Games that won't cook your phone

Battery drain is the quiet dealbreaker of mobile gaming. A game can be brilliant, but if it turns your phone into a hand warmer and empties the meter in forty minutes, you stop playing it on the go. So we started testing this properly.

The biggest culprits are high frame rates and heavy 3D scenes. Racing games and detailed RPGs will always ask more of your hardware. The good news is that most of them let you drop to 30 or 60 fps and lower the graphics preset, and the visual hit is usually tiny compared to the battery you save.

Casual and puzzle games sit at the other end. Something like a simple tapper barely registers on the battery meter and stays cool for hours. If you know you will be away from a charger, that is where to look.

My general advice: dig into the settings menu before a long session. Turn off any high-refresh option you do not need, drop the brightness, and use battery saver if your phone has a game mode. Small changes add up fast.