Summary

• Recent updates to Mobox and Winlator allow modern PC games on smartphones, but Horizon-Emu lags behind its rivals.
• Horizon-Emu has fast installation and simple UI, with support for newer drivers and Wine versions for better performance.
• While Horizon-Emu shows promise with quick load times, mixed performance in games, lack of controls, Steam client incompatibility, and no support for VirGL drivers need addressing.

Over the years, we’ve seen plenty of emulators designed for smartphones, but for the longest time, even the best emulators were only capable of running games designed for older consoles. Emulating Windows titles natively on Android led to several bugs and glitches, on top of requiring long procedures just to boot ancient titles.

Thankfully, recent updates to Mobox and Winlator have made it possible to run even modern PC games on your smartphone. What’s more, there’s even a third contender called Horizon-Emu that started making the rounds in May. But as a fledgling in the emulation space, it’s still lacking in many departments, and it’ll take a while before the app can catch up to its rivals.

What I like about Horizon-Emu

Fast installation and simple UI

One of the best aspects of Horizon-Emu is that its setup process is relatively painless. Once you’ve installed the .apk file of the emulator from the official GitHub link, all you need to do is install the dependencies and compatibility layers from the Download section, and voilà; you’re free to begin running Windows games.

The user interface of the emulator and its containers is quite easy to navigate, too. Creating the containers is just as simple, as all you have to do is pick the version of Wine you intend to use and change a few driver settings. Meanwhile, the rest of the options, like resolution and controls, are neatly laid out in the Settings tab. Unlike Winlator’s multitude of menus or Mobox’s complex customization process that requires you to modify the Termux, Termux_X11, and container settings, Horizon-Emu has a straightforward calibration procedure.

Support for newer drivers and Wine versions

Unlike its rivals, Horizon-Emu is compatible with relatively recent versions of the Wine compatibility layer, including the newer Wine 9.5 and 9.7. Likewise, the emulator can run newer releases of Box64 drivers.

As such, it can provide better performance in some games, like Crysis and Ori and the Blind Forest. However, stability is a different issue altogether, and in many cases, I found noticeable display glitches and crashes when switching to Wine 9.7 (but more on that in a bit).

Fast load times

Another feature worth mentioning is the quick boot times offered by Horizon-Emu. When compared to Winlator, Horizon-Emu doesn’t take an abhorrently long time to boot into a game. Additionally, you don’t need to constantly switch the compatibility layer and driver settings, as most games work fine with Wine 9.5 Vanilla (the 9.7 version has many bugs) and the latest VirGL/Turnip drivers. And that’s where all my praises come to an end, because there’s a lot to talk about Horizon-Emu’s drawbacks.

What I don’t like about Horizon-Emu

Performance is a bit of a mixed bag

As usual, I used the original Crysis as the primary benchmark to test the performance of the emulator on my Poco F5. With all the settings turned down to low and resolution set to 1024x768, Crysis ran consistently at above 30FPS, and even managed to hit 60FPS at some spots when I lowered the settings. Likewise, Ori and the Blind Forest ran at similar frame rates with the resolution turned up to 1600x1200, though it was prone to frequent crashes. In both games, the emulator even managed to surpass Mobox, though other titles provided mixed results.

Although it can run some older 3D games like Dead Space and F.E.A.R. at playable frame rates, you’ll need to reduce the resolution to 1280x720 and lower many settings to get over 30FPS. Plus, there was a lot of micro stutter, though lowering the version of Wine from 9.7 to 9.5 fixed this issue at the expense of further reducing the frame rates. In contrast, Mobox had no trouble running them at higher resolutions.

That’s before you include the graphical issues, like Just Cause 2’s weirdly colored skybox. Meanwhile, Hollow Knight and Cuphead kept crashing no matter how many times I tried to run them on the emulator.

Lack of proper controls

Since Horizon-Emu doesn’t have proper controls built into it, you’ll need to spend a few minutes making the perfect controller profile/on-screen keybinds using another before repeating the process for every game that uses a different control scheme. If that sounds familiar, then it’s the fatal flaw present in Mobox.

Unfortunately, the procedure is far more difficult with Horizon, as InputBridge can occasionally crash a few minutes after loading the emulator. While the emulator has an inbuilt mouse overlay, the on-screen keyboard has never worked on any game I tested on the emulator.

As such, there’s little point in enabling the left and mouse buttons, unless you’re playing games that don’t require keyboard input at all.

It's incompatible with the Steam client

With GOG offering DRM-free game files, it’s the only game distribution platform that you can use to legally acquire PC games for Android emulators. Meanwhile, Steam requires you to install a client before you can download games from your Steam account. But since the Steam client doesn’t work on Horizon-Emu even after implementing multiple fixes, there’s no way to set up legitimate Steam titles on the emulator. As such, you’ll have to contend with a smaller pool of games if you’re planning to exclusively use Horizon-Emu on your device.

No support for VirGL drivers

Although VirGL drivers aren’t recommended in emulators, it’s worth noting that the latest version of Horizon-Emu doesn’t support them. So, non-Adreno GPU owners should look elsewhere if they want to emulate PC titles on their smartphones.

Horizon-Emu: A promising emulator that needs more fine-tuning

Having spent the last week with Horizon-Emu, I’ll admit that there are plenty of perks about the app. The fact that its performance was close to that of Mobox in Crysis, of all games, proves that it has a lot of potential. Unfortunately, it falls short on the performance aspect in other titles and is prone to a lot of crashes and bugs. The emulator also fails to launch the Steam client, so you’re only limited to GOG games.

Despite Horizon pulling ahead of Winlator, it also lacks the latter’s robust controller and on-screen gamepad provisions. Plus, it doesn’t support VirGL drivers either, so you’re only limited to devices armed with Adreno GPUs. All-in-all, if you have the storage space to hold multiple emulators and don’t mind testing all your favorite titles, then Horizon-Emu is definitely worth checking out. Otherwise, there’s no reason to switch to it if you’re satisfied with Mobox or Winlator.