I do like having games on my phone, but it’s always a struggle looking for games with 0 microtransactions. So would like a game I can out right pay for, or one with ads. The ability to disable ads for $5 is chill though.
I’ve played a lot of games that you can “have fun being f2p” but some days I just get really sick and tired of games I play trying to sell me things every 30 seconds.
So do you guys have any?
If not I may go back to playing GBA games on my phone XD
EDIT: Oh selling like expansions is probably fine if it’s legit like a full other game. I’m on android
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Shattered Pixel Dungeon is great, it’s an open-source dungeon crawler. Neither adds, nor transactions, micro or otherwise. If you want to pay tho, there’s a donation link for the dev team.
And if you still want too play GBA games, check check out the Lemuroid emulator, it’s also open source and has no adds. Works for nintendoDS too.
You can find both of these on F-Droid. They’re also be on Google Play, but since I’ve only tried the F-Droid version idk if the other has adds.
the dev team
The team is one guy. His name’s Evan.
I also highly recommend Shattered Pixel Dungeon. I’ve been playing it for years.
There’s also a version of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup on mobile. Although the UI is quite clunky with the control and shift commands imported from PC. But the gameplay is more elaborate than Shattered Pixel Dungeon, I’d say.
Great game. Been playing it for years.
However, the mobile UI has some serious issues since it was more of a secondary thought. It’s really easy to accidentally tap to move somewhere and ruin an entire run that you were really enjoying. There’s no undo or any way of editing the save to help recover the run. I’ve stopped playing for months because I was just so discouraged after shit like that constantly happening. In fact, I’ve hit that point just now.
Some stuff like that’s definitely happened to me. My dumbest defeat was after drinking a potion of levitation to get past some disintegration traps, accidentally tapped he wrong part of the screen, thought I might still have enough fuel to make it to the chest and I’d use my spirit chain on the way back… But nope, I fell right on a trap and died. I had an ankh, but not a blessed one, so even tho I could make it back to that room’s entrance I had no way to recover my bag.
Started playing Balatro on my phone at work.
Don’t download Balatro on mobile unless you want to lose your job, family, friends, and health. It’s that addictive.
I didn’t need to know mobile balatro was a thing, oh no. Not good… not good.
How bad could it be, just a quick little game.
Ooh yeah pc games that have good mobile ports are a good shout!
Whatever emulator you can run and the ROMs of your choice.
Mindustry is basically Factorio-meets-tower-defense. It’s open-source, also available on desktop.
Ahhhh Mindustry, such an amazing game! I play it on my phone almost daily
Mini Metro. Its a transportation strategy game where you build and manage a city´s metro system through the style of the London tube map. You pay once and get the whole game. No ads or micro transactions.
Open Tyrian is an old shoot em up thats open source and has been ported to dozens of platforms, including android. It plays very well with touch controls.
If you want a Minecraft like game thats free and has no microtransactions I recommend Minetest (Now called Luanti). Its open source and has tons of mods.
Thank you so much for the Mini Metro suggestion! Loving it!
It’s been a while. Have you thrown your phone yet?
Still loving it! After fucking up a bunch of times I started reading up on some strategies. Still stuck on London, but I’m enjoying it
Very similar, but in my opinion slightly more fun, is Mini Motorways
Minetest is a good suggestion, but it’s worth noting that the base application won’t have anything playable on install. A few of the games made with it attempt to recreate Minecraft, but it’s not limited to that.
Also, while the core team has announced the name change, it’s still listed as Minetest on both the play store and F-Droid.
Some good ones from the fdroid app-repo.
Shattered Pixel Dungeon - already mentioned roguelike
SGT-Puzzles - already mentioned microgame puzzlers
Frozen Bubble - already mentioned bubble-shooter
Vector Pinball - already mentioned pinball
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/net.artificialworlds.boxstacker/index.html - Physics puzzler
https://f-droid.org/packages/com.simondalvai.ball2box/ - flick ball to the box for 3-stars
https://f-droid.org/packages/com.gpl.rpg.AndorsTrail/ - Massive story quest driven RPG
https://f-droid.org/packages/de.chadenas.cpudefense/ - Tower defense on a PCB
https://f-droid.org/packages/ch.logixisland.anuto/ - trad tower-defense
https://f-droid.org/packages/it.alessandropira.wesnoth114/ - hex turn-based fantasy RPG
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.lettucepie.flickybee/index.html - flick the bee through the course
Slay The Spire
Into The Breach
Slay the Spire is one of my favorite games of all time, and has a nice android port I play before bed all the time. No ads, just caw caaaw
Oh no! It looks like you don’t have enough block! Would you like to buy enough block to survive this round with 1 HP for $0.99?
FreecivUnciv on Android is an almost feature complete re-creation of Civilization 5 with minimal graphics. You can also download the JAR and run it on a desktop if you have a Java SDK installed. As a Civ player that started with 4, I found it easier to pick up than freeciv which is trying to replicate something more like Civ2.Edit: provide correct name
Threes
Fun puzzle game that got ripped off by 2048 and it’s endless clones. They wrote a blog post on how shitty mobile game development can be.
Stardew Valley! It was worth the $5 already in vanilla, then it got updated with more content at no extra charge and then again. And now 1.6 is around the corner with even more. It is the love child of one dev that keeps on giving and giving and giving. And there are tons of mods of all kinds including entire world overhauls that adds even more replayability. Very much recommended.
Papers Please
I didn’t see Unciv recommended yet, it’s a decent mobile open source version of Civilization.
Pocket City 2 also gets a shout-out, it’s not very deep but a nice casual city builder with a one time purchase.
The Netflix version of mobile games have their micro transactions removed (or at least all the ones I’ve downloaded).
