Had enough Candy Crush and looking for some fun new games to play on your iPhone? Here are five favorites TIME rounded up this week.
Wrassling
Although Wrassling is truly inane in its gameplay, it’s reminiscent of the classic Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots. Command a blockheaded wrestler and try your best to clobber your opponent even as your limbs fall off. There’s something truly mesmerizing about how long you can spend playing a game this simple.
For a blocky, retro-looking game, Burn it Down is surprisingly plot-heavy. You wake up and find that all of the sudden, your lover is missing. The kidnapper and the motive remain unclear, but you must work your way through various, grim levels and find clues in order to get to the bottom of it. Part detective story, part haunted mansion explorer.e
If you were to take Frogger and give it to the creators of Adventure Time, you’d get Bouncy Bits. It’s a simple runner game with a slight twist. The goal is to navigate your character and bounce through each level while dodging obstacles. You can upgrade to new maps and players and rack up points. There are some in-app purchases you can make, like new player modes and characters, to enhance gameplay.
Tower Slash takes the classic neo-pixel game format and does something that is at once both incredibly retro and very well suited to the iPhone. Climb up a tower on the game’s vertical landscape and try to beat your friend’s scores — but you’re limited to the few basic commands of jumping to dodge obstacles and attacking enemies with a few weapons upgrades.
This should have been a Game Boy Color game. Navigate a tadpole with an elastic tongue through a river and snatch various bugs and animals. As you improve, and as the game becomes more impossible, you also unlock other tadpoles to play with. Every fly you eat earns you points. There’s something incredibly calming about the game’s design and how easy it is to play for a few short minutes here and there.
Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare. Activision's futuristic first-person shooter in which players take on a rogue private military company uses a brand new engine built specifically for PCs and new-gen consoles to handle its cutting-edge lighting, animation and physics.
Sledgehammer Games/ActivisionFar Cry 4. This pulled back shot of fictional Himalayan region Kyrat is in-game, believe it or not, rendered with an overhauled version of the engine Ubisoft used to design Far Cry 3.
UbisoftThe Last of Us: Remastered. Naughty Dog's meditation on the worst (and best) of humanity is built on technology that reaches back through the studio's pulp-adventure Uncharted series.
The graphics are so impressive,
TIME recently assigned a conflict photographer to photograph inside the game.Ashley Gilbertson for TIMEAlien: Isolation
Built from scratch, the Alien: Isolation engine's outstanding deep space visuals all but replicate the set design of Alien film concept artists H.R. Giger and Ron Cobb's work.
The Creative AssemblyAssassin's Creed Unity. Ubisoft says it "basically remade the whole rendering engine" in its AnvilNext design tool to handle the studio's meticulous recreation of Paris during the French Revolution.
UbisoftChild of Light
Inspired by filmmakers like Hayao Miyazaki and artist Yoshitaka Amano, Child of Light's hand-drawn artwork puts the lie to presumptions that graphical richness depends on shader support or polygon counts.
UbisoftDestiny
Built from scratch by ex-Halo studio Bungie, Destiny's game engine was designed to scale across the next decade, says the studio.
BungieMario Kart 8
Nintendo's kart-racer for Wii U reminds us that raw horsepower is just a facet of crafting a beautiful game world.
NintendoInfamous Second Son
Sucker Punch's freeform Seattle-based superhero adventure models all sorts of minutia, from the intricate wrinkling of an aged character's face to the way eyelids stick, slightly, before separating when characters blink.
Sucker Punch Productions Monument Valley
Escher-like at first glance, Ustwo's mind-bending puzzler was also inspired by posters, bonsai plants, arabic calligraphy and filmmaker Tarsem Singh's The Fall.
UstwoGrand Theft Auto V
Rockstar's remastered crime spree opus was crafted from an in-house engine first employed in a game that simulated table tennis.
RockstarTitanfallRespawn EntertainmentForza Horizon 2
Turn 10's Euro-racer actually models light refracted through drops of moisture, the render tech plausibly simulating something as intangible but essential as the earth’s atmosphere.
Microsoft Studios/Turn 10 Studios80 Days
Inkle's anti-colonialist vamp on Jules Verne's famous novel uses crisp art deco imagery inspired by travel posters to unfurl 80 Days' tale of intrepid globetrotters Monsieur Fogg and his valet Passepartout.
InkleTomb Raider
Crystal Dynamics' radical reboot of its popular series about an athletic archaeologist uses a modified version of the engine that powered Tomb Raider: Legend in 2006.
Square Enix
