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It’s been another excellent year for mobile games new and old.
Don’t believe us? Just for starters,check out the finalists and winners of the Mobile Games Awards, as voted for by the industry, and the Pocket Gamer Awards, as voted for by the players, to check out the year’s hottest releases and best updated games. Don’t forget to check out the GOTY picks from our Mobile Mavens right here, too.
Being the end of the year, the staff at here PocketGamer.biz have picked their star games of 2024, along with a few honourable mentions.
As another year draws to an end, there are so many great games to look back on, but there’s got to be just one in the top spot.
If you had told me at the start of the year that this game would be my favourite mobile title, I may have laughed. I wouldn’t even expect a game from this IP to rank that highly for me.
So, what is it?
My pick of the year goes to Pokémon TCG Pocket.
While only recently being released, this is a game I use on my phone daily. It’s intended as such by design with how you open packs and wait until you can open the next. Usually, I have one to open in the morning and one before I go to bed at night; it’s become a routine.
In between waiting for my new cards featuring pretty artwork, I’ve been enjoying the battle system too. Something which, at first, I wasn’t intending to really dabble with since collecting the cards was all I was originally interested in.
But the battles sometimes offer me the chance at earning a few tickets towards opening my next pack sooner, or an event is on that means I can work towards unlocking a cool card. Then there are PvP battles, which are rewarding when a deck you’ve put together pays off and you emerge victorious.
When playing, I’m fully aware that I am likely a big part of the current demographic for this game, someone who used to love Pokémon but hasn’t really been as invested over recent years; the nostalgia factor has worked its magic and captured me as a player again.
However, now I’m invested, so inevitably, when the game starts to pull away from the 90s classic Pokémon and introduce packs from later games, I’ll be ready to collect them.
The game features beautiful artwork, which I love, and it’s an ideal mobile game since it is easy to pick up and play if you have five spare minutes. It also doesn’t feel like you have to spend money, but doing so will simply mean you build your collection of cards quicker.
I’ve also really enjoyed the social aspect of it because it’s one of those games that has had my friends chatting about which cards they’ve just got or which decks they’re building. It brings back that sense of playing the physical game I played years ago.
For me, it’s exactly the kind of mobile game that works, and when I look at it with my business cap on, it’s doing a lot of things right. I’m really intrigued to see what the future of this game looks like.
Honourable mention: Balatro
As for my runner-up, Balatro is definitely worth a very honourable mention. When it was initially released on PC, I kept hearing how great and how addictive it was. I didn’t feel like it was the kind of game I had time for, so I didn’t play it.
Given that I enjoy a few traditional card games, poker among them, I did have a feeling it would be the kind of game I would enjoy, and then when it was released on mobile, the ease of access felt like it offered the right time for me to jump in.
And it’s excellent! I understand why players got hooked when it was first released on PC.
As with most card games, there is sometimes that sense of luck that you need, but I also like that there is a level of strategy involved, too, and the deckbuilding mechanics feel unique.
I’ve mentioned before when speaking about Balatro that it’s one of those games that is easy to learn but hard to master, which means it can appeal to a wide range of players. If you’re looking for something more casual, you’ll find enjoyment in it, but there’s extra depth there for those who want that type of experience.
The game is a great success story and one that I hope gives other developers hope that sometimes all you truly need is a good idea.
Non-mobile game of the year: Dragon Age The Veilguard
Craig Chapple
Head of Content
There have been a few great games I’ve played this year, which I’ll give a nod to in my honourable mentions. But the one I keep coming back to is Peak Games’ Match Factory.
I’m a sucker for casual puzzle games and haven’t really meddled in the match-3D space. I’ve been an avid fan of Toy Blast and Toon Blast in the past, and Peak has done it again. It’s exactly what I want from a puzzle game like this.
The gameplay is relaxing and the puzzles aren’t particularly frustrating to play. The levels come thick and fast, occasionally tripping you up. But for the more competitively minded, going head-to-head against other players adds an entirely new dimension, where all of my usual zen-mode skills collapse into a random object tapping frenzy fuelled by sheer panic.
The music, sound and tactile feel of the game are also fantastic (who really listens to the audio of a mobile title, I know). But the feedback from matching objects and then watching them all drop into a box at the end reminds me of Scopely’s Monopoly Go, and how the audio and feel of the dice roll just add to the polish.
When you see giants like King and Playrix largely struggle to break out of the genres that made them famous, it’s a testament to the talent at Peak that they’ve found a new gem away from the blast category in Match Factory.
No doubt I’ll be playing this one well into 2025.
Honourable mentions: GeoGuessr, Connections, LinkedIn
I might have chosen this as my Game of the Year until I realised this title was first released in 2013(!). GeoGuessr has really got its hooks into me over the last month after I watched a promoted streamer from one of my favourite StarCraft 2 content creators, of all things.
For those unfamiliar, the game uses Google Maps and Street View to drop you into a random location anywhere in the world, and then gives you a limited time to figure out where you are. It’s a simple premise, but it’s enormously good fun putting the detective hat on and trying to recognise languages, spot city names and architecture to find the country and city you’re in.
The multiplayer is where GeoGuessr really comes into its own for me. It’s hugely satisfying guessing the correct location ahead of others – and equally embarrassing picking locales 10,000km away from even the next worst guess.
The game moved to a subscription model this year, which looking around seemed to cause some controversy. As a newcomer, a monthly fee feels worth every penny.
Other honourable mentions: Connections from the New York Times, and LinkedIn’s games (a surprise to me too!).
Non-mobile game of the year: StarCraft 2
It’s the end of another busy 12 months for the mobile games industry, and while there are plenty of releases that made major waves throughout 2024, my pick for Game of the Year is something a little lesser known.
That something is Atelier Resleriana: Forgotten Alchemy and the Polar Night Liberator.
If you didn’t skim over that title, colour me impressed.
Its comically long name aside, Atelier Resleriana first grabbed my interest as a fully fledged mobile entry in Gust’s 27-year-old franchise all about foraging, fighting, friendship and alchemy.
I’d already dabbled in the series with Atelier Ryza: Ever Darkness & the Secret Hideout on the Nintendo Switch – a game which achieved record sales for the series, propelling it to newfound popularity – so when I saw that a free-to-play mobile game was on the way to Japan, I was optimistic that a global expansion would follow.
After four months as a Japan exclusive, that optimism paid off, with Atelier Resleriana’s global release on January 25th, 2024.
Jumping into the mobile game, it soon became apparent that Atelier Resleriana balances its appeal between series veterans and relative newcomers like myself, weaving a story between brand-new main character Resna, a bunch of legacy characters I didn’t really know, and Atelier Ryza’s titular protagonist.
The game explains away these returning characters as a result of some mysterious world-bending travel, and while I was initially excited to see Ryza show up so immediately, I was pleasantly surprised by Resna’s own characterisation. Her excitable, energetic personality and her noble goal to restore the dying art of alchemy – despite being a novice at the craft herself – led to genuinely amusing interactions between her and now-veteran alchemist Ryza.
Playing on, I soon learned that the returning alchemists from older games were unable to use their standard wizardry in Resna’s world, turning the student-master dynamic on its head and, honestly, setting up a far more compelling premise than I’d expected.
Being a gacha game, Atelier Resleriana’s returning characters do form a major part of its appeal, and I can see legacy fans especially being engaged by the older heroes and heroines brought up to date with modern graphics.
With an almost 30-year back catalogue to work with and plenty of alts of fan favourites already (there have been four Ryzas this year), there’s certainly plenty of potential for ongoing revenue and maybe even leading newcomers to try out the older titles too – even if their names are just as absurdly long.
Honourable mention: Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket
Does anyone know why game titles have been so long this year? My honourable mention goes to Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket, which I may well have picked as my Game of the Year, but I’ve probably talked about it enough already.
If you’ve followed my coverage across the data stories, features and podcasts, you’ll already know that this game has been huge – one of the year’s biggest, in fact, and the closest thing to Pokémania since Go.
Since its launch late this October, I’ve been jumping into Pocket daily as a free-to-play player to open packs and battle it out with my Charizard deck. And while I’m less so the target audience than my colleague Paige – my Pokémon nostalgia is built around the late 2000s, not the 90s – it is exciting whenever an Immersive Card pops up, even if they all represent Kanto Pokémon so far.
While I am enjoying some casual daily play, I’m really setting the foundations with my account for when my own favourites make it in – newer Pokémon like Turtwig, Rowlet, Goodra and Nihilego. If they already had cards on board, maybe Pocket really would have been my Game of the Year too…
Non-mobile game of the year: The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom
