Apple Arcade Mini-Reviews: Batch Two

Another batch of 10 games from the service, ranked

Apple’s Arcade
Published in
10 min readOct 14, 2019

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Took me long enough, but I finally played enough games for a second batch. (Here’s the first one, if you missed it.) And speaking of things taking a long time… man, I played a heck of a lot of some of the games on this list.

Apple Arcade has been proving time and time again how great of a value it brings to someone who values well-thought-out experiences in games. Even if I absolutely adore my Nintendo Switch and have a bunch of unplayed grade-A games installed on it (Astral Chain, Fire Emblem Three Houses, Untitled Goose Game…), I kept coming back to Apple Arcade games. Especially to my top-ranked game of this batch, which you will read about at the bottom of the article.

Out of the following ten games, there are only two I would describe as “bad” or “meh”, and three I would say are “okay”. The other five were genuinely good or excellent, and games I would undoubtedly recommend even if they were standalone purchases.

They all remind of me in one way or another of Holedown, a game I simply adore and have been recommending to people ever since discovering it a few months ago. I kept looking at it and thinking, “how come there are so few games like this on the App Store?” I finished it and started searching for the next game that would make me feel like that, but I never found another one until Apple Arcade was released. Now I have more than a dozen quality games on that level or better.

I’m insanely happy with the service.

Anyway, let the games begin. As before, I’ll be going down the list of the ten last games I played, in order from my least liked to my absolute favorite.

🧻. Big Time Sports

This is the prettiest waste of time I’ve ever played.

You open the game, and you have a bunch of sports to pick. Every sport is a minigame, and you are scored based on how well you did at the task it proposes. One or two of these are mindless interesting, but all the others are profoundly boring. As an example: on the weight lifting modality, you need to watch two bars on both sides of the screen at the same time and tap each time a moving line crosses a specific segment of the bar. And that’s it. You do this for like a whole minute or two, and you’re graded on how many times you got it right. It’s neither reminiscent of lifting a weight or fun.

The art style is colorful and pretty, but the whole things is pointless. Not only are the minigames tedious, but they also lack any sort of structure: you’re invited to try to break a record, and then to continue trying to surpass your own high score after that, but for what? There doesn’t appear to be any unlockables or even a leaderboard for you to see your friends’ high scores. (If there’s one, it must be buried deep within that Game Center modal window no one cares about.) And the music sucks. Big time.

Optimal experience: playing it next to someone who can appreciate how shitty it is so you can at least have an enraged laugh.

9. Dear Reader

Are you a fan of public-domain classic literature such as Crime and Punishment, 20.000 Leagues Under The Sea, and Heart of Darkness? If so, you might enjoy this game. It looked fascinating to me at first glance, but then I got to playing it, and it’s just a few wordplay activities based on real passages of these books. You rearrange words that are out of order in a paragraph in one section, then you fill in blanks in another part, and, as Vonnegut would say, “so it goes”. Unfortunately, it’s dull enough that I would rather just read the books, thank you very much.

Optimal experience: opening Apple Books instead.

8. Lifeslide

Here you’re controlling a paper plane as it flies collecting energy dots and generally trying not to crash. Even if it feels a tad unpolished, the game isn’t bad, and I would recommend you try it; it just didn’t compel me to stick around for a long time after the first few stages. It’s kind of a simplified version of an old-school Star Fox game without all the lasers, but somehow it didn’t stick the landing for me.

One highlight, though: tilting the screen to fly the paper plane feels surprisingly pleasant and tactile. I would love to see more game developers remembering that there are several input methods on a mobile device other than just touching the screen. (If you know of a game that creatively uses non-touchscreen inputs such as the microphone, motion, cameras, etc., I would love it if you’d let me know below!)

Optimal experience: iPhone is good, iPad is better.

7. Dodo Peak

Dead simple, nice to play, no-frills, and cute. This game feels like the kind of games we would have had a lot on the coattails of Angry Birds if the whole freemium bullshit hadn’t taken over the App Store. In it, you control a Dodo Bird as it tries to efficiently gather its scattered baby Dodos and bring them back to the hut in safety. The gameplay is reminiscent of Crossy Road and Q*Bert, and stages are quick and fun, perfect for that quick fix when you’re standing in a line or sitting in a waiting room. Plus, it still feels refreshing to be able to unlock skins for your character using nothing but the coins you pick through normal gameplay.

Optimal experience: this one feels almost pointless on the iPad or the Apple TV because it’s such a “quick fix” game, perfect for the iPhone.

6. Chu Chu Rocket Universe

The follow-up to legendary Dreamcast puzzler “Chu Chu Rocket”, Universe goes above and beyond on Apple Arcade in terms of sheer polish: this game is proper pretty. It even has completely unnecessary — and delightfully cheesy — voice acting.

The gameplay is genius in its simplicity: the Chu Chus are little mice that always run forward and only turn when they encounter an obstacle or when they’re directed by arrow tiles. You place the arrow tiles on the ground to guide them away from obstacles and into the Rocket they need to board to clear the stage.

But things get pretty complicated pretty early — in fact, the sudden difficulty spike on some stages as soon as World 2 is the only thing that pushed me a bit away from the game. All in all, a competent game that reminds me a bit of Cosmic Express — AKA the best puzzle game ever made available for iOS.

Optimal experience: iPad. Both because the extra screen real estate helps and because this thing will DEVOUR your phone’s battery.

5. Neo Cab

Gig economy, self-driving cars, fascism, surveillance, tech monopolies. Hardly the kinds of topics you expect to see handled by a video game on your mobile device, but here they are in Neo Cab. And very well handled, I must say. You play as a girl who works as an “Uber” driver as she moves to a new city to live with her best friend.

The story takes as many turns as an Uber driver would in a big city, and soon you’ll be using your rides as much as opportunities to learn about the city and uncover a mystery as to earn a living.

I especially liked an element the game introduces early on via a bracelet that glows with colors that represent your emotions — it squeezes even more out of the already excellent writing. You’ll be empathizing with your real life Uber driver in no time.

Optimal experience: this one is better if treated like a book. Sessions can’t be super short, and it benefits from focus. Enable Do Not Disturb.

4. Sayonara Wild Hearts

True to its name, this is a wild one. For starters, it’s an impossibly beautiful game. Everything is bright and bold, an explosion of neon colors and flashing lights.

Almost more a playable music video than a traditional video game, Sayonara Wild Hearts features a ridiculously well-produced synth-pop soundtrack — which may, in fact, be the single best thing about the game. The only problem, then, is the actual playing of it. I can’t really imagine how well it plays with a gamepad, but it feels too loose on a touchscreen. The game is fast as a bullet, and the touch controls often can’t keep up. This turns into an even greater problem since part of the gameplay appeal is to get high scores for gold ranks in every stage — although I believe there are far better games on Apple Arcade if what you want is a high score chase. Sayonara’s strong suit is its charming and arcane story paired with the kick-ass soundtrack.

Optimal experience: make sure to play it big and play it loud.

🥉 The Pinball Wizard

I have a thing for pinball. Don’t really play a lot of the real thing, as I suck and prefer to hand out money via other means when I’m in a charitable mood, but video games with pinball mechanics? Sign me up. The Pinball Wizard is extremely satisfying to play, especially on the iPhone, due to the stellar implementation of haptic feedback. You can feel the bumpers move whenever you whack that ball — I mean, that Wizard. Because, yes, the namesake Wizard is the actual ball in the game.

The structure is straightforward: guide the Wizard as he bumps everywhere and collects treasure, slays enemies, gets the key, and goes through the door to exit the level. However, every single one of these steps has some added depth in the form of powers, skills, multipliers, and special mechanics.

Every time you die, you spend your XP to level up and unlock new skills, and your collected treasure to buy and upgrade said skills. It’s an extremely satisfying gameplay loop, which kept me going for many “one more run”s long after I’ve actually beaten the game and upgraded every skill to the max.

Optimal experience: the iPad’s larger screen felt right at first, but the UI elements that come in play after you’ve gained a few skills were badly placed, so I switched to the iPhone and discovered it’s actually much better to play on it due to the haptic feedback.

🥈 Grindstone

It took me 19 days to write this second batch of mini-reviews after the first one, and over half of this time was spent playing Grindstone. It’s a devil of a game. The graphics are literally Adventure Time-level of awesomeness, but what really slays is the gameplay mechanic: you’re a barbarian in a cave chock-full of monsters in different colors, and you kill as many of them as you want… provided they’re all the same color and you can trace a line connecting all of them.

If you can trace a long enough line, a crystal drops into the board. These crystals can be included in your next chain, and they have a neat side effect: from the crystal onwards in your line, you can change to a different color of monsters. This creates the potential for some sick chains of cartoon murder, which in turn will generate more crystals etc.

I swear, there were times where I got late to stuff because I couldn’t put this game down. Mobile games can hardly get more engaging than this. The only complaint? Some of the stages can take a little longer to beat, and the game does not save your mid-stage progress.

Optimal experience: I’m torn. Playing on the iPhone allows me to play this whenever I want, but playing on the iPad lets me use the Apple Pencil to trace my murder lines, so…

🥇 WHAT THE GOLF?

This game is FAN-TAS-TIC. I refuse to say a lot about it because everything is a potential spoiler for one of the best experiences some of you will have on the Apple Arcade. So feel free to stop reading this now and go play this and have a grin on your face the whole time.

If you’re still here, there’s one thing I’m willing to say: it’s not a golf game, but rather a game that tells jokes using the universally understood language of golf games. Every stage and most interactions are either the set-up or the punchline for a joke, many of which are brilliant. I would pay good money to watch John Cleese or Norm Macdonald play What The Golf. It’s comedy you can play — and it’s gold, Jerry.

Optimal experience: as good as this game is (and it’s simply very), the developers fumbled really bad with the save file system. There are many reports of people randomly losing their saves. In fact, this happened to me when I was 71% done with the game. So: play on the iPhone, where the game feels more at home — and don’t even try to pick it up where you left on another device, because that’s when the save bug tripped for me.

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Apple’s Arcade

Cares too much about: 1. Design, 2. Board games, 3. Lists having at least three items.