If You Like Brawl Stars and ARC Raiders, You'll Love MISFITZ

Two of our favorite games of the last few years live in completely different worlds. Brawl Stars: tens of millions of monthly players, three-minute matches, the phone in your pocket. ARC Raiders: a slower thing, on PC and console, where the best moments are forming a temporary alliance with a stranger and hoping it holds all the way to extract. They don't look anything alike. They feel almost the same. Brawl Stars and ARC Raiders are both about people, not just gunplay.

What Brawl Stars Got Right

Brawl Stars is one of the most-played mobile games of all time. Top-down perspective, three-minute matches, characters with abilities, no inventory grid you have to fight with. Tens of millions of monthly players. Live worldwide since December 2018. One of the rare mobile games where if you say the name in a non-gamer room, half the room knows what you're talking about. It also opens our list of the best mobile games to play with friends.

The reason Brawl Stars worked is that it didn't try to be a PC game squeezed onto mobile. The team started from where players actually were: holding the device with two thumbs, in transit, with maybe four minutes before the bus came. Top-down so your thumbs don't cover what you're trying to see. Two sticks with a tap to auto-aim, so a new player lands shots right away and a good one can still out-aim you. Three minutes so it fits between things.

What ARC Raiders Got Right

ARC Raiders is the opposite kind of hit. PvPvE extraction on PC and console, more than 16 million copies sold, and the moments players share most are often not the shootouts. They're the negotiations. The voice-chat moment where a stranger asks for help and you have to decide whether to help them, ignore them, or shoot them in the back.

ARC Raiders made extraction about other people: the gear matters, but mostly because it makes trust expensive. That switch, from loot to people, sounds small in a paragraph and is enormous in practice. It's the difference between a game where losing is annoying and a game where losing is a story you tell at dinner. There's no ARC Raiders on mobile, and Embark Studios hasn't announced one. If the negotiating is the part you love, we also rounded up games like Among Us with combat.

The Game in the Middle

MISFITZ is made by ex-Supercell and ex-King developers. The CPO and lead game designer, Frank Yan, was a senior game designer on Brawl Stars. The CEO, Brice Laville Saint-Martin, was Art Director on Clash Royale at Supercell for 6+ years. The CTO, Andre Parodi, was Technical Director on Candy Crush at King.

Worth saying out loud: this is our game. We're not pretending to be neutral about it. But we're also not making the connection up. We spent years building mobile games, Brawl Stars among them. MISFITZ is what happens when that experience meets the extraction genre.

Here's how that shows up in MISFITZ. Top-down like Brawl Stars. Short runs, 2.5 to 7 minutes. One stick to move, one to aim, and auto-aim, like Brawl Stars. If you came here looking for games like Brawl Stars, that is the short version. Six characters with abilities like Brawl Stars. Then the second half: extraction stakes, Relics worth the risk, and alliances with strangers. (There's no voice chat in MISFITZ yet, proximity chat or otherwise. We plan to add it later.) MISFITZ takes the format from Brawl Stars and the weight from ARC Raiders. That's the entire pitch.

Brawl Stars vs ARC Raiders vs MISFITZ

Why the Bridge Matters

The interesting part of combining these two isn't the design exercise. It's the audiences. We believe plenty of Brawl Stars players would enjoy higher stakes on mobile, and plenty of ARC Raiders fans would play something in that spirit on the device they carry everywhere. MISFITZ is built for that overlap.

We're probably not the only studio that's noticed. What we bring is two halves: people who actually shipped one of those games, plus an explicit design choice around the social mechanics that made the other one memorable. That path, from Brawl Stars to MISFITZ, is its own story. Our goal is for MISFITZ to be the place those two audiences meet.

If you came up on Brawl Stars and want more weight, or you came in through ARC Raiders and want that kind of game in your pocket, MISFITZ is coming free to iOS and Android. For everything else worth a look on mobile, see our list of new and upcoming mobile games of 2026.

Frequently Asked Questions

What games are like Brawl Stars and ARC Raiders combined?

MISFITZ, coming free to iOS and Android, is built to combine them. Top-down mobile-native format from Brawl Stars. Extraction stakes and social trust mechanics from ARC Raiders. Built by ex-Brawl Stars and ex-Clash Royale developers.

Is ARC Raiders coming to mobile?

Embark Studios has not announced a mobile version. ARC Raiders is on PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S. MISFITZ is a different game, designed for mobile from day one: a top-down social extraction game with runs of 2.5 to 7 minutes, Relics to collect, and temporary alliances with strangers.