Since its inception, the xCloud gaming library has grown considerably, with an increasing number of titles featuring touch controls. Below, you’ll find our picks for the best xCloud games with touch controls that you can enjoy on the go, without having to go and bring a compatible gaming controller with you.
Minecraft Dungeons
Minecraft Dungeons was one of the first games in the xCloud library to receive touch controls and it remains one of the best games in the entire Xbox Game Pass library. This criminally underrated dungeon crawler is basically Diablo for kids, complete with the same addicting looting mechanic and isometric third-person perspective with tight combat mechanics as well as a good dose of co-op gameplay.
Grand Theft Auto V
The latest installment in Rockstar Games’ controversial but highly popular Grand Theft Auto franchise continues to find its way to other platforms nearly a decade after it was first released in 2013. This time around, it’s available on your phones via xCloud and the experience is actually amazing. More than just a novelty, playing GTA 5 on your smartphone via xCloud feels no different from playing the game on standard platforms.
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
There’s nothing we can say about Bethesda’s open-world action-adventure RPG that people haven’t said about the game already. Even though playing Skyrim on your smartphone isn’t the first time that the game has made its way to a portable platform, one can argue that playing Skyrim via xCloud is the definitive portable experience.
Control
For those who haven’t heard of Control before, it’s Remedy Entertainment’s latest title. Unlike Alan Wake though, Control plays more like a shooter. It puts players in the shoes of Jesse Faden, who is the newly minted Director of the Federal Bureau of Control, a fictional branch of the government that handles everything paranormal, much like the Men in Black but for ghosts and not aliens. The main appeal of playing Control via xCloud is the fact that you can play it on your mobile phone. It’s just a bonus that Microsoft added touch controls to it. Still, if you already have an Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription, there are dozens of worse games that you can spend your time playing.
Halo: The Master Chief Collection
Even though it’s been years since we last saw a proper Halo game release, Master Chief remains synonymous with the Xbox brand. Thus, it only makes sense for Microsoft to make sure that gamers can experience at least one Halo game with proper touch control support on the xCloud. However, Microsoft didn’t just give gamers one Halo game. Rather, The Master Chief Collection contains every numbered Halo game from the first one to Halo 4, including Reach and ODST.
A Plague Tale: Innocence
A Plague Tale: Innocence is a classic example of a game that received a lot of hype before its release only to vanish into relative obscurity once it arrived. This isn’t to say that it’s a bad game. The 2019 title holds an 81% score on Metacritic, which suggests that it is quite good. However, for some reason, a lot of people never really got the chance to play A Plague Tale: Innocence when it was first released. Now that it’s on xCloud, there’s really no reason not to try it out. A Plague Tale: Innocence is a narrative-driven stealth-action game set in late 1348 as a rodent plague ravages the entirety of France. In a way, the game will remind you a lot of Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us.
Forza Horizon 4
Do you know what the best thing about Playground Games’ Forza Horizon games is? It’s that they never failed to one-up themselves with each new installment. Subsequent sequels have only improved on the visuals and gameplay of the one that came before it. So much so that Forza Horizon 4 is widely considered the best racing game today. At least, until Forza Horizon 5 arrives.
Hitman
2016’s Hitman game was an experiment gone right. Effectively serving as a reboot of the franchise, there were very few things that IO Interactive didn’t do right then. In fact, perhaps the biggest issue was their episodic delivery of the games, which, thankfully, they chose not to do for Hitman 2 and Hitman 3. Luckily, you won’t have to wait to play the entirety of Hitman on xCloud, as the entire game and all the DLCs are available to play right away.
Octopath Traveler
One of the biggest gripes of playing games on xCloud is the inevitable latency issues. Regardless of how good the servers and how fast your internet is, it’s difficult to bridge the literal gap between sending signals from your phone and to the xCloud servers and vice versa. But, with turn-based RPGs, that’s not something that you should worry about. With that said, if you’re going to play a turn-based RPG on xCloud, you might as well play the best of them, which is Octopath Traveler.
Sea of Thieves
Rare’s pirate simulator didn’t exactly garner as much attention when it first launched compared to when it was first announced. However, it’s been quite some time since the game arrived. Now, Sea of Thieves is quickly becoming one of the more underrated live-service games on the market and one of Xbox’s most profitable brands.
