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

Lara Croft And The Temple Of Osiris – now available on mobile (Feral Interactive) A new Lara Croft game is available on mobile phones this month, along with top notch puzzle game Servant Of The Lake, and new Ball x Pit DLC. So far, there’s no indication that GTA 6 will influence the release schedules of mobile games, but with Rockstar Games’ juggernaut set to divert people’s attention away from literally everything else, including smartphones, you’ll still need to be brave or foolhardy to launch too close to it. As a result, September is incredibly busy when it comes to new console and PC games, but for mobile it’s relatively normal. Although it’s perhaps surprising that so far there’s been no sign of a GTA clone to try and take advantage of the situation. Instead, you can look forward to the completely free final update to the brilliant Ball x Pit, eagerly awaited new Rusty Lake puzzle game Servant Of The Lake, and mellow idle fish husbandry sim Chillquarium. Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor – Heavy Duty Expansion Expert, exclusive gaming analysis Sign up to the GameCentral newsletter for a unique take on the week in gaming, alongside the latest reviews and more. Delivered to your inbox every Saturday morning. iOS, £8.99 (Ghost Ship) Taking Deep Rock Galactic’s dwarves and mining setting, and combining it with Vampire Survivors’ swarm management, the result was a fun top-down shooter that also had you mining your way through tons of rock. That gameplay loop may eventually get a little stale, but its recently released Heavy Duty expansion is a good antidote. It comes with a new character class, called the Demolisher, which drives the Rockdozer – a sort of JCB that shoots flames out of its rear end. That’s a useful ability when you’re continually being followed around by swarms of enemies, that you can now conveniently immolate as you explore. There’s also a bunch of extra weapons; the new Egg Hunt mission type, where you mine your way towards alien ova, before taking down a multi-tentacled Brood Nexus boss, and Endless Mode, which rather than concluding with a boss fight, let’s you keep fighting and mining until you’re finally overwhelmed by the horde. At almost the same price as the game itself it’s expensive, especially by mobile standards, but if you’re still enjoying Galactic: Survivor, this certainly gives it a fresh lease of life. Score: 7/10 Ball x Pit: The Naturalist iOS and Android, free update (Devolver Digital) Ball x Pit’s masterful blend of Breakout and Balatro’s brand of exponential stat boosting is enormously addictive, its mobile implementation proving just as playable without needing to resort to a Bluetooth controller. The Naturalist update is a free piece of DLC that adds two new characters and a raft of extra ball types and abilities. The Ballbearer gives you double the usual number of slots for balls to aim and shoot, but no space for passive buffs, while The Hoary Hoarder is the opposite, with just two ball slots, but twice the default number of power-ups, making his access to powerful Evolutions his biggest strength. Their contrasting play styles, along with the new varieties of ball and passive ability – which work with all of your currently unlocked characters – are a breath of fresh air and good reason to return to this exceptionally moreish game. Score: 9/10 Lara Croft And The Temple Of Osiris iOS & Android, £7.49 (Feral Interactive) Not a mainline Tomb Raider, but spiritual successor to Lara Croft And The Guardian Of Light, this reuses that game’s isometric view and builds on its co-op mode, letting you play with up to three friends. Along with generally lightweight puzzles, there’s quite a bit of twin stick shooting action, using Lara’s standard issue pistols and the Staff of Osiris. While all of that’s perfectly good, it’s just not quite as much fun as Guardian Of Light was. As usual, Feral Interactive’s port is first rate. You’ll need a newer phone to play it, but provided you have that, its implementation of touchscreen controls offers both a standard fixed interface and one with simplified, context sensitive interactions – which works even better. Considering this is an action game, something fundamentally at odds with onscreen controls, it’s an impressive feat. Score: 7/10 Chillquarium iOS & Android, free (Snapbreak) There’s something very relaxing about idle games; the timing and dexterity tests of conventional video games replaced with incremental upgrades, stress free decision making, and bonuses that accrue even while you’re not playing. Chillquarium has just that feel, its core gameplay consisting of buying randomised packs of baby fish using in-game currency, then raising them to maturity. You can do that simply by waiting, but tapping the screen to feed them speeds up the process. Each fish you own earns money every day they live in your tank and once they’re grown up you can sell them, using the proceeds to buy more fish and upgrades for your aquarium, sorry, Chillquarium. You’re forced to watch ads every few minutes, but they’re short and inoffensive, and at least in the first few hours the sense of progression is gratifying. It may not be the most complex game but being able to look at your increasingly extensive and exotic pixel art brood turns out to be a reward all on its own. Score: 6/10 Servant Of The Lake iOS & Android, £4.99 (Rusty Lake) Developer Rusty Lake specialise in tactile, surreal, and delightfully sinister touchscreen puzzle games, presented using an idiosyncratically minimalist art style. Servant Of The Lake fits perfectly into their oeuvre. You’re the new servant at a lake house owned by a deeply unsettling family, whose every whim you must attend to for three days. You do that by solving point ‘n’ click puzzles built into environments that despite their outward austerity, manage to disguise a huge amount of hidden detail – the way your attention is gently led towards clues is a masterclass in subtlety. Its music, deadpan humour, and puzzles, that sit within the game’s twisted yet consistent logic, are a pleasure to solve, some taking a satisfying degree of head=scratching before reaching the inevitable eureka moment. Score: 8/10 Galactic Outlaw: Tower Defence iOS, free (Purplecow) Your tiny cartoon cowboy stands alone at the bottom of the screen, shooting upwards to whittle away incoming space invaders before they can reach and damage a forcefield that rests just above his head. Destroying enemies grants experience, giving you a choice of new missiles and power-ups every few seconds, their damage stacking impressively if you repeatedly upgrade the same weapon. It’s quite compelling until you realise that you don’t actually need to move the cowboy, his auto-aim targeting the nearest enemy without you doing anything at all. And since special moves work autonomously, all that leaves you to do is choose power-ups. Perhaps the most glaring indictment is that its highest priced microtransaction is the permanent ability to speed up the game, implicitly admitting that despite high production values, it’s just not that interesting. At least it doesn’t force you to watch ads, although you are regularly incentivised to do so, and as with a great many free-to-play games, progress soon slows to a crawl in a bid to shake you down for cash to get it moving again. Score: 3/10 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: Mass Effect successor Exodus won’t let you bang the octopus party member Arrow MORE: Elden Ring director denies he has a Tarantino style foot fetish Arrow MORE: Two Nintendo Directs confirmed for next week and one is all about Zelda GameCentral Sign up for exclusive analysis, latest releases, and bonus community content.