It's fair to say that one of the biggest gaming debacles of 2018 has been the extremely-poorly-received announcement that the Diablo series was coming to mobile in the form of Diablo Immortal. Although it will no doubt be a huge success, both financially and in terms of player numbers, it's not something that gamers really wanted.
There's no denying, though, that mobile has a bright future in gaming and is likely to end up as the most popular gaming platform, because the barrier for entry is so much lower. We might still love our PC and console games, but with more than five billion smartphones in the world, there is no catching up for those more traditional gaming platforms.
With that in mind, here are some game series that we would actually like to see on mobile, because in our downtime for PC, we could use a little mobile gaming time on something good.
Let us know in the comments below what games you'd like to see ported to mobile.
South Park RPGs
A number of South Park games have been released over the years, most of them terrible. But South Park: The Stick of Truth and its sequel, Fractured but Whole, were great, fun romps that combined the series' classic humor with some solid RPG mechanics. Although there have been some ok-ish, dedicated mobile games for South Park, we want to see the real deal brought to our handsets so we can fling farts and insult people properly while we play.
Crawl
It might not be some major PC hit, but one of our favorite local gaming experiences with friends in the past few years has been Crawl. It challenges one player to take on the role of the hero, while up to three others take control of the monsters. When the hero dies, whoever killed them takes control, all the while everyone is upgrading their monsters, weapons, items, traps, and spells, to try and take down the end boss.
You'd need some kind of networking functionality to take full advantage of it, but crawl's simplistic controls would work perfectly well on mobile and we'd love to have another platform to be able to slay one another on.
Nintendo Classics
Many development houses of yesteryear, like Sega, have released a big back catalog of games on mobile devices, as well as PC, but Nintendo is being notoriously – and typically – slow about the transition. Despite the success of mobile games like Pokémon Go and Super Mario Run, it's not yet released much else on mobile and we want that to change.
How about the entire back catalog of Pokémon games? Where's the original Super Mario Bros or Legend of Zelda? These games have simple control mechanics that would easily translate to smartphones. Emulation is fine, but where's the real deal when you need it?
Darkest Dungeon
A game that we've spent equal amounts of time raging at the RNG as we have enjoying it, Darkest Dungeon combines great Lovecraftian themes, with classic dungeon crawling, and a great sanity mechanic which keeps us coming back for more. Despite being ported to almost everything, including Android tablets, we've yet to see a mobile version of it. Dungeon Survival, a cheap knockoff of Darkest Dungeon, shows it can be done, so give us the real thing Red Hook, come on.
Frostpunk
Frostpunk is another game about depressingly fighting against the odds, though instead of undead horrors, it's the cold and human aggression. With its microcosmic focus on a single city, simplified circular building mechanics and limited decision making, it would make a great fit for mobile. Its UI wouldn't even need to change much, since it's so chunky and steampunky.
It's a pretty new game so this may be something that comes to pass too. Fingers crossed we see it on mobile in the future.