Best new mobile games on iOS and Android – August 2025 round-up

A mobile version of Subnautica, a Zack Snyder movie tie-in, and the return of Angry Birds are amongst this month’s most interesting mobile games.

Like Google before it, Netflix’s foray into video games doesn’t appear to be going to plan. Despite concentrating on mobile – a more accessible sector with a faster turnaround than PC or console titles – the recent deletion of 20 games from its roster, including crown jewels like Hades and Monument Valley 3, isn’t a great sign.

There’s a move afoot to concentrate on Netflix IP, as typified by this month’s Blood Line: A Rebel Moon Game, which while perfectly competent is a little uninspiring. Netflix subscribers will still find all-time classics like Into The Breach are available, but it may be wise to make the most of them while you can.

Subnautica

iOS & Android, £8.99 (Playdigious)

Released for PC in 2018, Subnautica finally makes its way to mobile with this excellent port. Once again your spaceship suffers a rapid unscheduled disassembly over watery planet 4546B, leaving you with just an escape capsule bobbing on the waves, which when you begin the game, is on fire.

To survive on your own, in an alien ocean, you need to harvest crafting materials to make useful props, like The Swiss Family Robinson but with a fabricator. Starting with longer lasting oxygen tanks and flippers for speedier underwater swimming, you’re soon building submarines and entire undersea bases.

Touch controls are rarely ideal, but the slow-moving undersea environment doesn’t demand twitch reactions, although you will still need to make the odd swift getaway from large aquatic predators. The lovely undersea environments, gradual exploration, and drip feed of new construction blueprints remains hugely compelling.

Score: 8/10

Blood Line: A Rebel Moon Game

iOS & Android, included with Netflix subscription (Netflix)

Based on the instantly forgettable Zack Snyder films, Blood Line uses Rebel Moon’s lore and universe, which means the plot is complex but turgid, its poker-faced dialogue delivered by still drawings of generic, bearded sci-fi bodybuilders.

Behind the characterless facade you’ll find a twin stick shooter, whose missions – steal fuel supplies, destroy signal jammers, acquire holographic MacGuffin – boil down to shooting some people and robots, activating switches, then defending an area from more people and robots, before being extracted back to the bearded muscleman mothership.

It looks fine, you can play co-op with randos online, and its guns look and feel powerful, with a variety of different characters and skills to experiment with. The action is pretty mindless but also moderately entertaining, provided you skip through the plot exposition at high enough speed.

Score: 6/10

Bridge Constructor Studio

iOS & Android, £4.99 (Headup Games)

Physics-based bridge building games work really well on a touchscreen, especially on the slightly roomier screen of an iPad, and Bridge Constructor Studio is no exception, its interface proving straightforward and intuitive.

Start by sizing up the gap you need to cross, available anchor points, and the vehicles you’ll need to get to the other side, then make a bridge using as few materials as possible to bring it in under budget, earning a golden screw for each level successfully completed.

In fellow bridge maker, Poly Bridge 3, you could view the winning constructions of players on its leaderboard, which was a nice twist, but even without that Bridge Constructor Studio is a polished puzzle game with near endless scope for tinkering, as you try and complete each challenge with fewer and cheaper materials.

Score: 8/10

Shadow Kingdom: Frontier War TD

iOS & Android, free (Pusilung)

Borrowing the core gameplay of last year’s free-to-play Nightfall: Kingdom Frontier TD, Shadow Kingdom may not look quite as refined, but it’s no mere rip-off. Underneath the mild plagiarism and less cartoony art style is a much more balanced and interesting game.

Centred around a controllable hero defender, you use the winnings from each wave’s dispatched enemies to build resource generators, defensive towers, and barracks to train ground troops. Each level’s geography, tower availability, and the constituency of its waves of enemies makes it a singular puzzle to unpick.

Watching the occasional ad does help the war effort, and there are deliberate pay walls that take a bit of grinding to get through, but Shadow Frontier still manages to deliver a decent sense of progress and thought-provoking challenges, that often take a few attempts to figure out.

Score: 7/10

Angry Birds Bounce

iOS, included with Apple Arcade Subscription (Apple)

One of the founding pillars of the mobile video game ecosystem, Angry Birds has been around seemingly forever. Its latest instalment, Bounce, returns to sling-shotting ball-shaped birds, but this time rather than knocking down buildings, you’re trying to eliminate tiles by catapulting and rebounding birds into them.

Once again, different birds come with their own destructive properties, so choosing the right ammo for each level really helps you get through it, and since this is Apple Arcade, all hint of microtransaction has been expunged, leaving you to enjoy as much of it as you like.

As is traditional for the franchise, it’s actually pretty tough once you get going, its cartoon-style good looks belying serious difficulty, even if it never quite manages to match the charm of the Puzzle Bobble games, which relied on a similar mechanic.

Score: 6/10

Fate War

iOS & Android, free (IGG Singapore)

A blatant and terrible looking AI introductory sequence, with poorly translated dialogue, helps set the scene for a game that plays exactly like Kingshot and its ilk.

That means you’ll be refurbishing a cute village, bulking up its army and defences, and joining a clan. After those gentle introductory hours, you’re then unleashed into the wider world, where you’ll instantly fall prey to players who’ve spent more money than you and will repeatedly and ruthlessly demolish your settlement.

Given just how many games are built around these mechanics, it suggests there’s a market for its brand of skill-free pay-to-win warmongering. And yet it’s baffling that a game that only rewards you for waiting and paying would be worth making in the first place, especially when it’s dressed up in dismal generative AI art assets.

Score: 2/10

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