Good touch controls are invisible, bad ones ruin everything

You can have a beautiful game with a brilliant idea, and one clumsy control scheme will sink it. On mobile there's no controller to fall back on, so every tap and swipe has to earn its place.

The best touch controls disappear. You stop thinking about the buttons and just play. Racing games that let you swap tilt for touch, adventures that use simple taps instead of tiny hotspots, RPGs with menus you can reach one-handed. That's the invisible good design we look for.

The worst offenders cram desktop layouts onto a phone and hope for the best. Tiny buttons in the corners, gestures that fight each other, menus that need two hands. I've abandoned genuinely great games over exactly this.

When we review, we spend real time just moving around before we judge anything else. If the basics don't feel right, nothing else matters.

So when you see us praise a game's controls, know that it passed a fairly grumpy test on more than one device.