Apple Arcade added games every month this year, and most of them were plus versions of App Store hits and kids' titles. Three releases pass for console games. Six more earn a place for how they look, whether that's a full 3D city, a virtual arcade, or a set of Audubon plates. Ranked from most console to least, with the device each one wants.
The order is mine.
1. Oceanhorn 3
Oceanhorn 3
Cornfox & Brothers' Zelda-shaped action RPG, exclusive to Arcade, with a rebuilt combat system, the series' first first-person mode, and a story set a thousand years after Oceanhorn 2.
Apple Arcade
The one release this year that a console owner would mistake for a console game. It's a full 3D action RPG, five years in the making by creator Heikki Repo's count, with boss fights against the Titans, a skill tree to channel resources into, and a first-person mode the series never had. It's exclusive to Arcade, runs on iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV, and Vision Pro, and reaches back to iOS 15, so an older iPhone gets it too.
Apple's own line for it, and for once the phrase fits:
Stunning console-quality visuals and deep lore.
2. Sid Meier's Civilization® VII
Sid Meier's Civilization® VII
Firaxis's PC strategy game rebuilt around touch: the Ages system that reshapes your empire each era, saves that follow a match across iPhone, iPad, and Mac, and online play for eight.
Apple Arcade
Bring an iPad. This is the full PC game rebuilt around taps and gestures rather than cut down, and it wants a recent chip and iOS 18 to show it; on an M4 iPad Pro it runs without feeling compromised. It launched without expansions, and online multiplayer arrived after release. The look is the point: a desktop strategy game that stays a desktop strategy game on a tablet.
3. Madden NFL 27 Arcade Edition
Madden NFL 27 Arcade Edition
EA's Madden designed for Arcade rather than ported from mobile: Franchise and Quick Play, current NFL teams, ratings that move with real-world performances, and controller support.
Apple Arcade
The licensed sim with a season structure, built for the service instead of adapted from the phone game. Franchise mode runs on a weekly story engine that casts you as general manager, player ratings shift with the real NFL season, and a controller works on iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple TV. It landed on August 6, a week before the console Madden NFL 27.
EA's Evan Dexter, when it was announced:
Apple Arcade is the perfect home for Madden as a premium platform that matches the complete, no-compromise experience we've built.
4. Pocket City 2+
Pocket City 2+
Engaged Labs' city builder in full 3D, where you drop from the planning grid to street level and walk, drive, or fly the city you built.
Apple Arcade
A city builder that lets you climb down into the city as your own mayor, with day and night and four seasons rolling over the blocks you laid out. The free roam is what makes a builder look like a game instead of a spreadsheet with roofs. The plus version is the complete game, on iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV, and Vision Pro, from iOS 13.
5. True Skate+
True Skate+
True Axis's finger-flick skateboarding sim with nine parks in the Arcade build, Underpass first, and physics that reads swipe direction and strength in real time.
Apple Arcade
Realism of a different kind: the physics reads the direction and strength of your flick and answers with the board, and the parks, from Underpass out to the Valley, are proper 3D spaces with concrete that looks better than the genre usually manages, to my eye. It runs from iOS 13, which makes it the most forgiving entry here.
6. Retrocade
Retrocade
Resolution Games' virtual 1980s arcade: seven classic cabinets, Pac-Man and Galaga among them, flat on iPhone and iPad or walked around in a Los Angeles arcade on Vision Pro.
Apple Arcade
Seven cabinets, Pac-Man, Galaga, Centipede, Asteroids, Space Invaders, Breakout, and Bubble Bobble, running the original games inside a virtual Los Angeles arcade you can walk around on Vision Pro or pull up in front of you. On iPhone and iPad it's the same cabinets on a flat screen, which is less of an event. What's missing is a second player. iOS 18 and up.
The listing's own pitch is the honest one:
And the quarters? Unlimited.
7. DREDGE+
DREDGE+
Black Salt Games' fishing-trawler horror with every expansion folded in, The Pale Reach, The Iron Rig, and Blackstone Key, on iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV, and Vision Pro.
Apple Arcade
The App Store's iPad Game of the Year for 2025, here as the complete edition with every expansion and the custom rod. You captain a trawler between remote islands, each with its own residents and its own wrong thing under the water, and the fog and lantern light do most of the visual work. To my eye that atmosphere is why it won. iOS 16 and up.
8. Cozy Caravan
Cozy Caravan
5 Lives Studios' original for Arcade: drive a caravan through Harvestvale, craft meals and outfits, run a market stall, all drawn in a stop-motion animation style.
Apple Arcade
An Arcade original pitched at kids, which is fair, but the handmade look is the point: it reads as a claymation short you steer, and the crafting loop of meals, outfits, and a market stall gives the trip a reason. Hitchhikers along the road hand out the errands. iOS 15.6 and up.
9. Art of Fauna: Cozy Puzzles+
Art of Fauna: Cozy Puzzles+
Klemens Strasser's jigsaws cut from nineteenth-century wildlife plates by John James Audubon and John Gould, each paired with a note on the animal.
Apple Arcade
The opposite of a render budget. The plates were drawn for scientific publications, and the game cuts them into jigsaws, pairs each with a short note on the animal, and adds a harder mode where you reassemble the text instead. Accessibility settings are built in, and a 2025 App Store Award for Cultural Impact sits behind it. The best-looking thing Apple added in September, to my eye, and the calmest.
The first three are the whole console argument, and iPhoners paying for Arcade on that basis can stop there; the rest are why the subscription survives a long flight. Oceanhorn 3 on an iPhone, Civilization VII on an iPad or Mac, Retrocade on a Vision Pro, and Madden with a controller.
