Why some games melt your battery

We test battery on every review, and the differences between games are enormous. Two games can look similar and yet one lasts twice as long on a charge. Here's roughly why.

The biggest factor is what the screen and processor are doing. Bright, animated, particle-heavy games push both hard. A flat casual game like Lucky Coin barely touches them, so it sips power. A strategy game simulating a whole map constantly, like Tidebreak Command, works the chip nonstop.

Screen brightness is the single lever you control most easily. Dropping it a couple of notches genuinely stretches your playtime, and most games look fine dimmer.

If a game runs hot, it's not just uncomfortable, it's your phone throttling to protect itself, which then makes the game stutter. When we flag a game as a 'charger-nearby' title, that's what we mean.