Welcome to Off The AppStore, a weekly feature with a twist. Namely, that while these – as with all the games we cover here – are games that you can play on your phone, they’re ones that operate outside of the realms of the big two ways to play: The Google Play Store and the Apple AppStore.
That means that there might be a bit of work required in downloading alternative AppStores or APKs, or that the games can simply be played in your phone browser. We’ll make sure to detail that for each game though. Anyway, read on to find a new game or experience to play Off The AppStore.
Take off your tie and put it around your forehead, you rebel you. It’s time to get out there and flex your space-pirate muscles, to purloin, loot, asbscond, steal and nick some ships. Shipnickers is a deceptively elaborate game of stealing all of the cool deep-space ships through a series of vicious, daring Galaga-adjacent heists and escape sequences.
There’s a lot to love here, but I think its the ship variety, as well as how many of them have moves which charge differently. There’s a lot of ships which grow stronger if you hold the shoot button, however the repairing system is based around tapping rapidly while avoiding another hit. It makes for a tense time where you need to rapidly relearn systems while also attempting to dodge a wide assortment of different attacks from your target and their friends.
As with our last entry in Off The AppStore, The Legend That is Jacob, Shipnickers runs on the pico8 engine, which means it comes complete with native support for mobile browsers, meaning you should have no issue getting it running regardless of your device – if you can run a web browser, you can run Shipnickers.
You can play Shipnickers for free on its Itch.io page.
