The Battle Cats

The Battle Cats is the best mobile game by far. Continuous updates for years, frequent collaborations with some really cool franchises, and a somewhat intriguing storyline. So many cats to collect, most all with amazing designs and unique gameplay mechanics. I've been playing this game since 2014 on and off, which is over half my life!

The gacha system is pretty fair and you can consistently obtain ubers through guaranteed events, as well as tickets on fests when there's a higher chance for them. This guarantees you get amazing units, especially if you roll on banners chock full of them such as The Almighties. You can also use the dark arts to seed track, and remove the gacha element entirely by seeing which cats you will roll.

The few problems I have with the game are pretty simple. Catseyes, what you use to upgrade units past its usual 30 levels, are pretty time consuming to get, mainly being obtained through Gamatoto expeditions which you'll normally only knock out 1-2 a day. On the plus side, it's passive and you just have to check in when it ends. You also can get catseye caverns events where you will blow all your catamins to get catseyes. However, even that isn't enough to keep up with how expensive upgrading gets, especially when it's bumped up to 2 catseyes per level. This somewhat impedes progress even if you have the right units. There's also busted ubers that completely control the meta and lead to power creep, and most of the time you're only going to use the same group of meta cats, but there's still quite the variety of meta cats to choose from, and it's fun to make the game a bit more interesting by using often forgotten units.

I have more hours in this than any game ive rated 5 starts (except minecraft)
This is such a cheerful game.
There is so much that keeps you coming back. Different collabs, New events, limited time units etc.
The genius of this game is that on the surface its a fairly simple "tower defence" style game. Just spawn a cat when you have enough money. But over time this becomes a strategy tactical game. And im not even kidding.
Team composition based on enemy types, variety, enemy count. How much range do enemies have. How fast are they? And for all these questions there are different team compositions to tackle them. And even then you have to strategically spawn in different types of cats to make the most use out of them. Genius.
Its a gacha game. So there is an option to buy gacha spins using real money. But the game is SUPER forgiving regarding the gacha. They give you free premium currency like its nothing. Which is a great thing.
I have put around 300 hours into this game, and im nowhere near beating it. Also the only mobile game I play. Its just simply great.

a mobile game i have 1k hours in lmao, great and varied character (cat) designs, fun strategies, a surprisingly large amount of content, love it still and lots of nostalgia from playing in 6th grade