Five settings to change in any new mobile game

Most mobile games ship with defaults tuned for a demo video, not for your actual phone. The first thing I do with any new game is open settings, and it's saved me from plenty of frustration.

Start with the frame rate cap. Lots of games default to the highest your screen allows, which looks lovely and drains battery and heats the phone. Dropping to 30 or 60 is often invisible in play and massively kinder to your hardware.

Next, kill the push notifications. Nothing ruins a good game faster than it nagging you while you're trying to read a message. Then check the haptics — constant vibration is a quiet battery drain and gets annoying fast.

Finally, look for an animation-speed or 'reduce effects' option. We found one in Legends of Slots that made the whole game smoother on an old phone. These toggles are everywhere once you start looking.