The Best Looking Mobile Video Games

In just a few years, smartphones, and now tablets, have come from being just communications and productivity devices to powerful entertainment devices that can rival, and often surpass dedicated portable game consoles, at least in sheer graphics prowess, if not in gameplay. And this trend is just beginning: what has happened to PC gaming in the past 15 years, will happen to mobile gaming, but in the next 5 years, and it will blow us away. Let's take a look at some of the best looking games out there.

The Games

New games are popping out everyday, but there are games that stand above the crowd and I've chosen a select few as references for this article.

Infinity Blade: there's no way around it, by leveraging years of man-hours put into the Unreal Engine, the Infinity Blade team has produced a remarkable game that is not only beautiful (see introduction image), but also uniquely adapted to the touch screen interface. (available on iOS)

Reckless Racing is a dirt-road racing game with a bird's view of the track. It features detailed textures and a beautiful environment. As the race goes on, you can see details like dirt particles being ejected by sliding cars or water flowing smoothly in the river. Cars also leave a trail of burned rubber as they slide around the tight U-turns.. (available on Android)

In a slightly different style, Bang Bang Racing is another racing game that has very nice high-resolution graphics that are, in my opinion, less "noisy" than Reckless Racing, which gives it a "cleaner" look. There again, the action is smooth, and there are plenty of smoke and other particle effects that add eye-candy. (available on Android)

Samurai II : Vengeance is a "beat-them-up" game that can run as fast as 60 frames per second on select devices. The action happens in medieval Japan and the hero is a Ronin (a Samurai without a master) who seeks vengeance for the death of his love. I've always said that good action games must have a scenario that fits on a smurf's kleenex, and that's definitely the case here. the Samurai II designers have chosen very stylized graphics that allow for great-looking graphics, while keeping the polygon count (relatively) low, and the frame rate high! Warning: this is probably too "gory" for the young ones, but hey, adults can play too. (available on Android)

DeadSpace: there's nothing like a space-thriller to occupy your evenings. Everything happens in space when a ship's distress call is answered by a rescue team, which will soon find themselves fighting for their lives against monsters and "zombified" crew members. Originally built for more powerful platform, the development team did a good job at porting the game to mobile devices. (available on iOS)

Gears is a physics-based roller in which you have to guide the ball across different levels and pick-up powers. The difficulty is that the whole (made of gears, hence the name) is in constant motion and it's very easy to slip. However, it's not hard to imagine that players would definitely want to go to the next level, just to see how it looks. This game works only on recent mobile hardware, so it can use high-resolution graphics that provides a crisp image. "frustrating, but in a good way", says a player.

Why is it moving so fast?

Mobile games looked like this only a couple years ago

As you can see, mobile games have come a long way just in a short few years, and I can already tell you that the pace of innovation is going to accelerate. Why? Because the mobile industry is basically using knowledge that has been accumulated for more than two decades of hard work by the Console and PC gaming industry. Everything that developers have learned, with the exception of the unique form factor, can be re-used and improved upon, once again.

It's like going back in time and start high-school again... well, it would work out great if you were a game developer :). And although games have come a long way, there are certainly a lot more room for progress in the months and years ahead.

Conclusion

The good news is that this is all fueled by a stream of steady speed increase of the central and graphics processing units, and there is no sign that this will slow down in the foreseeable future. This article shows you a small sampling of the best-looking games out there, but one thing is for sure: a lot more is coming!

Did you expect things to go this fast? What are your favorite game genres?

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Ubergizmo loves gadgets and the technologies that make the gadgets go. We are geeks to the core, but while we talk geek, we also talk electronics in a way that our grandparents can understand. We take everything into consideration from design, to user interface to practicality, pricing and competition.We make lists to help you decide what gadgets you need (or don't). And we deliver live coverage at conferences like CES, E3, Mobile World Congress, CTIA, DEMO and GDC, so our readers can feel like they are there with us. If it's cool, we are covering it. Hubert Nguyen is the co-founder and editor of Ubergizmo. He is a retired engineer who programmed special-effects demos at NVIDIA. Hubert also managed the developer education program and edited the GPU Gems 3 book. Before joining NVIDIA, Hubert was at 3dfx interactive. Prior to that, he worked on 3D-Engines in various video games.