Best new mobile games on iOS and Android – March 2026 round-up

This month’s batch of promising mobile titles includes a new The Witcher game, a port of the Tomb Raider reboot, and chess with a shotgun.

Everyone’s ill, summer’s still three months away, and the Middle East’s on fire. Sounds like as good a time as any to immerse yourself in mobile games, titles like Plug In Digital’s excellent chess adjacent Shotgun King; the tactical 2D pixel art joy of Dwarves: Glory, Death & Loot; and Feral Interactive’s latest port, Tomb Raider, which brings Lara Croft’s mud and blood spattered 2013 reboot to mobile.

Ponchorado

iOS & Android, free (SEAL.GAMES)

Cuphead kicked off a micro-trend for making video games that look like 1930s cartoons. Ponchorado is one of those games and it puts you in the flickering, sepia-tinted boots of a cartoon movie stuntman, tasked with shooting up bandits.

They pop out of the ground, immediately moving to attack you, while you avoid their gunfire and explosions, automatically returning fire. Between levels you’re forced to watch an ad, before buying and upgrading guns, health, and movement speed. You’ll also gain access to companions who automatically follow you around, unleashing their special skills until they too get shot down and need reviving.

Its witty, pleasantly satirical dialogue enhances the moderately entertaining bullet hell action, but can’t quite make up for a glacially slow sense of progression.

Score: 6/10

Tomb Raider

iOS & Android, £12.99 (Feral Interactive)

Feral Interactive have applied their mobile port Midas touch to Tomb Raider, the first of the survivor trilogy, that saw the franchise rebooted by Crystal Dynamics for the second time. For a 13-year-old game, the action and pacing still feel wonderfully cinematic, comparing favourably to far more recent titles – it’s certainly more involving than Aphelion’s precarious traversal.

The touch controls do a decent job on the larger screen of an iPad Pro, but when the action gets frenetic it can feel harder to keep up. Luckily, the app supports controllers, something you can do without, but which does help when large numbers of burly, heavily armed cultists and Russian mercenaries are trying to shoot or bludgeon Lara to death.

This release includes all seven DLC packs, comprising challenge tombs, new weapons, and outfits, making it a real value for money proposition. It’s great rediscovering Lara’s swift journey from ingénue to casual mass murderer, via a whole lot of looted historical relics.

Score: 8/10

Shotgun King

iOS & Android, £5.99 (Plug In Digital)

It’s chess, but not as you know it. The black king has gone nuts, losing all his courtiers but gaining a pump action shotgun, giving the turn-based battles quite a different tenor. While still tactical and taking place on a conventional chessboard, now you can use your firearm to blow away white pieces.

After killing the white king the game pauses, letting you a choose a pair of cards that give you and white an advantage each, before moving onto the next round. These fundamentally change the game, adding everything from grenades, to extra pieces, to an heir to the white king who takes over when he gets peppered with hot lead.

While it’s tricky to bear in mind the many different rules you add during each of its roguelike runs, it’s fascinating to play, the interaction of those additional buffs making every attempt unique. It also feels right at home on a touchscreen, where its 16-bit styling and swift, cerebral rounds are ideal for a quick blast between meetings.

Score: 8/10

Reigns: The Witcher

iOS & Android, £5.99 (Devolver Digital)

Released in 2016, Reigns was a game of binary choices. You played a king whose advisor asks a series of A/B questions, to be selected at your regal whim. Its speed and throwaway one thumb gameplay made it ideal for mobile, and it got sequels based on Game of Thrones and Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Now Reigns is taking on The Witcher.

Instead of a simple binary Geralt simulator, this is about Dandelion the bard attempting to make a name for himself singing about the Witcher’s exploits. Each decision is framed in rhyming couplets, your eventual demise adding to Dandelion’s renown.

Like its predecessors, it’s incredibly lightweight, your choices set out so briefly you’re regularly left guessing about potential outcomes; a sense the game attempts to paper over by throwing so many of them at you. It’s occasionally amusing, but too insubstantial to be satisfying.

Score: 5/10

Dwarves: Glory, Death and Loot

iOS & Android, £4.99 (Sidekick)

Command a band of pixel art warrior dwarves in a series of 2D skirmishes, recruiting new members, arming and equipping them, while filling in each of three clans’ rune circles, whose buffs persist between runs, roguelite style.

As you outfit new members, you need to balance different character classes, as well as choosing ranged attackers and putting tanks at the front to prevent a rout. Each dwarf’s running speed and your chosen formation affect where they end up in battles that you can only watch, their outcomes influenced purely by your choices as you progress.

It’s introduction, delivered in amusing faux olde English is fairly cursory, leaving you to work out almost everything for yourself. If you enjoy immersing yourself in dexterity free, slow build strategic combat, this is a highly unusual and involving way to indulge that preference.

Score: 8/10

Retrocade

iOS, included with Apple Arcade (Resolution Games)

If there’s one issue uniting retro game collections, it’s what’s missing. Because of wearying licensing requirements, most of them only manage to have one or two games you actually want to play, with the rest often pure filler, much of which you don’t even remember from the cigarette burned arcade cabinets of yore.

Retrocade’s line-up is the opposite. Asteroids, Breakout, Bubble Bobble, Track & Field, Centipede, Frogger, Galaga, Pac-Man, and Space Invaders, with Konami’s Haunted Castle – effectively the prototype for Castlevania – the only virtual cabinet you might consider non-essential.

Inevitably its biggest issue is onscreen controls, with Pac-Man especially all but unplayable using swipes, but with a controller this is a definitive early years arcade collection that comes with its own gamified achievements system encouraging you to play more.

Score: 7/10

Last Asylum: Plague

iOS & Android, free (37Games Global)

Widely promoted with ads made using generative AI, this would normally pass well underneath our radar, but something about the game’s charming art style and unusual plague -octoring subject matter demanded a closer look.

Sadly – but maybe not surprisingly – it turns out to be yet another kingdom builder reskin, its overarching mechanics indistinguishable from Rise Of Kingdoms, Whiteout Survival, Lords Mobile, the dreaded Evony, and many more, its apparent originality just a microscopically thin veneer.

Just as vapid and pointless as its peer group, this is pay to win gaming at its most primal, automating everything and simply requiring you to tap on the next upgrade or alliance battle, spending money to speed things up, the game applying ever increasing psychological pressure. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

Score: 2/10

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