Like most (all?) weeks in the world of iOS gaming, there's no shortage of things happening and games being released. I spent last weekend at the Hearthstone Summer Championship and wrote about the experience. It's downright incredible to see how huge esports are getting, particularly when Blizzard invites you to hang out in their real-deal esports arena they just built inside of the studio that was once home to The Tonight Show. Last weekend was packed with mobile esports in general, as Las Vegas was home to Amazon's Mobile Masters. I'm curious to see how Mobile Masters evolves over the years as esports over-saturation is definitely a thing.
Anyway, my favorite game that was released this week is Layton Hawkes' Campfire Cooking. It's a super clever puzzler that focuses on managing food you're cooking over a campfire by moving things around on a grid. We've got a great interview over on TouchArcade digging into the background of the game, along with some early concept art and work in progress shots. If nothing else, it's super refreshing to just play a $4 puzzle game that feels like a complete game experience instead of being packed with freemium shenanigans.
Another really cool game that came out this week is Guns Royale, which as of right now is the closest thing to a bite-sized mobile version of Playerunknown's Battlegrounds. Instead of 100 players, it's 16, and it takes place on a top-down Minecraft-y island. Aside from that limitation, it follows the Battle Royale format exactly with looting, killing, and surviving.
The sequel to the incredible Warhammer Quest was also released this week. We've got a review up for Warhammer Quest 2 where we gave it five stars. It's a beautiful turn-based strategy game where players make their way through various Warhammer adventures. There's one minor caveat to this recommendation though, as a few people in the TouchArcade community with older iOS devices that aren't running iOS 11 are experiencing crashes. The developers are totally aware of this problem and are actively working on a fix. So if you're running iOS 10 still, and end up having problems, it'll be updated soon.
We've been following the development of the upcoming global Minecraft event MineCon Earth for a while now, which takes place on November 18th. It's going to be a global event, streamed live, that everyone can participate in and they just announced that Will Arnett will be hosting it. When you consider that Minecraft is a worldwide phenomenon worth quite literally billions, I guess it makes a lot of sense that they're pulling out all the stops for MineCon.
One of my favorite games on mobile is Kairosoft's Game Dev Story, which is a pretty simple game where you're in charge of a game studio. I spent years saying that I wish someone would take that same gameplay formula and flesh it out, which is exactly what the guys behind Game Dev Tycoon did. It's been on Steam for a few years now, and is headed to iOS on November 28th. If this is the first you've heard of this game, you need to read about the absolutely hilarious stunt the developers pulled to screw with pirates.
Last, but not least, is the reveal of some art for the upcoming Banner Saga 3. Banner Saga and its sequel blends tactical gameplay with a fabulous story. They got their starts on Kickstarter and have been super successful since. The Banner Saga games are always on short lists of the best modern tactical RPG's, and I'm sure the third one will be just as good as the previous two (which you should totally play, or at least look into).
That's it for us this week, and remember, if you're at all interested in mobile gaming be sure to come check out TouchArcade where we post this sort of stuff day in and day out, with tons more details.
