TFT Mobile hands-on: Good, fun, but definitely not perfect

We recently got a chance to try out the mobile version of Teamfight Tactics ahead of its release. And Riot Games’ first mobile game ran and performed surprisingly well.

For the purpose of testing the game, we tried TFT Mobile on iOS and, specifically, on an iPhone X. All first impressions of the game are going to be based on that OS and device.

The game ran exceptionally well on our device. The interface is slick and works perfectly for mobile. You can get rid of units and open up menus at the touch of a button. It’s clean and beginner-friendly.

For instance, items are in their own separate menu so they aren’t cluttered at the side of your board. This is perfect for small devices—you won’t have to click and drag a tiny box over. Instead, you can just take out and place the item you want on your champion.

The game, however, isn’t without its issues. On our phone, TFT Mobile can be a bit unresponsive and tricky to control. On the carousel, for instance, it’s hard to control your Little Legend to get them to go to the champion that you want them to pick up. Most of the time we found ourselves picking up the champion or item we didn’t want to get.

This transitions over to the board, where restructuring your units quickly becomes a struggle. When we tried to drag units over to a new place or put items onto a specific unit, it sometimes wouldn’t work, placing them somewhere we didn’t intend at all. That isn’t just frustrating on a gameplay level, but it also potentially ruins your chances of a win.

While the game overall ran smoothly, it did occasionally get hit by slowdowns and sluggish gameplay. Our FPS also sometimes saw obvious dips, but, of course, it’s unclear if this is an issue with the beta version we were testing or if it’ll carry over into the official release.

TFT Mobile looks good, it plays well, and it really is TFT in your pocket. But we’ll probably stick to it only as a necessity—we don’t see ourselves jumping ship from the PC version anytime soon as the main platform. And that’s probably all TFT Mobile really needs to be.

At the very least, it’ll make road trips a lot more fun.