Android Gaming Headlines and Updates: League of Legends: Wild Rift, Genshin Impact, Dead by Daylight Mobile, and More

For the second week in a row, we’ve reported on a forthcoming indie game with experimental leanings and an emphasis on text and storytelling. What are the chances? Lineweight, from Cipher Prime, is bound to be a compelling experiment in multimedia narratives, if that’s your thing.

Otherwise we’ve got news of League of Legends: Wild Rift’s inexorable spread as it approaches a global launch, and Genshin Impact’s inexorable rise to the top of the Top Grossing charts.

To read about this week’s best new Android games and sales, check out the Saturday companion to this article.

Headlines

Cipher Prime is one of the most accomplished indie developers on mobile, with classics like Splice, Auditorium, and Fractal under its belt. The studio’s latest project is a multimedia narrative experience – not entirely unlike Unmemory, which we covered last week – and it’s already won a handful of awards.

We still don’t know when it will be possible to play League of Legends: Wild Rift in the west, but the game’s closed beta is steadily expanding across Asia. South Korea and Japan have been added to the existing territories, and more players have been invited in Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, and the Phillippines.

Genshin Impact was one of the most highly anticipated games of the year before it launched a couple of weeks ago. It looks like the anticipation was justified, as the game has immediately become one of the highest grossing mobile titles in the world, a mere $4m behind Tencent’s Honor of Kings.

AFK Arena, the idle gacha RPG from LilithGames, is clearly looking to get to the next level, having recruited the superstar actor Elijah Wood to front a new ad campaign. The ads use the tagline “cheat on your RPG”, and depict an unfaithful Wood having casual fun with AFK Arena on his phone while a sad orc, representing conventional RPGs, loses his mind with jealousy.

Pocket City was a surprise hit when it came out in 2018, cramming a fully featured, impeccably balanced city-management game into your smartphone. Developer Codebrew Games has lifted the lid on the highly anticipated sequel with a short snippet of footage. It’s all in 3D, but that’s all we know for now.