Best-selling consoles and games in 2021 in Europe: Switch beats PS5, Xbox not named
Best-selling consoles and games in 2021 in Europe
Christopher Dring of GamesIndustry.biz - through a long series of tweets - has revealed some information on the European market, precisely indicating the consoles and the best-selling games in 2021 in Europe. Switch beats PS5 in various nations, while Xbox isn't even named.Going in order, Dring talks about best-selling consoles and claims that Nintendo Switch has "dominated in a lot of European territories, but PS5 looks poised to to be the number 1 console in the UK and other small markets such as Sweden, Denmark and Finland. " Dring does not name Xbox in any way, in terms of hardware sales.
Speaking of the best-selling games, without any kind of surprise, FIFA 22 is first in Europe: the game also surpassed sales of FIFA 21 a period parity. Among the "new" games (ie released in 2021 for the first time), the only ones in the Top 10 are Call of Duty Vanguard and Super Mario 3D World + Bowser's Fury. Pokémon Shining Diamond and Shining Pearl would appear in the Top 10 if they were counted as one game. Far Cry 6 may be able to make it to the rankings: it still has some time to close 2021 and rack up more sales. Dring does not list FIFA 2 as a "new" game, apparently.
One of the tractors from Farming Simulator 22 It is later said that Farming Simulator 22 was able to sell more than Skywards Sword HD, Ratchet & Clank Rift Apart, Monster Hunter Rise, Forza Horizon 5 and Guardians of the Galaxy in Europe.
Analyzing only the new IPs of 2021, in Europe the most successful is It Takes Two, well above Outriders. Metroid Dread is later said to be only 23rd, behind New Pokémon Snap and ahead of Super Mario 3D All-Stars.
Speaking precisely of PS5, FIFA 22 is the best-selling, just above Spider-Man. Resident Evil Village is instead the fifth. With Xbox, Dring explains, the matter is complicated as Xbox One games automatically upgrade to Xbox Series X | S, but Dring believes FIFA 22 is best-selling on Microsoft's console as well. Forza Horizon 5 is fourth.
The data - just collected - is a couple of weeks old, so there is still time for a few small changes.
Source Did you notice any errors?
The best iPhone games 2021
We've rounded up the best iPhone games you can download today, whatever genre you're interested in. From strategy games to shooters, sports games, racing games and more, you'll find every key genre covered on a separate page in this guide, so you can jump straight to what you're interested in.
There are loads of top games to choose from in each genre too, with the App Store being one of the most vibrant gaming ecosystems around, and Apple's powerful phones rivaling the Nintendo Switch as the best portable consoles available.
So if you're a gamer, these are the phones for you, and whether you've just got an iPhone for the first time or you're simply looking to add to your library, you've come to the right place.
We’ll also highlight one new game every month, so remember to check back regularly to get a taste of the latest game to consume your waking hours.
Genshin Impact was Voted Best Mobile Game at the TechRadar Choice Awards 2021
iPhone game of the month
($4.99/£4.49/AU$7.99)
Townscaper lives in the App Store’s games section, but it’s more an open-ended meditative toy. Rather than tapping the screen to play sounds or trigger abstract patterns, you instead build island communities that sit atop an endless sea.
The controls are simple: tap to add a component and tap-hold to remove one. Townscaper deals with everything else, dynamically aligning buildings to its irregular grid, and upgrading or demoting building types, depending on how many blocks are added together.
This is delightful stuff and properly zone-out fare, from the splashy plop you hear on adding your first house to the way you can experiment with colors to create rainbow-like hamlets. Towns are auto-saved when you create a new one, and tools exist in a sidebar to move the sun, should you want an atmospheric night-time vibe when reworking your towns during the wee small hours.
The best iPhone strategy gamesThese are our favorite iPhone card games, RTS and turn-based strategy titles, and board games to check out right now.
($6.99/£6.99/AU$10.99)
Meteorfall: Krumit’s Tale feels like the ultimate evolution of games that combine turn-based strategy, deck building and RPGs, and then squash the resulting playfield into a tiny grid. Your aim is to defeat foes that exist in a three-by-three playfield, by carefully utilizing cards. But rather than cards being dealt into your hand, they are bought or discarded from the grid for money.
Every decision you make involves weighing up risk versus reward, whether you’re grabbing a weapon, selling armor, or deciding to take on an enemy. This can be overwhelming at first, and your first few goes will likely result in a swift demise. But stick it out and you’ll find Krumit’s Tale a deeply rewarding strategy title, blessed with fantastic art, a wide range of game modes, and enough depth to keep you refining strategies for months.
($4.99/£4.99/AU$7.99)
Kingdom Two Crowns is an iPhone game that kicks things off with a monarch on horseback, using his handful of gold coins to have locals do his bidding. Train archers and they set out to hunt local wildlife for dinner. Elsewhere, fences are erected to turn your ramshackle campfire into a slightly less ramshackle fortress.
This is just as well, because when the sun sets, the Greed arrive. These ghoulish beasts exist to steal things. If they nab your workers’ tools, you’ll have to spend to upgrade them again. If they get your crown, your reign is over, and it’ll be down to your heir to figure out how to defeat the Greed once and for all.
With its lush pixel art, large side-scrolling landscapes, and smart mix of real-time strategy and action, Kingdom Two Crowns is a mobile masterpiece.
(Free + $2.99/£2.99/AU$4.99)
Peak’s Edge joins an increasingly impressive sub-genre of sorts on iPhone: turn-based strategy games in a shoebox. Here, your little pyramid trundles around single-screen levels, aiming to smack enemies into oblivion and reach a goal.
Much of the strategy lies in the various power-ups that are dotted about. Roll on to one and it’s applied to that face of your pyramid. Defeating foes subsequently relies on correctly orienting yourself before attack.
Quickly, it becomes apparent that Peak’s Edge is easy to get into, but tough to master – and with procedurally generated levels, 25 skills, and 30 armor types, there’s loads to dig into. Note that although you can play for free, we’re treating this as a premium game, because IAP rids the title of intrusive ads, and unlocks the unlimited undos you’ll need to have the best experience.
($1.99/£1.99/AU$2.99)
Maze Machina finds you as a mouse in a maze. Unfortunately, it’s not a cardboard creation with cheese at the end, but a bewilderingly complex clockwork construction crafted by an unhinged robot testing his mini-mes.
The aim is to get to a key and then an exit. But every tile on the four-by-four grid acts as a power-up. As you swipe to move, everything else on the grid follows suit. You must therefore strategize to forge a path to your goal, not get impaled by tiny stabby robots, and avoid inconveniently blowing up the key with a bomb.
Every game feels like a new challenge with limitless combinations. But the slide-based mechanics make it approachable. It’s an excellent example of ‘simple to play, hard to master’, brilliantly compressing oodles of strategy into tiny spaces and short games.
($2.99/£2.99/AU$4.99)
Starbeard features a race of space gnomes, attempting to defend their gardens from aliens that look an awful lot like garden pests. But in order to stab them, you must engage your brain rather than your sword arm, because Starbeard is a match puzzler.
The game happily plays with conventions. You can only move items on the bottom of each column, and your protagonist’s position within the grid is key when it comes to engaging bugs. However, your attacks rely on actions that only become available if fully charged by you matching certain items.
Starbeard therefore gives you something more than a typical gem matcher, demanding you think several moves ahead; and the strategy the game’s set-up demands ensures victory over those nasty bugs depends on your brain, rather than the dexterity of your digits.
($2.99/£2.99/AU$4.99)
P1 Select is a single-screen dungeon crawler with a twist. At the bottom half of the screen is a basic maze, with its walls, monsters, bling, and an exit. At the top half is a player select grid. As you move within the maze (in turn-based fashion), the player selection shifts accordingly.
This is, to put it mildly, perplexing. At first, P1 Select merrily smashes your brain out with a brick. Even though the game has just nine screens, getting to the end seems like a daunting prospect.
At some point, it just clicks. You figure out how to goad monsters, and better switch between players. Then you can work on improving your strategy – a must, given that your high score is actually an average of recent runs. Thinky stuff, then, and all the better for it.
($4.99/£4.99/AU$7.99)
Kingdom Rush Vengeance is the latest entry in mobile gaming’s foremost tower defense series. As ever, the basics involve using resources to buy towers that stem the flow of adversaries. If too many of them reach their goal, you’re defeated and must try again.
The twist – at least from a storyline perspective – is that you’re the bad guy. Vez’nan the wizard has had enough, and is now on the rampage, attacking his nemeses. (How this is achieved through tower defense, we’ve no idea, but, well, video games.)
It’s visually smart, with varied levels, plus added strategy in the form of heroes to deploy and special powers to unleash. Even though it’s a touch fiddly on iPhone, and gates some towers and heroes behind IAP, Vengeance should be immediately snapped up by any fan of the genre.
($3.99/£3.99/AU$5.99)
Twinfold initially comes across a bit like iOS tile-sliding match classic Threes! You move cards within a claustrophobic grid, aiming to match pairs and double their face value, and cards all sport expressions, imbuing them with the kind of personality typically absent from such games.
Very rapidly, though, you realize Twinfold has more in common with turn-based dungeon crawlers than puzzlers. Your aim is primarily to survive; and this requires you learn and master rules and powers that enable you to efficiently deal with enemies roaming the mazes that shift and change every time you gulp down an energy-giving yellow card.
Despite the tight confines of the arena, there’s loads of depth here – but it sits behind a vibrant and inviting interface that ensures immediacy and accessibility. Top stuff.
($4.99/£4.99/AU$7.99)
Euclidean Skies takes the framework behind iOS classic Euclidean Lands and stretches it to breaking point. Lands had you move in turn-based fashion on floating structures akin to Rubik’s Cubes, attacking nearby foes in chess-like fashion. Manipulating the landscape was as important as the direction of your next step. But in Skies, the land itself can be pulled to pieces.
This means the original’s quiet clockwork elegance has been replaced with a kind of brain-thumping chaos. You may be tasked with obliterating a giant monster’s spine by reworking the landscape, or figuring out how to simultaneously carve a pathway to a switch and some doors.
It’s hard work, but hugely rewarding; and even though the game’s a touch fiddly on the smaller screen, iCloud sync means you can always pick up from where you left off on your iPad.
($3.99/£3.99/AU$5.99)
Reigns: Game of Thrones slaps a famous license on now-familiar Tinder-meets-kingdom management larks from the original Reigns, and follow-up Reigns: Her Majesty. You tend to the needs and desires of your subjects and enemies, keeping the army, church, people and bank happy – but not to the point they’ll instigate your untimely demise.
Flick cards left or right and your approval ratings change accordingly – and sometimes unpredictably. Quests and themes run throughout, providing surprising depth, given the basic nature of your interactions.
The writing is great, although the game is more enjoyable if you’re a fan of the TV show on which it’s based. But even if you’re a newcomer, this Reigns is fun, with you seeing how far you can get into its complex narrative web before being brutally taken down by any number of foes.
(free + $19.99/£19.99/AU$30.99 IAP)
Sid Meier's Civilization VI is one of the PC’s finest 4X (eXplore; eXpand; eXploit; eXterminate) strategy titles. Its turn-based shenanigans have you explore a brand-new world, aiming to be the dominant civilization through conquering space, getting absurdly rich, or giving everyone else a kicking until your mob’s the only one left standing.
When the game arrived for iPad, that was an eye-opener, but now it’s on your iPhone. This isn’t a cut-back, cartoonish take either – it’s the full experience.
There are drawbacks beyond the high price – the game’s a touch fiddly on a phone, requires powerful hardware, and lacks cloud save sync. We’d love to play a few turns on the train and continue later on an iPad. Gripes aside, this game showcases the potential for immersive AAA experiences on iPhone like no other.
($2.99/£2.99/AU$4.49)
Card Crawl is solitaire reimagined as a dungeon crawler – or perhaps the other way around. Regardless, it pits you against a grumpy ogre’s deck of 54 cards. During each round, he deals four cards, which may be a mix of weapons, potions, spells, and hideous enemies.
Your own four slots are for the adventurer, your two hands, and a backpack to stash items in for later. The adventurer’s health is diminished when fighting monsters (unless armed), but you can counter by getting stabby with swords (or hiding behind a shield, like a coward).
Games are brief – only a few minutes long – but Card Crawl manages to balance randomness and strategy. Over time, you can unlock new abilities and figure out strategies to boost your high scores. It’s a polished, entertaining and clever take on card games that’s ideal for iPhone.
($1.99/£1.99/AU$2.99)
High-octane card games don’t seem the greatest fit for iPhone gaming, but Exploding Kittens perfectly captures the manic chaos of the Oatmeal-illustrated original. As per that version, this is Russian roulette with detonating cats.
Players take turns to grab a card, and if they get an exploding kitten, they must defuse it or very abruptly find themselves out of the game.
Strategy comes by way of action cards, which enable you to peek at the deck, skip a turn, steal cards from an opponent, and draw from the bottom of the deck “like the baby you are”.
Local and online multiplayer is supported, timers stop people from dawdling, and a ‘chance of kitten’ meter helps everyone keep track of the odds. Large hands of cards rather irritatingly require quite a bit of swiping to peruse (although cards can be reordered), but otherwise this is first-rate and amusingly deranged multiplayer mayhem.
($4.99/£4.99/AU$7.99)
Nintendo fans probably wonder why the big N hasn't yet brought the superb Advance Wars to iPad, but Warbits now scratches that particular itch. However, although Warbits is influenced by Nintendo's turn-based strategy title, it isn't a copy — the iOS game brings plenty of new thinking to the table and is very much optimised for the iPad.
Working with 16 varied units, you conquer a series of battlefields by directing your troops, making careful note of your strengths and the enemy's relevant weaknesses. All the while, Warbits merrily has you and your opponent trading barbs, often about subjects such as whether tomatoes are fruit, because that's the kind of thing you'd go to war over.
Finish the 20-mission campaign and you'll have a decent grasp of Warbits, and can then venture online to take on other human players across dozens of different maps. With superb visuals, enough new ideas over the game that inspired it, and a single one-off price-tag, Warbits is a must-buy for any iPhone-owning strategy nut.
