Which Genres Eat Your Battery Fastest

We track battery use on every game we review, and after a while some clear patterns emerged. It is not always the game you expect that drains the most.

Racing and 3D action games are the obvious culprits. All those particle effects, dynamic lighting, and high frame rates ask a lot of your phone, and you can feel the back panel warm up within minutes. Neon Drift Rally was our worst offender this year.

Strategy and simulation games are sneaky. Any single moment is light, but you tend to leave them open for a long time, so the total drain adds up. Turning on the idle battery-saver modes many of them hide in settings makes a real difference.

The gentlest are the still-image adventures and simple tappers. A game like Lanternwood Tales barely registers on the battery over an hour. If you are heading somewhere without a charger, that is the category to reach for.

The one setting worth checking in almost any game is the frame rate cap. Dropping from 60 to 30 frames rarely hurts a mobile game and can noticeably extend your play time.