Best iPhone Game Updates: ‘Call of Duty Mobile’, ‘Star Traders: Frontiers’, ‘AFK Arena’, ‘Archero’, and More

Hello everyone, and welcome to the week! It’s time once again for our look back at the noteworthy updates of the last seven days. I’ve tried to include some new faces in the line-up this time around, just for the sake of variety. Granted, the pickings aren’t what they might normally be due to real-world circumstances, but there’s still plenty to see. Of course, you can keep an eye out for updates yourself using AppShopper or by participating in the TouchArcade forums. This weekly summary is just here to fill you in on the things you might have missed. Let’s go for it!

SEGA Heroes: RPG Match 3 Games, Free The Yakuza character roll-outs continue in SEGA Heroes, with brand-new Captain rank character Goro Majima joining the ranks. Well, he’s joining the ranks if you’re super-lucky or throw an absolute gob-ton of cash at the game. Otherwise, he’s just sitting there in the character unlock screen forever. This update also makes it so that the game saves your speed and auto-play settings between sessions. The shard and currency finders now have a handy feature that lets you jump directly to the appropriate events.

Angry Birds Transformers, Free Hm, I haven’t checked on this game in pretty much forever, but let’s have a peek. According to the updates notes, war has come to Piggy Island, a stark contrast to the usual peaceful state of the place. Energonicons are now upgradable, you can now choose the accessories you want to upgrade, map nodes now have a higher difficulty and give greater rewards, and there’s a new character called Noun. I don’t know that one. Maybe it’s a mistake in the update notes, I can’t be sure. There are some other improvements and additions, but I’ll leave it to you to sort them out.

AFK Arena, Free AFK Arena has a hot new character for everyone to try out. Graveborn hero Oden – Bitterblight is now ready to join the battle. In addition to the new character, the campaign replay feature has been optimized in this new version to allow you to choose from more replay types. A new follow-up quest to the “Accumulate a Total of X Gold While AFK" quest has been added, presumably allowing you to check off another task involving collecting a bunch of gold? Well, that’s fine.

Subway Surfers, Free Alright Subway Surfers kids, I know you’re all about the world traveling, but it’s very dangerous outside right now. You need to be social isolating, not doing a wild world tour. Oh well, there’s no helping some people. The kids are off to Iceland, where they’ll surf through ice caves and sweltering volcanoes. Add new Surfer Bjarki to your line-up, and see if you can unlock his Fisher Outfit. Since it’s that time of the year, there are Easter Eggs to collect along the tracks. Grab as many of them as you can and you’ll get some nice rewards.

Star Traders: Frontiers, $6.99 When all else fails, you know Star Traders: Frontiers will have a cool update to check out. Let’s see what we’ve got this time. It’s a big list again, so I’ll just hit a few highlights and let you check the notes yourself for the rest. Starting Contact placement has been improved to prefer high economy/high population zones, the Economy requirement for high level craft has been reduced to a maximum of 12. Alta Mesa’s acquisition of Battle Bridge 2 now includes Battle Bridge 3 as well. Aside from that, you can look forward to a lot of balance improvements, UI adjustments, and bug fixes. I don’t see anything else jumping out at me, so I’ll give this the coveted UMMSotW award for this week.

Merge Dragons!, Free Creating unholy fusions of creatures and objects: it’s a hot genre, friends. And one of the most popular games of this sort is Merge Dragons. The latest update to this example of science gone wrong includes a whopping three new events to enjoy. There’s the Easter Event, the Flowering Felines event, and the Healing Waves event. Each one includes unique dragons and items to earn and play with. This update also does the usual business of fixing bugs and making nebulous improvements.

Call of Duty®: Mobile, Free Call of Duty Mobile has been extremely popular since its launch, easily besting the success of all prior mobile Call of Duty releases. People really seem to dig what it’s laying down. And now there’s more of it! The Steel Legion update arrived in the last week, adding new Industrial Revolution-themed rewards, new Premium and Free Battle Pass rewards, a new multiplayer map, and some limited time game modes. The UI got some little improvements here and there, and bugs have been squashed.

Cookie Jam: Top Match 3 Game, Free And here’s our obligatory free-to-play matching puzzle game update for the week. Cookie Jam is the game that helped build JamCity, who in the past acquired Tiny Co, who made one of my old (and dead) faves Avengers Academy. Therefore, I blame Cookie Jam for the death of my stupid superhero aquarium even if it makes no sense to do so. This update includes some new levels, some collection events, and apparently more? I do not know what that “more" implies, but it is in there. Play the game and find out, I suppose. That’s science!

Archero, Free Here’s another super-popular game that we don’t look at all that often. You can argue about how Archero has found its success, but it did indeed find it. The latest version adds a bunch of new content, including the Hero Duo mode which sees two-person teams, the Hero’s Adventure which sends three Heroes on an infinite adventure, a new hero named Shari, and two new chapters for Hero Mode. There are also some optimizations and bug fixes, as is the tradition in these hallowed halls.

Black Desert Mobile, Free Let’s finish things up with a look at the gorgeous Black Desert Mobile‘s latest update. This one adds a brand new class, the ever-fashionable Dark Knight, and a brand new Tower of Trials to test your skills at. An Auto-Quest feature has been added for those who like their games to play themselves, an Auto-Craft Alchemy feature, new language support, and some cool new events. More than just good graphics? Hmm, I don’t know. But those graphics sure are good, there’s no doubt about that.

That about wraps it up for last week’s significant updates. I’m sure I’ve missed some, though, so please feel free to comment below and let everyone know if you think something should be mentioned. As usual, major updates will likely get their own news stories throughout this week, and I’ll be back next Monday to summarize and fill in the blanks. Have a great week!