Foxy’s Football Islands is a mobile game.

But there are mobile games and there are mobile games. 

Sure, you can play just about anything on a smartphone these days, from Tetris to GTA Vice City. But these aren’t mobile games. They’re just games that happen to be playable on mobile. 

Foxy’s Football Islands, on the other hand, is a game designed to be played on a smartphone, built around a touchscreen and, more importantly, the way we all tend to play games on our phones. 

Before we get into why, we’d better let you know what the game is all about. 

Developed by Frank’s Football Studios, a team of industry veterans seemingly assembled for this project, Foxy’s Football Islands is a genre-banding fantasy soccer build-em-up that sees you colonising a string of islands through the power of football. 

You begin with a fantasy island called Aztlan, where you’ll find a number of sites ripe for building. To get started, you just need to tap on one of these sites to put up a crude structure. 

Once that’s done, you can tap on the same place again to make a slightly more sophisticated building, and then another, all over the island, until you’ve got an Aztec pyramid, a giant stadium, a looming totem pole, and a market. 

This completes your island, triggering a short coin-collecting minigame as you head for the next to repeat the process all over again in the glamorous new surroundings of the Knight’s Quest Pitch. 

But you won’t be able to do all of that at once. Building stuff costs money, which is where all the football comes in. 

To earn coins in Foxy’s Football Islands you have to flick a ball with your finger towards a target inside a goal. Most successful strikes will earn you a stack of coins to spend on renovations. 

Some strikes, however, give you the chance to steal from another player by way of a card-flipping minigame. Others will let you pound another player’s island with boulders. 

In both cases, you can target a random stranger, pick a friend, or take revenge against a player who has wronged you.

Sometimes a strike will bring up a second, moving target. Hit that and you’ll be in for a bumper payday. Other times, you’ll get a goalie glove, letting you parry one boulder attack against your own island. 

There’s a huge variety of stuff to do, in other words, but it all adds up to coins, which add up to an expanding civilisation, more stars, and leaderboard dominance. 

So how is Foxy’s Football Islands such an exemplary mobile game?

For one thing, the controls. Everything you do in this hypercasual title, from pulling off a tricky shot into the wind to launching a football-themed boulder at a mediaeval castle, is totally intuitive, easy, and achievable with one thumb. 

For another, it’s totally free to download and play.

Taking a shot costs energy (two or three units if you decide to up the ante), but this replenishes automatically to a generous total of 50.

It’s not easy to get the balance right in a free-to-play game, but Foxy’s Football Islands pulls it off with the carefree grace of a Jude Bellingham bicycle kick. 

Foxy’s Football Islands looks the part, too. Mobile graphics are best when they’re clear, colourful, and detailed. The developers at Frank’s Football Studios have managed all three, producing a game that sits alongside the most aesthetically accomplished titles on mobile. 

Finally, Foxy’s Football Islands is a perfectly scalable experience – one of those rare games that can fill 30 seconds or three hours, depending on your mood and your situation. 

To get this piece of mobile gaming perfection on your phone, head to the Google Play Store or the App Store and download it for free.