Best iPhone XS Max Games By Kevin Kenson

(Upbeat music) - The iPhone 10S and 10S Max are out today and you might be wondering, "Hey, I love playing games on my phone, which one is the better one to grab?" And the answer is honestly pretty easy and straight forward, the 10S Max, for two very simple, but very important reasons. First off, battery life, games can be very draining on your phone's battery and you wanna make sure that you're able to get a lot of playtime in and at the same time have your phone available, just in case, and a better battery is gonna make sure that isn't a problem. Reason number two, screen size. Staying true to its name, the 10S Max's increased screen size, relative to its already larger body has created one of the largest phone screens ever made. And it actually contends with actual gaming systems. I mean the Switch screen is actually a smaller diagonal, there's more screen real estate, but this gets very, very, very close.

Which is really important for a lot of games to make sure they're able to see everything nice and clearly, anything that uses touch controls, your fingers aren't getting in the way of the action, it's gonna give you the best gameplay experience. Now of course, the next important question is, what games should I get? Because I don't know if you've been on the app store lately, there's a lot of them, a lot. And there's a lot of good stuff to choose from, but we're gonna go over five of the best games you can play today. First off, let's talk about a game that uses a feature that's exclusive to newer iPhones, AR. There are a lot of AR games in the market right now.

Most of them are kind of just, tests and theories, ideas of how games can develop, but there's a few that are starting to get really, really good and a personal favorite of mine is The Birdcage. I am a huge sucker for a lot of escape room style games, puzzle games, things that are very interactive you can do on your phone with a touch screen interphase. And The Birdcage is a very interesting idea in that it creates an actual, like, birdcage in augmented reality, that you can interact and mess with having to solve puzzles. All you have to do is scan a tabletop surface and you'll see a birdcage emerve, emerve, what the (beep). (Mumbles) Birds.

Emerge, is the word I'm trying to say. Not immerse, (chuckles) emerge. All you have to do is scan a tabletop and watch an actual birdcage emerge out of the surface of it that you can then, freely walk around, inspect, and mess with. And this is something that I think, there's a lot of kind of, interactive, escape room puzzle games on iPhone, but AR is taking it to a whole new level that I cannot wait to see where it goes. Next up, is one of my personal favorite iPhone games.

I think it's something that has been developed perfectly with phone interfaces at mind and that is Reigns. Reigns is a game that if you haven't heard of is basically, imagine Tinder meets some kind of choose your own adventure story. You're constantly make decisions where all you're doing is swiping left or right and seeing how events play out, constantly having to balance all these aspects of daily living and, pretty much no matter what you do, you're gonna eventually die and play as a whole nother king or queen all over again. Now this is actually a series that has a couple entries going on right now, the original is a king, the most recent one is a queen, and soon we will have a third entry, that is actually crossover with Game of Thrones. This might sound a little too simple at first, but actually the game is much more complex than you'd ever realize once you start playing it.

It actually has a really kind of interesting backstory built into it, as well, that you fully discover as you play more and more. And while it is very simple and straight forward with just the swiping mechanic, this also makes it the perfect game to just pick up and play in short bursts whenever you want. (bouncy bass music) Now, speaking of games that are suited really well to the iPhone, there is one genre I've always loved which is metroidvania. And it's not something that's usually very easy to pull off with a touchscreen interface. But there is one game that is proven that idea wrong and that's Dandara.

Dandara takes the idea of a metroidvania where exploring a large dungeon, reexamining rooms, backtracking, dealing with enemies, but changes its gameplay style instead of being a traditional side-scrolling platformer into a game that relies on touch controls where you're leaping from wall to wall and using range attacks on enemies. It all plays, wonderfully smooth on a touch screen interface and it's so much fun. The thing that I really appreciate about it too is that I think a lot of the times when people think about mobile games, they think about games that are very specifically designed for a phone in mind, it doesn't have the same grand scale stuff you might see on like the Playstation or the Switch. Dandara's one of those games where it actually blends the kind of scope, scale, and quality gameplay of a console game, but brings it home to a phone in a way that makes it a fairly unique experience and blends the two mediums perfectly. Fourth in the list, we're gonna get a little less serious with one of the funniest game to come out recently on mobile, Donut County.

Donut County is a very simple game in which you are a hole. As a hole, you eat things up and the more stuff you eat, the bigger the hole gets, and, thus, you can eat even bigger things. And that's the way the whole thing goes. Kind of imagine almost like a reverse Calamari, where instead of rolling stuff up and making a ball, you're just destroying everything. Now at first, that might sound really easy, but it actually gets really complex the farther you get, adding a lot of puzzle elements that you might not think about when you first learn how the mechanics work and more importantly, the game is just ridiculously funny at the same time.

Both the story line it has itself and more importantly the trashopedia. Basically, as you eat items up in the game, those show up in the trashopedia, where you can look at images of them and then read short, little descriptions, that often times, not at all accurate, but hilarious. Then, we have a game that when it was first announced, honestly I never would've seen myself recommending it to people, but once I actually played it, it really grew on me really fast, and that's Final Fantasy Fifteen: Pocket Edition. Now I know, if you've just seen gameplay of it, the art style is a little off putting at first, at least it was for me, but it really grew on me as time went on and it really is interesting how this game has taken some massively scoped title, like Final Fantasy Fifteen and scale it down into a fun little portable game. While the gameplay and visuals are, of course, entirely different it actually uses a lot of the same music, audio files, and recreates whole scenes from the game, while making it a more condensed, shorter adventure that can be easily enjoyed on the go.

As someone who played the original game before jumping into this one, yeah it's a little weird at first, but if you give it a shot it really is a lot of fun to play and if you haven't had the chance to play Fifteen, this is an awesome way to experience the storyline without quite the same investment.

Source : Kevin Kenson