Comparison

NEON Game of Life vs Life II

Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both games, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.

Head to head
About

NEON Game of Life

Experience a unique zero-player game with a vibrant neon aesthetic. Set up initial patterns on an 80x80 grid and watch them evolve. Save, share, and experiment with different rulesets for endless possibilities.

Highlights
  • Zero-player simulation
  • Neon graphics
  • 80x80 grid
  • Pattern checkpoints
  • Pattern sharing
  • Multiple rulesets
Features
Read full description

NEON is Conway's Game of Life, reborn in neon. Paint a handful of glowing cells, hit play, and watch them breed, drift, and collide — gliders streak across the grid, pulsars breathe, and a Gosper gun throws spaceships into the dark. It's a sandbox, not a screensaver. Every tool for building and studying patterns is free. THE SIMULATION — free — 12 rulesets: Conway (B3/S23), HighLife, Day & Night, Amoeba, Mazectric, Coral, Diamoeba and more — plus a B/S rule builder for your own totalistic rules. — Toroidal grids sized to your device, driven by a GPU compute kernel that keeps up. — A per-cell procedural neon shader — no sprites; every living cell is drawn live. PAINT & EDIT — free — Paint or erase with a fingertip; a live loupe magnifies exactly the cell under your finger. — Region select: marquee any rectangle, then copy, cut, clear, save as a snippet, or export as RLE. Paste it anywhere. — 20 canonical snippets (block, glider, LWSS, pulsar, queen-bee shuttle…) with live toroidal previews. Drag to stamp; rotate or flip before you drop. — Symmetry brush — 2-, 4-, or 8-fold mirrored drawing. — Full LifeWiki RLE round-trip: paste, fetch from a URL, or open a .rle file, plus a raw-text editor over the live grid. STUDY — free — A 15-pattern Discover catalog: Gosper gun, Simkin gun, acorn, R-pentomino, replicator, garden of Eden — with provenance. — Timeline scrubber — pause and rewind all the way back to the first generation. — Population sparkline, live cell count, generation counter, and stability detection (still life / period-N oscillator / extinction). — Minimap and stats HUD, both toggleable right on the canvas. SHARE — free — Pattern links: every soup encodes into a neongameoflife:// URL you can drop in a message. No server, no account. — Record the canvas to MP4 or GIF. Full iPad keyboard shortcuts. NEON PRO — optional A one-time purchase, family-shareable, no subscription. Every tool for building and studying patterns is free; Pro is the finish — more speed, surface, and instrumentation. — Fast-forward to 1,000 generations/second. — Arbitrary grid sizes and a 16×16 custom snippet creator. — iCloud sync of your library across devices. — An interactive Home Screen widget and a Dynamic Island Live Activity, each running a live mini-sim. — Pattern labels that identify gliders, oscillators, and still lifes and track them as they move. — An activity heatmap that renders cell-flip frequency as a cool-to-hot overlay. — A 3D time-stack you can orbit — every generation stacked in space, from a single instanced draw. — A neon palette editor, animated themes, and cell trails. — 15 alternate app icons drawn from classic patterns. PRIVACY No accounts, no tracking, no third-party SDKs, no analytics. Your patterns live on your device and, if you opt in, in your own iCloud private database. Share links carry the pattern inline — nothing touches a server. Built in Swift + SwiftUI, from a 2019 SpriteKit experiment rebuilt from the compute kernel up.

About

Life II

Explore John Horton Conway's Game of Life with customizable resolutions and speeds. Features a built-in editor with copy-paste functionality for running patterns from online libraries.

Highlights
  • Conway's Game of Life simulation
  • Adjustable resolutions and speeds
  • Built-in pattern editor
  • Copy-paste pattern functionality
  • Supports online pattern libraries
Features
Read full description

John Horton Conway's Game of Life. Supports different resolutions and speeds, and has a built-in editor. The editor supports copy & paste, so you can run stock patterns from pattern libraries found on the Internet.

Screenshots

NEON Game of Life4 screens
Life II3 screens

Verdict

The call

The clearest difference is update cadence: NEON Game of Life at every 2 days against Life II's every 5 months. NEON Game of Life also leads on review sentiment (90% vs 67%) and ratings volume (7 vs 2). Life II's advantage is iOS requirement (11.0 vs 18.0). On price, rating, ads and in-app purchases there is nothing between them.

Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS

CostPrice · In-app purchases · Ads · Monetization

Both are free to download. Neither carries in-app purchases, so what you see is what you pay.

ReceptionRating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings

On the App Store both sit at effectively the same score — 4.4 for NEON Game of Life against 4.5 for Life II. Both are backed by a comparable volume of ratings — 7 and 2 respectively. Written reviews are what separate them: 90% of NEON Game of Life's written reviews are positive against 67% of Life II's.

UpkeepUpdate frequency

NEON Game of Life ships an update every 2 days, Life II every 5 months. The most recent releases landed on September 8, 2026 and September 23, 2026 respectively.

Scorecard4 real differences · 6 level
NEON Game of Life versus Life II: the parameters behind the verdict, then further details
ParameterNEON Game of LifeLife II
PriceFreeFree
Rating4.4 (7 ratings)4.5 (2 ratings) — better
Positive reviews90.0% of reviews — better66.7% of reviews
Number of ratings7 — better2
Update frequencyEvery 2 days — betterEvery 5 months
AdsNoNo
In-app purchasesNoNo
MonetizationFreeFree
DevicesiPhone, iPadiPhone, iPad, iPod — better
Requires iOS18.011.0 — better
Further details — not scored
Size26 MB0 MB
Age rating4+4+
DeveloperEnzo MaruffaThomas Okken

Customer experience

NEON Game of Life

All ratings7 ratings
Positive85.7%
Neutral14.3%
Negative0.0%
Written reviews10 reviews
Positive90.0%
Neutral10.0%
Negative0.0%

Life II

All ratings2 ratings
Positive100.0%
Neutral0.0%
Negative0.0%
Written reviews3 reviews
Positive66.7%
Neutral0.0%
Negative33.3%

In-app purchases

None

NEON Game of Life

No in-app purchases

None

Life II

No in-app purchases

Questions

Is NEON Game of Life free?
NEON Game of Life is free to download, with no in-app purchases.
Is Life II free?
Life II is free to download, with no in-app purchases.
Which has better reviews, NEON Game of Life or Life II?
Life II is rated higher. NEON Game of Life averages 4.4 out of 5 from 7 ratings, while Life II averages 4.5 from 2 ratings.
Do NEON Game of Life or Life II have ads?
Neither NEON Game of Life nor Life II shows ads.
Which is updated more often, NEON Game of Life or Life II?
NEON Game of Life ships an update every 2 days, and Life II every 5 months. Most recently, NEON Game of Life was updated on September 8, 2026 and Life II on September 23, 2026.

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