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

Saints Row: The Third is back (Feral Interactive) The month’s best mobile games include mobile versions of Saints Row, Monster Hunter, and Ratchet & Clack, as well as a touchscreen answer to Mass Effect. Feral Interactive are justly renowned for their skill in recreating complex, high budget PC and console games on mobile. You won’t be surprised to learn that their version of the gratuitously OTT Saints Row: The Third doesn’t disappoint. It’s joined this month by fellow franchise outings, Monster Hunter Outlanders and Ratchet & Clank: Ranger Rumble, both of which have been reinterpreted for touchscreens. Plus, there’s our first ever reader created mobile game, the hugely enjoyable Juno And The Dragon King. Space Defender: Frontier Squad iOS & Android, free – full game £2.99 (Petit Vasseau) Pitching itself somewhere between space-based real-time strategy and single stick shooter, Space Defender’s campaign offers a fully-fledged space opera to play through, exploring its galaxy in a top-down view, shooting up miscreants, scanning planets for resources, and sending down away teams to harvest them. Want GTA 6 news? Sign up to the GameCentral newsletter for the latest GTA 6 news, reviews of new games you should play and exclusive analysis of the biggest stories of the week. While its space battles initially feel a bit formless, as you begin adding ships to your fleet, and upgrading their guns, missile batteries, turrets, shields, and more, engagements get a little more tactical; your growing potency is a satisfying match to the increasingly dangerous sectors you’re tasked with taming. Its default view is a bit too zoomed in to be useful, especially when there are a lot of enemies to contend with, but its systems work, it has a proper plot and characters, and its upgrades and ship unlocks are compelling. With a free trial and minimal fee for the full game, this is a real bargain. Score: 7/10 Monster Hunter Outlanders iOS & Android, free (Level Infinite) Capcom’s behemoth action role-player makes its way to mobile, with more socially orientated mythical beast killing, this time on the new island Aesoland, where the element radiantite has mutated familiar monsters from the series into novel forms. It has two control methods, one of which handles much of the game’s traditional complexity for you, the other giving you full command, which without a controller can be a lot to take on. It works, leaving you to concentrate on exploring expectedly vertiginous environments in search of quarry, either with friends or accompanied by a party your phone controls for you. Hunts are shorter than those in its big screen forebears, although it still takes a good few minutes to whittle away larger monsters’ health bars and there are several slow-to-earn currencies that provide the first clue about the game’s real motivations, but provided you don’t mind a lot of grind fans of the series will find much to like here. Score: 7/10 Ratchet & Clank: Ranger Rumble iOS, free (PlayStation Mobile) Another blockbuster console game reinvented for mobile, this time with a multiplayer twist that puts PlayStation’s Ratchet & Clank into a series of colourful arena-based matches that involve variously shooting, punching, and blowing up opponents. As you play you unlock new characters, special moves, weapons, and play modes that include king of the hill, team and individual deathmatches, first player to collect 300 bolts, and plenty more. You can also upgrade your avatars, gaining more damage and hit points, keeping you competitive as you progress through its levels. It may not have tremendous depth, but it looks good, has short, moderately intense rounds and movement is steady enough that its touch controls rarely get in the way. Compared with most of Nintendo’s tawdry mobile offerings this is a highly effective repurposing of a well-loved IP. It’s just a shame it canned before it even got a proper worldwide launch. Score: 7/10 Hand-drawn artwork (Ivan Onoprienko) Doodle, Please! – Draw Physics iOS, free – full game £8.99 (Ivan Onoprienko) Physics-based puzzle games are an excellent match for touchscreens, letting you interact with their moving parts smoothly and intuitively. Doodle, Please! is one such game, its hand drawn good looks and graph paper backdrop making it look like playing a living doodle. Your job is to guide a stickman to an exit flag by drawing in bridges, climbable chains, swings, and props to guide him there. On such a small screen it can be tricky drawing in components accurately enough, with even tiny divots in your finger-drawn lines enough to deflect its protagonist or knock bridges into oblivion, forcing a restart. Still, there are lots of puzzles to work your way through, that contain a real variety of different assault courses, your stickman gamely doing his best to scramble the last few millimetres when items don’t perfectly line up. A fun and mentally invigorating set of challenges. Score: 6/10 Saints Row: The Third iOS & Android, £12.99 (Feral Interactive) Grand Theft Auto’s chaotic open world has inspired numerous attempts at replicating its addictively kinetic freedom, a feature that Saints Row really cranks up to 11. This instalment sees the Third Street Saints morph from street gang into blinging media conglomerate, which is just an excuse to ladle on even more ludicrous levels of cartoon ultra violence. Guns have infinite ammunition and massive clips, there are innumerable vehicles to unlock and planes to fly, unleashing floods of mechanised destruction in the franchise’s trademark janky, throwaway action that turns out to be very well suited to a small screen, largely thanks to Feral Interactive’s customary technical excellence and attention to detail. Silly, sweary, and wantonly puerile, subtle this is not, but if you’re looking for wildly over the top action and slightly wobbly Michael Bay style set pieces, this will be just the ticket, its primitive thrills actually sitting comfortably well on mobile. Score: 7/10 River City Survivors: Downtown Of The Dead iOS, include with Apple Arcade subscription (Arc System Works) Another day, another take on Vampire Survivors, this time with a Streets Of Rage twist that has you hitting two onscreen attack buttons to take on the hordes of pixel art undead that constantly threaten to overwhelm you. As usual, you need to balance your time between attacking and circling back to pick up the experience points enemies drop when they die, with extras awarded for taking on randomly occurring events that drop in mid-level bosses or civilians to protect. Its fairly mindless action is elevated by special moves that get inspiringly destructive after a couple of rounds of upgrades, a surprisingly taxing difficulty level, and a plethora of short terms objectives, achievements, and routes to longer term upgrades, that make each level part of much broader meta goals. Progress feels constantly rewarding, adding a welcome sense of purpose to the ongoing grind. Score: 8/10 Juno And The Dragon King iOS, £4.99 (Darren & Robyn Crozier) While we always welcome Reader’s Features, it’s not often those submissions extend to fully playable commercially released video games, but that’s exactly what Juno And The Dragon King is. Made by Darren Crozier and his seven-year-old daughter Robyn, this is a spiritual successor to C64 classic Flimbo’s Quest, its lovingly designed platforming and shooting action delightfully reminiscent of that bygone 8-bit era. Each of its 2D, multi-layered parallax scrolling levels contains coins to pick up, collectible letters that spell out words, secret rooms, and numerous monsters to shoot, both flying and ambulatory. There are no ads or microtransactions and its shops use purely in-game currency to vend their fun cosmetic and gameplay upgrades. With a gradually escalating difficulty over 10 stages, it’s been comprehensively play tested to ensure it’s well suited to younger gamers and while it may have less appeal to seasoned players, if you have primary school age children in the house this is perfectly tailored to their sensibilities without ever feeling patronising. We look forward very much to seeing what this talented father and daughter team cook up next. Child tested (Darren & Robyn Crozier) Email gamecentral@metro.co.uk, leave a comment below, follow us on Twitter. To submit Inbox letters and Reader’s Features more easily, without the need to send an email, just use our Submit Stuff page here. For more stories like this, check our Gaming page. Arrow MORE: Scalpers are trying to sell Zelda: Ocarina Of Time remake bonuses for over £700 Arrow MORE: You can play 007 First Light’s first mission for free right now Arrow MORE: Nintendo confirms more remakes but will Zelda: Majora’s Mask be next? GameCentral Get the latest GTA 6 news, reviews of new games you should play and exclusive analysis of the biggest stories of the week.