Best New Android Games and Sales: MudRunner, Professor Layton, Thumper, and More

It’s been another great week for mobile game releases. We’ve been spoilt not only for quality, but for choice as well. There’s a mud-soaked driving game, a family board game, a plucky metroidvania, and a classic puzzle-adventure in the mix, all of them top-drawer.

And bargain-hunters are well-served, too, not least because one of this week’s new releases – Layton: Unwound Future – is on sale at launch. We also recommend the fantastic Cultist Simulator.

New Games

Willy Jetman: Astromonkey’s Revenge is a reasonably acclaimed metroidvania that came out earlier this year on PC and consoles. It sees you exploring caverns and kills critters on an alien planet. Oh, and you play as a street sweeper. Heroic.

The latest mobile RPG from Bandai Namco, Tales of Crestoria takes place in a whole new world within the overarching Tales universe. It’s had a somewhat confusing launch, going live as a pre-install before apparently going live proper, presumably because the bugs were fixed sooner than expected, though it’s still reportedly buggy.

Game of Life 2 deserves to be a hit. Brought to you by Marmalade Studios, the team behind a number of polished board game ports on mobile, Game of Life 2 takes the classic gameplay of the original and updates it with contemporary career options and a number of clever tweaks.

A cult hit on PC, MudRunner sees you driving around the hostile terrain of Siberia in the most unwieldy vehicles imaginable, armed with only a map and a compass.

Layton: Unwound Future – an ASO-friendly contraction of Professor Layton and the Unwound Future – is the third in a trilogy of mobile ports. It sees you travelling to the future to derail a catastrophic sequence of events that sees Layton becoming a crime lord in a dystopian London. It’s temporarily discounted.

The Gardens Between is an acclaimed indie puzzler that explores the relationship between two youngsters on the eve of one of them moving away. Their shared memories form a sequence of puzzle stages in a moving, ingenious, thought provoking puzzle adventure.

Sales

Cultist Simulator, published by Playdigious and developed by UK studio Weather Factory, is a clever, atmospheric, mildly disturbing card-based roguelike in which you steer a path through a branching narrative with the overall goal of forming a horrible cult. It’s $1.99, down from $6.99.

For the first time ever, Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc Anniversary Edition is discounted on mobile. You can currently pick up this popular visual novel about a murderous game in a high school for $11.99, down from its usual price of $17.99.

Evoland and its sequel are two of the cleverest and most enjoyable action-RPGs available. Their USP is that you move through the technical and creative evolution of RPGs as you move through the campaign, steadily working your way up from 8-bit to 64-bit and beyond.

Thumper is one of the greatest arcade rhythm-action games of recent years. It sees you controlling a shiny beetle as it rockets on rails into the screen through a hellish 2001-inspired glowing universe. You can pick this bonafide classic up right now for less than half-price.