A deep dive into the Apple Arcade—Part One

My new iPad Air came with a surprise (at least, to me): A three-month trial to Apple Arcade.

I thought if I'm going to trial it, I should really trial it. And what better way to do that than by playing everything they offer? So over the last few days, I have downloaded, launched, played a bit of, taken some very brief notes on, and (in most cases) deleted a total of 139 141^*Two more games were released during the writeup of this series. games.

Here's what's in each part of the series:

• Part One: The part you're reading now, it covers what I look for in games, some general observations on the games in the Arcade, and the lengthy list of games that didn't make my first cut.
• Part Two: A slightly deeper look at the first half of the games I felt merited additional time for playing and testing.
• Part Three: A slightly deeper look at the second half of the games I felt merited additional time for playing and testing.
• Part Four: The first half of my set of definite keeper games.
• Part Five The second half of my set of definite keeper games, including my two favorites.
• Part Six: Wrapping it all up.

I am not going to begin to pretend I will post a full review of each of these games. For most of them, in fact, I can provide only a passing first impression based on my one-time testing of each game.

Obviously, my conclusions on these games are based on what I find enjoyable in a game—even more particularly, in an iOS game. With that in mind, here are the rules I applied to this collection of 139 games…

1. My main requirement is this: I want an iOS game to be quick to load and start playing the first time I try it. My iOS device isn't a console or a PC or a Mac, it's a device that I may only have a few minutes to use, and I'm just looking for something enjoyable to do during that time.
2. Rule One does not preclude long-duration games—be they adventure, exploration, or puzzle solving games. However, if the game has a backstory that requires 10 minutes to read or tap through—even one time—then it's not a game I'm going to keep.
3. As a general rule, I do not play these genres of games: Fighting games, endless runner games, real time strategy games, sports team management simulations, games that rely on perfectly-timed reflex actions, "hold a conversation" games, and tower defense games. Of course, all rules have exceptions, so there may be some in my list.
4. For iOS, I prefer not to use a gamepad; the whole idea of an iOS game is a gaming-to-go experience, and I don't want to carry a gamepad around with me.
5. I don't generally like iOS games that require using one hand to move the character, and the other to manipulate a camera—without a gamepad, I generally find that I can't do this smoothly, and wind up feeling ill with the camera moving around too much.

With those rules in mind, you'll probably disagree with the selections I made, as your taste in gaming probably differs from mine. But before we get to the games, some general observations about the Arcade.

While testing 139 games, some high-level observations quickly became apparent—some I expected, some I did not. The first one was quite a surprise…

Many of the games are huge

When I started the installations, my iPad Air had over 180GB of free space. I figured that'd be plenty to install all 139 games—by way of comparison, I currently have only four games that are over 1GB. Well, I was wrong. Really wrong. Here's a look at my iPad storage with a screenshot taken sometime during testing…

The red-starred games are Apple Arcade games; view the full screenshot, and you'll see there are seven on the list. If you're on a minimum-storage-size iOS device, you won't be loading too many of these on at the same time. I was able to fit 104 before my iPad filled up…and that's when I learned that I hadn't disabled the "automatically install App Store apps on this device" feature on my iPhone. It was not very happy with me, as it was completely out of space. Oops.

So I wound up doing my testing in two batches. If you're planning on installing and keeping all the Apple Arcade games, it'd be best to get yourself a 1TB iPad Pro!

When I started taking notes, I'd write "impressive visuals." But soon I stopped, because I was writing that for every entry. Of the entire set, there was only one game where the visuals weren't quite so appealing, and that's because it's designed to look like a very retro pixelated black and white game. Here's a quick sampling of just a few games; while the styles all differ, I found them all visually well done:

You can get a good sense for the art in the games by browsing Apple's Arcade page, or click any of the links in the app table further along this article.

Although there were a handful of apps where I found the audio annoying, in most of the games, it was nicely balanced—music wasn't too loud, effects were lound enough to hear. A handful of the games recommend headphones for the best experience, and that's how I tested most of the time.

There is, however, one bit of in-game audio present in every game that gets annoying very quickly…

That splash screen loads for every game in the Arcade…along with the beep. Sure, it's only a second or two, but it's there every time you play the game. That gets old. How about just a small overlay that says Apple Arcade for a few seconds, on top of whatever the game is loading?

This one doesn't apply exclusively to games in the Apple Arcade, of course, but the number of pre-game "logo splash" screens seems to be increasing, and each one interferes with my desire to quickly get into an iOS game. Games with just the Apple Arcade "welcome" screen (with annoying sound effect) were rare. Many games had only one more after that, but quite a few had at least two or three more after Apple's screen. Ugh.

Here's an idea, Apple: Require developers to use one logo splash screen, and tell them they have to figure out how to put two or three logos on that single screen—it shouldn't be too hard. Mutliple splash screens aren't fun for the user.

I think I counted a total of five sports games, and that includes a couple that only marginally make the cut as "sports." Traditional auto racing games—as opposed to arcade-racing games—are entirely missing. There are exactly two word games. There might be one card game. There's one jigsaw puzzle game (and it's tough). There are no traditional hunting games.

What is there is a diverse mix, but it's not as diverse a mix as in the Games section of the main App Store.

This one really bugs me: You launch a game, watch the logo splash screens, and then are forced to watch (and perhaps marginally participate in) some long drawn out scene that lays out the story of the game, your character's background, the environment, and whatever else the developers think you might need to know.

I understand that some games are complex and require explanations, but many of the games I tried had multiple minutes' worth (yes, minutes) of prologue material where my involvement was either zero or tapping the screen a few times. Some games will allow you to skip these scenes. But not all games.

Here's a 30-second edit from the worst offender I ran into, Jenny LeClue; the red clock is how long the intro has been running; the green clock is how long I've been interacting with the game during the intro.

Yes, the intro to Jenny LeClue runs over eleven minutes long (with only a couple minutes' interactive time)—and if there's a way to skip it or bypass it, I didn't find it.

To me, this is inexcusable—if I hadn't been working on this writeup, there's no way I would have sat through eleven minutes of backstory. Put the backstory in a button on the home screen, or work it into the story itself—anything other than make a user sit through an eleven minute video!

Any multi-minute-long intro has no place in an iOS game, in my opinion.

I mentioned I dislike iOS games that have a movement control on one side of the screen and a camera control on the other. Unfortunately, there were many of these in the Arcade. With a controller, I think I'd probably do much better, but trying to use both sides of the screen at the same time means that your hands are covering more of the screen so you can see less, and for me, it's really hard to get fine grained control over the camera's motions.

There were a handful of games that even displayed some form of "works best with a controller" message during loading. Using a controller also means (obviously) placing the iPad on a surface or a stand, so that's another thing to consider if I want to use the controller.

For me, iOS gaming is first and foremost about ease of use, and a controller interferes with ease of use.

Of the entire collection of 139 games, I believe there were at most three or four that ran in portrait mode. Everything else was done in the more-cinematic landscape mode.

For those games that save your progress in your quest or adventure or whatever, those saves are almost universally automatic—I saw many warnings about "do not quit the game when you see the 'saving progress' symbol onscreen." There were only a couple of games that I tested where you had to save progress on your own, though some offered both manual and automatic saves.

This is, I think, a good thing in general—having to remember to save your progress can be annoying. However, if the auto-save spots are far apart and you decide to stop playing before you reach one, you may have to backtrack the next time you play.

Of the 139 games, fully 111 (80%—the 80/20 rule again?!) held no interest for me. Granted, this is based on—at most—a few minutes of actual gameplay, so it's possible I missed some hidden gem. But generally, I can tell quite quickly whether a game is going to hold my interest or not.

Very important note: Just because I didn't like a particular game, that doesn't mean it's a bad game. Far from it—the amount of effort put into each one of these titles is visible in the quality of the graphics, the sound, and the gameplay. It's just that, for these titles, the gameplay didn't line up with my interests in gaming.

Each entry in this table is linked to its App Store page—just click on the app's name to jump directly there.

Tomorrow, a look at the titles that made the first cut, divided into two separate posts just because they're somewhat lengthy.

Note: All logos and game images used here are copyright by the original copyright holders; they are used here solely for the purpose of review and commentary.