameplay loop of endless levelling up, heady empowerment, and a frankly ridiculous number of enemies on screen at any one time.

Floppy Club’s Rytmos is the kind of exquisitely stylish isometric puzzler that works so well on iPhone. This one has a particularly funky edge though, in the form of a rhythmic hook. Each abstract puzzle sees you sketching out a path that links together several pegs before completing the loop, but each action contributes to a steadily developing music track of bleeps, bloops, and clacks. The underlying musical themes take in everything from kosmische to Ethiopian jazz, making this the perfect game for thoughtful musos chilling out in between sides A and B.

What do you get when you combine a narrative adventure game with Tinder? Wait, no. Not that. Get your mind out of the gutter. You get Reigns and its two sequels, Reigns: Her Majesty and Reigns: Game of Thrones.The game casts you as the ruler of a fantasy-medieval land, and tasks you with moderating the power of four vying factions. This is where the Tinder part comes into play, as you swipe left or right to make a string of interconnected binary decisions - the kind of decisions that will determine your immediate fate and influence subsequent runs.

Some six years in the making, Donut County is one of the most lovingly crafted, weirdly uplifting, and just plain lovely iPhone games around. It’s all about hoovering up everyday objects using a roving hole, which in turn expands to allow you to swallow up even bigger objects. And people. And houses.Each level is a virtual playlet of unexpected chain reactions and delightful Easter eggs. Stitching all of it together is a charmingly written story all about mischievous racoons and wanton gentrification. Like we said, it’s weird.

Heads Up! has been around for over a decade, but it’s still one of the best iPhone games. It’s essentially a digital version of the Post-it note party game - hold your phone above your head and your friends shout out prompts for you to guess what word is being shown on your phone’s screen. There’s a wide range of card decks to choose from, and the app also records your friends as they shout out their prompts, giving you hilarious footage to watch back after each round.

You can now get your Mario Kart fill on your iPhone, which will be music to the ears of pretty much every Nintendo fan. It may not be the full Mario Kart experience you’ve experienced on Switch, Wii or SNES, but the familiar characters, fabulous course designs and vast range of customisation for karts and players alike will keep you racing again and again. And of course, the expected suite of weapons is also at your fingertips. Just keep an eye out for that blue shell.

It’s not unusual for a hit roguelike indie game to make its way from PC and console to mobile. It is unusual for such a game to feel entirely native to iPhone, as Dicey Dungeon does. This delightful game sees you working through a series of randomly arranged turn-based battles, where everything is decided by the roll of the dice. Values obtained by such rolls can be attributed to your character’s unique attacks, and it’s this tactical variety – not to mention a cheeky sense of humour – that gives Dicey Dungeons its endless appeal.

This follow-up to indie hit LIMBO is another atmospheric 2.5D platformer with a deeply disturbing narrative. You play a kid on the run in a hostile world, but this one is all the scarier for being closely aligned to our own. Featuring brilliantly evocative graphics that make expert use of lighting, weighty physics-based puzzles, and a closing stretch that genuinely has to be seen (or rather played) to be believed, this is one of those games that will stick with you well beyond the closing credits.

Automatoys seeks to replicate the tactile joy of a particular strand of physical tabletop toy from the ’80s. Remarkably, it manages to achieve just that, and then some. Each automatoy is a self-contained 3D obstacle course, through which you must guide your tiny ball via a series of timed button presses. Mazes will rotate, flippers will flick, and bridges will wobble in a delightfully realistic way. Through a combination of stellar presentation, clickety-clack sound design, and fine-tuned haptics, you’ll swear you’re interacting with a toy rather than playing a game.

Like GRID (see elsewhere on this list), Wreckfest is a fully fledged premium console racing game that’s been brought over to mobile with no compromises. This one’s got a much more down and dirty angle to it, with a focus on scrappy banger racing and outright demolition derbies. It’s flat out automotive chaos all the way, powered by an impressive physics engine. Seeing a dozen cars hurtling around a figure-of-eight track, parts hanging off, at a steady 120fps (on newer devices) isn’t the sort of thing you would usually expect to see on your mobile phone.

Moncage is a unique puzzler that plays with perspective in ingenious ways. Presented with a diorama-like scene held in a magical glass box, you must rotate the screen to align seemingly disparate components that will advance time. It’s like an optical illusion, a hidden object game, and a physics puzzler all rolled into one confounding contraption. Add in some sharp, stylised visuals and a poignant hinted-at narrative, and you have a game that’s worthy of standing with the App Store puzzler greats.

Roto Force is a manic shooter indebted to the hardcore ‘bullet hell’ shoot-’em-ups of the ’80s and ’90s, but with a couple of decidedly modern twists. This time your craft is rotating around the perimeters a series of confined rooms, shooting at enemies in the middle and dashing perilously from one side to the other. Throw in a gaudily retrotastic 8-bit art style, slick twin-stick touch controls, a stack of bosses and some meaty weapons to discover, and you have a modern shooter classic.

Developer Zach Gage has made a career out of taking a familiar physical game (like chess or solitaire) and applying the kind of ingenious spin that only video games can facilitate. Pocket Run Pool presents a simplified game of top-down pool, then riffs on it to delicious effect. At the heart of this is a rotating set of score multipliers for each pocket, which forces you to take on trickier shots. There’s also a mode that applies crazy modifiers, such as oversized balls or pinball bumpers. It’s the kind of pool game that even non-pool-players can love.

Nothing says “family" more than arguing over the correct rules for Monopoly. Thankfully, with Monopoly Go! you can get your fill of the iconic board game without having to negotiate a peace treaty between your brother and nan. The iPhone game incorporates the famous board into a wider world where you can team up with (or actively work against) friends and family to collect properties, build houses (and hotels), earn money, play mini games, and destroy other players. Delicious.

Super Mario Run hasn’t been the most successful of Nintendo’s mobile games to date. Thanks to a divisive premium pricing system, it famously fell short of the company’s expectations. But we’d argue that Nintendo’s first mobile game remains its best.The Japanese console giant has somehow managed to distil the pure essence of Mario into a bite-sized mobile format. While there are plenty of one-finger auto-running platformers out there, none play with as much depth or tactile joy as Nintendo’s effort.

Call of Duty Mobile might be attracting all of the attention right now, but for our money Guns of Boom is the better mobile-focused online shooter. From its super-clean visual style to its nigh-on perfect controls and gunplay, this is the most natural-feeling FPS on mobile.Guns of Boom hits that sweet spot between easy accessibility and skill, meaning you always feel victory is in your hands. The developer continues to support the game with fresh content several years into its life, too.

There had been several attempts to bring the multiplayer online battle arena (or MOBA) genre to mobile prior to Vainglory. But none quite managed to nail the formula until developer Super Evil Megacorp stepped into the ring.So popular was this mash-up of real time strategy and action-RPG that it became a massive hit in the world of eSports. It remains a finely balanced, technically lavish and strategically satisfying online mobile game to this day. And you can now even play against PC and Mac players.

Additional reporting by John McCann

Next, check out our shortlist of the best Apple Arcade games

Jon Mundy is a freelance writer with more than a dozen years of experience writing for leading tech websites such as TechRadar and Trusted Reviews.