What a crazy ride 2020 has been for all of us. There’s of course the whole business of the pandemic and the world becoming accustomed to the New Normal. Australia went up in blazes, we lost Kobe Bryant, Chadwick Boseman, and Eddie Van Halen, the world economy came crashing down, Liverpool won their first league title in 30 years, and through it all, the mobile games industry continued to grow. We saw the rise of party games, the growing influence of Twitch on popular culture, and so, so many gacha titles. Like, everywhere. With this mad year finally coming to a close, let’s look back at the top 10 free-to-play mobile games of 2020.

Among Us

If there was ever a game to remember 2020 by, it’s Among Us. In a time in history where we fear the human touch, the world turned to a game about killing, lying to, and manipulating our friends and workmates.

Among Us is the social deduction party game where a crew of spacefarers must work together to repair the damaged equipment on their starship. However, at least one of the crewmembers is an alien impostor intending to destroying the ship and its occupants through sabotage or straight-up murder.

Genshin Impact

Genshin Impact makes this list because there’s no game out there that give you more bang for your buck. For absolutely nothing at all, you can have a fully-fledged, console-quality action JRPG experience.

No, it’s not perfect. Its late-game monetisation model is heavily reliant on long grinds and gotta-catch-em-all gacha pitching, and the cliched characters and shameless utilization of tired anime tropes can be grinding on us old dogs who are no longer about that anime life. All of that is periphery though; the exploration and combat rivals any major action RPG in recent memory, and the scale of its world is absolutely mind-boggling.

If you aren’t a fan of the grind or loot boxes, keep in mind that’s late-game material meant for the most dedicated players. You can still progress through the main campaign without paying a dime.

Legends of Runeterra

Riot has shown that they’re fearless in how they expand the value of their brand, unafraid to take on established franchises. Legends of Runeterra was designed to step on the toes of Hearthstone, leveraging the League of Legends brand to capture an audience disenchanted with the direction Blizzard’s card game has taken.

But while Runeterra might look like Hearthstone at first glance, it plays nothing like it. If anything, it draws inspiration from Yu-Gi-Oh! where both players execute attacks and counterattacks in a frenzy of exchanges.

League of Legends: Wild Rift

With two excellent mobile games and a successful new shooter to boast about to investors, Riot will probably remember 2020 much more fondly than the rest of us.

League of Legends: Wild Rift is a game that proves Riot aren’t afraid to learn a few lessons from their copycats. It takes the mobile MOBA formula established by Arena of Valor and Mobile Legends and infuses it with their distinctive style. Riot has also added several quality-of-life features that give players more control over their characters, like quick-tap player icons for easy targeting.

With a more efficient and intuitive Rune system and a monetisation model that’s thankfully free of pay-to-win elements, Wild Rift is already the most player-friendly MOBA on the market.

EVE Echoes

EVE Echoes is a leaner, more streamlined reimagining of EVE Online. It pares down the features and mechanics of its desktop counterpart and hones in on the fundamentals of its gameplay: flying your ship around space and just surviving. Even with the cuts and reductions, EVE Echoes manages to keep the spirit of EVE Online intact.

In many ways, it’s a lot more fun, too. The painfully slow progression of EVE Online works much better on mobile where you can leave the game unattended for hours at a time. More importantly, EVE Echoes is still only a few months old -- the Corporations, EVE’s name for guilds, haven’t swallowed everything up yet with their spreadsheets and bean-counting. Give this crazy space game a go now while it’s still in that unpredictable, exciting wild west phase before the corporations take control.

Sky: Children of the Light

Sky: Children of the Light by thatgamecompany expands on the quasi-social multiplayer of their last title, Journey, encouraging collaboration between players while intentionally limiting communication to a library of adorable gestures. It’s experimental and whimsical with a tinge of melancholy.

Sky is an open-world adventure set atop a network of floating isles. Players are tasked with finding fallen stars and returning them to their place among the constellations. While technically you can complete the game solo, you’d be missing out on what makes Sky unique. Half of the game’s charm lies in your interactions with other players, and the process of extracting meaning from their movements is at times frustrating but more often hilarious.

Arknights

Arknights is a gacha-based tower defense game that feels as if it’s almost reluctant to sell you its loot boxes. Progress is determined solely by your skill rather than the quality of your units. Spending more money on better units will certainly make it easier to progress through the game’s increasingly challenging stages, but you can still complete them with low-ranked units and some clever tactics.

It’s refreshingly devoid of forced competitive multiplayer, even further reducing any incentive to spend gacha money. Fans of puzzle games will find Arknights a game worth investing their time on.

AnimA

Fans of classic Diablo will find a lot to like in AnimA. It’s a straightforward, dungeon crawling, hack-and-slash RPG that offers the same addictive loot-chasing fun of Diablo II but on your smartphone so you can sneak in sessions while you’re at work.

AnimA has microtransactions, but its developers seem to have taken a page out of Path of Exile’s playbook, treating in-app purchases as boosts to accelerate progress. Yes, this does mean free players will have to do quite a bit more grinding than someone who spends her money, but it’s much fairer than the genre’s current practice of locking the best gear behind paywalls.

Dragon Raja

Dragon Raja is an exceedingly stylish MMORPG set in a fantasy universe where technology has evolved beyond the medieval age. There’s fighting and adventure, sure, but Dragon Raja takes pride in its sandbox gameplay, allowing its players to make a living doing virtually anything you can imagine.

It may have combat gameplay, but Dragon Raja is a second life simulator -- a bit like the best MMORPGs of the early 2000s. If you’re longing for an MMORPG with a social focus in the vein of classic WoW or Ragnarok Online, this is just the title to scratch that itch.

GWENT: The Witcher Card Game

In a market saturated with Hearthstone clones, GWENT is unapologetically not Hearthstone. Instead of one-on-one duels between heroes, GWENT revolves around the clever use of foot soldiers, quick, on-the-fly adjustments to opponent tactics, and the manipulation of field buffs and debuffs. Because of this, combat is much more skill-based than Hearthstone, and luck plays a smaller role in determining how a match unfolds.

The standalone game has been available on PC for a while, but with its release on mobile, it feels like the game has finally found its true home.

By Andi Nuruljihad for Gamesforum