Xbox and Bethesda took a swing and massively missed with Mighty Doom earlier this year. Not because the free-to-play top-down mobile shooter was bad in the gameplay department, nor did I find its egregious monetization model that much of an issue. No, Mighty Doom flopped for me because it didn’t have an Xbox achievement list.When Gears Pop! launched back in 2019, I couldn’t get enough of the weird tower defense strategy game simply because it had achievements. Much like Mighty Doom, Gears Pop! wasn’t really that good — it was aggressively monetized with in-app purchases, horribly balanced, and, for pretty much most of its life, filled with cheaters. Despite all of this, I still kept playing because I was enjoying popping those achievements on my phone when I was on the train to work or had five minutes to kill. Sadly, much like Tom and I expect many, many others, I never did manage to grab the 1,000G before its servers were shut down two years later. With Microsoft recently completing its acquisition of Activision Blizzard, which includes mobile games developer heavyweight King, now is the perfect time to get the ball rolling on new mobile games with Xbox achievement lists. I know we’ll probably never see the heady days of the Windows Phone again (R.I.P.), and I know Xbox Cloud Gaming does fill a bit of the mobile achievements void, but I’d love it if Xbox started releasing proper first-party mobile games with some good ol’ achievements — preferably achievements that don’t require either a bucket-load of microtransaction money or over 1,000 hours of grinding to unlock. Achievements add value to any game and, for players like me, instantly make a game more appealing. I somewhat recently started playing Puzzle Quest 3 simply because you can make progress towards unlocking achievements on your phone. I never would have touched Puzzle Quest 3 if it didn’t have this Xbox integration, and the same can be said for Microsoft Wordament. We need more of this, and Xbox should really be leading the charge here. While I’m sure Microsoft’s focus will be on building out its own Xbox mobile game store to rival the dominance of Apple and Google, I really hope that achievements aren’t forgotten in all of this. I mean, what else am I supposed to do while warming the porcelain throne? Read a book? Nah, I want to be upping my Gamerscore, that’s what.
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