Platform games, puzzle games, shoot ’em ups and more – our pick of the best free games for your Android device.
What’s better than a free game? Well, pretty much nothing. Except when it’s just terrible and you’ve wasted your sweet time to download it.
Sure, it’s not going to cost you anything, but that doesn’t mean it’s OK to just mess around with terrible games that are free because the developer can’t make you pay anything for it in good conscience.
So what are you supposed to do about it? Well, we’re here to help you with all that – but before you get into the best gallery around for recommendations, here’s some advice to consider.
Firstly, consider what sort of game you want to spend your time on. Time, in this case, is literally the equivalent of money here. Do you want a quick game that you can play easily, or something that’s going to be a bit more in-depth?
However, there are some brilliant surprises out there as well – some lovely people spend hours coding brilliant games that they just let you play for free.
Also think about the kind of games that you need for your phone – if it’s a high-powered game that’s a visual treat, it’s not going to be much use on a phone that comes from four years ago and has a tiny display.
Right, got all that? Great – you need to get cracking and finding out which titles are right for you. Get your mouses clicking or fingers swiping… we guarantee there will be something you’ll enjoy in here.
Brave Hand is a card game that starts off with a basic solitaire at its foundation, welds that to a game of ‘higher or lower’, and dispenses with the ‘lower’ bit.
Your aim is to clear the table of cards, by beating the top card in any given pile. The snag is most cards start off face down. You can use a low card as a ‘scout’ that forces two cards to flip. But beyond that, it’s chance that dictates your fortunes as you dig into successive cards in a pile, hoping one won’t beat you.
Despite being very reliant on luck, Brave Hand is compelling. It perhaps won’t dislodge the likes of Sage Solitaire from your home screen, but it should appeal to card game fiends who fancy something fresh.
Drag’n’Boom shows that you should never encourage a teenage dragon. Here, the rebellious fire-breather zooms about minimal landscapes, belly-sliding down hills, soaring into the air, barbecuing soldiers, and generally being a menace.
Fortunately, you get to be the dragon, rather than the put-upon army rather wishing it had better weapons. The game recalls Angry Birds in how you ping your dragon along, but also borrows from twin-stick shooters, Sonic the Hedgehog (super-fast tunnel bits), and even The Matrix (slo-mo as you aim).
Although there’s admittedly not masses of variation across the game’s 50 levels and endless mode, it’s hard to be too critical. Drag’n’Boom looks great, and has the kind of grin-inducing breezy gameplay that’s perfect for slotting into the odd moment when you feel the need to unleash your inner dragon.
Flat Pack rethinks platform games by wrapping levels around 3D shapes. The aim is to dodder or fly about, grab six sides of a golden cube, and make for the exit. But each level has its own twist, forcing you to think on your feet – or rotors if you’re careening through the air, heading for some spikes.
Early on, for example, you contend with ‘flipping gravity’. This requires moving around a cubic section of level in a specific way, so you can enter from another direction. One level is two huge blocks that smash together at regular intervals, squashing slowpoke adventurers who dawdle. And it only gets more disorienting from there.
This could so easily have been a gimmicky offering, but it’s the smart level design that transforms Flat Pack into a must-have freebie.
Data Wing has the appearance of a minimal top-down racer, but it’s far, far more than that. That’s not to say the racing bit isn’t great – because it is. You guide your little triangular ship around neon courses, scooting across boost pads, and scraping track edges for a bit of extra speed.
But there’s something else going on here – an underlying narrative where you discover you’re, in fact, ferrying bits of data about, all under the eye of an artificially intelligent Mother. Initially, all seems well, but it soon becomes clear Mother has some electrons loose, not least when you start getting glimpses of a world beyond the silicon.
With perfect touch controls, varied racing levels, a few hours of story, and plenty of replay value, Data Wing would be a bargain for a few dollarpounds. For free, it’s absurdly generous.
Stranger Things: The Game re-imagines the Netflix TV show, set in 1984, as a 1980s videogame. How meta, you might think… but it works.
You take on the role of gruff Officer Hopper, trying to uncover a mystery at the heart of Hawkins, Indiana. As you work your way deeper into the game, you gradually find new characters, each with individual powers that are vital for further progression.
Push & Pop is a sliding tiles puzzler, with mechanics not a million miles away from Threes! (or low-rent knock-off 2048), but this is no mere clone. Instead, it builds on the basics of shifting tiles or blocks around a limited space by also borrowing ideas from Sokoban and Pac-Man, before stripping everything right back again.
Play occurs on a five-by-five grid, around which you slide a cuboid. On every move, a new block appears somewhere on the grid. Arrange five into a solid line by pushing them and they disappear, freeing up space, and leaving behind gems the blocky hero can collect by eating or shoving blocks through them. Further complications are added when immovable blocks appear. Your game’s over when you become stuck.
With its neon visuals and ethereal soundtrack, Push & Pop takes simple foundations and runs with them, fashioning an intriguing, engaging, and surprisingly novel title.
Battle Golf Online is a major revamp of the original – and hugely entertaining – Battle Golf. Once again, the golf bit is stripped right back to two players whacking balls toward holes that appear from a lake. Some of these are greens with slopes to aid the ball’s progress. Others are rather more esoteric – a lighthouse with smashed-out windows; a submarine; the Loch Ness Monster with a hat.
The controls are straightforward – a tap to stop an aiming arrow and another to choose your shot’s power. And that’s just as well, because this game’s more about speed than precision – and the first to five wins.
Against the computer AI, this results in frenetic, entertaining battles, but the hole-in-one comes from online multiplayer, where you battle it out against real humans. Just watch out for people performing the so-called ‘pro’ shot, hitting and hoping before holes surface from the water.
Aqueducts is a sedate path-finding puzzle game. The aim is to deliver water to cities, which will otherwise suffer from drought. Unfortunately, a buffoon has decided the means of moving said water is by way of elevated and fragmented aqueducts.
Each section – most being a single line or quarter circle – can be individually rotated, the idea being to gradually fashion a solid path for the water to follow.
Naturally, this is where you come in. Each tap rotates a piece 90 degrees clockwise. Depending on the level, you’ll either have a limited number of moves, or a rapidly draining reservoir.
Over time, the complexity of the required pathways increases – notably when T-junctions enter the fray; but the game never becomes overbearing, and its pleasing visuals and soundtrack further add to the charm.
Laps – Fuse is a match-three game based around numbered discs. If three or more of the same meet, they fuse into a new disc with twice the face value. The tiny snag: you’ve limited slots to hurl discs into. The other tiny snag: the discs you hurl zoom about the edge of a circle. The other tiny snag: you’ve only 20 laps to secure your high-score – and thereby Laps bragging rights.
This isn’t a thoughtful Threes-style outing, then – more an arcade puzzler on fast-forward. You at every moment you must plan ahead, trying to set up matches and chain reactions that fling your circling disc back a little way, buying you a few seconds of extra time.
It’s a tense, clever take on what’s become a tired genre. And should you master the main mode, you can unlock ‘endless’, ‘furious’ (faster), and ‘extreme’ (fewer slots – presumably for masochists).
Once you’ve powered up your hug bar, iHUGU provides a brief diversion in the form of a mini-game, which can be anything from darting about and grabbing leaves, to whatever the hug equivalent of a beat ’em up is (a ‘hug fight’, apparently). The entire thing’s endearingly daft.
With eight locations, 100 characters to unlock, and a character editor to create terrifyingly freaky monsters with which to hug, there’s longevity here, too. iHUGU also proves there are still new things to say in single-finger Android gaming. We hug it.
Wilful Kitty is a sliding tile puzzle game on a four-by-four grid. But before you yawn and assume it’s another 2048 knock-off (which itself was a Threes! knock-off), guess again. Because this game features cats. And all the things that cats really like.
The twist here is a little kitty moves about the grid as you swipe, and objects that enter the grid are combined into consumables and toys. For example, milk and a bowl becomes a kitty drink, and a plate and some fish makes a hearty lunch.
This shift in mechanics shakes up everything you knew about this kind of game – as does you being able to charge up a ‘satisfaction bar’ that when full unleashes a ‘Hyper Kitty Dash’, clearing a chunk of the playfield in double-quick time.
It’s entertaining serving the tiny cat’s every need – and surprisingly challenging, too. Because it turns out this Wilful Kitty has bite.
Calculator: The Game is a puzzler geared towards sums, featuring a sentient, snarky calculator who’s relentlessly eager to show you its buttons.
The aim in each level is simple: use whatever buttons are provided to reach a goal number, within a limited number of steps. So if you need to get to 9 and see +3 and x3 keys, that’s pretty simple.
The thing is, this calculator likes playing you as much as you’re playing it. Before long, it’s gleefully adding buttons that enable you to knock digits off of your total, reverse them, or hurl numbers through portals.
This one’s not your standard desktop calculator, then, but all the better for it. And it’s a surprisingly entertaining game, given that you’re ultimately doing math.
Age of 2048 is effectively a reskin of popular swipe-based tile puzzler 2048. Now, 2048 was really a low-rent knock-off of the far superior Threes! (which has its own free version), but it had the advantage of being open source, therefore opening itself up to all kinds of variations on the basic theme.
In the original 2048, you swipe to slide numbered tiles about a four-by-four grid. Merged pairs then double their face value. But Age of 2048 is all about buildings.
Initially, you swipe bits of rock together, until you’re fashioning tents and stone monuments. Build a ‘wonder’ – the largest building type and the equivalent of the 2048 tile in the original – and you unlock the next stage.
Ultimately, Age of 2048 is still a slightly limited game, lacking the nuance and charm of Threes!. But its concept, design, and the addition of some useful power-ups, ensures it’s worth a download, and that it manages to stand out from the crowd.
Flipping Legend is a demanding endless runner smashed into an RPG-like upgrade system. The protagonist embarks on an orgy of destruction atop a chessboard-like pathway, and can only leap diagonally.
This initially makes your head spin, not least because the path is a wraparound one. This means if you leap off of its left-hand side, you reappear on the right – something you frequently have to make use of, to avoid the many hazards in your way.
To further complicate matters, your health bar drains at an alarming rate, and only refills when you biff enemies. Grab enough bling and you can unlock power-ups for taking out multiple foes.
With an energetic soundtrack, a bunch of alternate characters, and a very smart chunky art style, Flipping Legend shows there’s still life left in endless runners (albeit as the hero is busy killing everything in this one).
Hoggy 2 is a platform puzzler that feels like it’s escaped from a Nintendo console. The premise involves the evil Moon Men kidnapping the children of the blobby heroes. You must find where the kids have been hidden, somewhere inside a massive maze full of jars.
Each jar houses a bite-sized challenge packed full of platforms, enemies, traps, and fruit. Eat all the fruit and you’re awarded a key. Collect enough keys to unlock new areas of the maze.
The platforming bits are frequently deviously fiendish. Early levels ease you in, but you’re soon facing tests that seem impossible until you spot something crucial – a block you’d previously not noticed, or a different order in which to approach things – whereupon you feel like a genius.
Should you best all 200 hand-crafted levels, you can make your own in a level editor, or take on those the Hoggy community’s created. That this all comes for free is astonishing. Download it now.
Drop Wizard Tower is a superbly crafted love letter to classic single-screen arcade platform games like Bubble Bobble. You dart about, knocking out enemies, grabbing gems and fruit, and duffing up bosses, working your way towards a final confrontation.
However, there’s a twist in that Drop Wizard Tower fuses old-school platforming with auto-running. Your little wizard never stops moving, and can only be directed left or right. And he only shoots the instant he lands on a platform.
You’ll likely fight against this at first, cursing Drop Wizard Tower for straying from traditional left/right/jump/fire controls. But the game really works on mobile, and when it clicks you’ll be zooming about, stunning foes with your magic wand, and booting them away to create tumbling ‘avalanches’ of enemies.
Timber Tennis is essentially a souped-up Pong. Two players face off, sending a ball back and forth. However, Timber Tennis is played across five ‘lanes’, in theory making it a touch simpler to line up your bat than in the free-form Pong.
Where Timber Tennis differs from its ancient inspiration is in how you progress. Your opponent never misses a shot, until you’ve powered up your Super Shot bar, at which point you’ve about a second to stop an oscillating arrow to target a smash. Succeed and you win. Mess up and your game’s over.
Timber Tennis doesn’t have much depth, but it’s still easy to love. It looks great, with varied courts and characters, is fun in short bursts, and has some excellent music. The irritating commentator, however, needs pelting with infinite tennis balls, until all that’s left is blissful silence. (Fortunately, you can turn him off by disabling the sound effects.)
If you can wrestle your bounding trio into submission, you might get a touchdown. If the other side gets one: game over. (Unless you’re in Career mode, whereupon it’s first to three – or first to five in the final.)
It’s all totally stupid, but – much like Wrassling and Dunkers, by the same team – loads of raucous, breezy fun. Just expect to be a touch disappointed next time you watch a real match, and the Miami Dolphins aren’t soaring through the air, desperately fending off an attack from a team of actual sharks.
Ballz is crude and clunky, but it nonetheless manages to mesmerize, with a mix of ideas borrowed from Breakout, endless runners, and Angry Birds.
You slingshot your ball towards a wall of numbered blocks, and it pings about before coming to rest at the foot of the screen. Each number denotes how many times a block must be hit before it disappears, and all the blocks march forward one space when your ball stops moving.
Over time, you collect more balls – all of which are fired at once – but the block numbers sharply increase to counter any new advantage you might have.
The physics is rickety and random, the aiming mechanism is fiddly, and the aesthetics are basic, but Ballz is nonetheless compelling as you gradually fashion and unleash massive chains of balls. More polish, and it’d be a classic; as it is, it’s still a great freebie.
Sonic The Hedgehog hasn’t fared as well as one-time rival Mario. Whereas Nintendo’s mascot still features in first-rate platformers, Sega’s blue hedgehog is more often mired in freemium rubbish. With Sonic The Hedgehog, though, you’re getting the original Genesis/Mega Drive classic.
Most importantly, the game itself remains compelling, with Sonic zooming about colorful landscapes filled with platforms, traps, gold rings, patrolling enemies, dizzying loops and tunnels, and the occasional boss. Retro-gaming’s often a disappointment, but Sonic stands the test of time. If only all old games were reworked for mobile with such care.
You start out by selecting a character from the claw machine, and that determines which world you’re dropped in. You might be a rubber duck blazing along bathroom tiles, or a skull skidding through a fiery hell.
The aim: get to the end of a hand-crafted level to add the character to your collection.
Even the so-called ‘easy’ levels are tough, and the swipe controls are sometimes a bit iffy. But the trippy visuals, head-bobbing audio, and varied isometric worlds peppered with devious traps will keep drawing you back.
This game flips chess on its head in brilliant fashion, by messing around with the pieces rather than the board.
During your first go at Really Bad Chess, you might examine what’s in front of you and quickly come to the conclusion you have a few too many queens. Your opponent, by contrast, will have a suspicious lack of decent pieces.
This is intentional. In Really Bad Chess, the AI’s capabilities never change, but the pieces do. As you improve, the setup shifts.
Get really good and you’ll have to take on the computer with a pile of pawns while it attacks you with as many queens as it can feasibly get away with.
For free, you also get a daily puzzle and two attempts to beat it. A $2.99/£2.89 IAP unlocks local multiplayer and removes the ads.
This game does for racing what auto-runners do for platform games. One Tap Rally is controlled with a single finger, pressing on the screen to accelerate and releasing to brake, while your car steers automatically. The aim is to not hit the sides of the track, because that slows you down.
Win and you move up the rankings, then playing a tougher, faster opponent. In a neat touch, said opponents are recordings of real-world attempts by other players, ranked by time.
In essence, this is a digital take on slot-racing, then, without the slots. But the mix of speed and strategy, along with a decent range of tracks, makes you forget about the simplistic controls. If anything, they become a boon, shifting the focus to learning track layouts and razor-sharp timing. Top stuff.
The idea behind Yellow is to make the screen entirely yellow. The twist is the game has 50 different ways of enabling you to do so, but each level provides no inkling of the required methodology.
Initially, progress is quite swift, as you tap the screen, fling a dot around Angry Birds-style to fill a hole, and then grin when you realize you must, for instance, press a yellow disc with the rhythm of blowing up a balloon.
Later levels, though, are at times willfully – and almost gleefully – obtuse. You can get hints, paid for by watching ads, but to do so feels like admitting defeat in this minimal and clever puzzler.
In Silly Sausage: Doggy Dessert, the world’s stretchiest canine finds himself trying to worm his way through a land of cake, chocolate, ice cream, and a worrying number of spikes, saw-blades, and massive bombs.
Rather than walk like a normal pooch, the furry hero of this game stretches as you swipe, until his front paws can cling on to something. His bottom then snaps back into place. It’s quite the trick – but also a hazard if one end of his body ends up in danger when the other end is worryingly distant.
There are 50 scenes in all, along with tricky bonus rooms to try and beat. And although some of the later bits of the game are perhaps a bit too testing, this one as a whole is a very tasty, satisfying arcade treat.
Zero points for innovation in Binary Dash, which is another side-scrolling auto-runner where you tap to jump, and tap somewhere else to flip upside-down.
But many points for the combination of super-fast gameplay, superb level design, and a visual aesthetic that thumbs its nose at the modern-day penchant for mid-80s pixel art, instead hurling you back to the lurid charms of late 1970s gaming.
Yes, Binary Dash more looks like it’s been vomited out of an ancient Atari console, but it nonetheless has a quirky charm. And the game itself is great. It eases you in gently, helping you get to grips with flipping above and below the horizon, thus turning game-ending pillars into pits to leap over when you’re upside-down.
Before long, though, your thumbs will be seriously challenged by the tight choreography required to jump and flip your way to the ends of later levels.
You probably wouldn’t be a happy commuter if forced to take the line in Infinite Train twice daily.
Here, a cartoon train lurches along a track with more bends in it than seems entirely reasonable. You must swipe in the appropriate direction to ensure the train turns in time, rather than crashing and providing the operator with a pretty good excuse for a cancellation.
Along the way, you can grab coins and carriages, amassing the points needed to unlock new skins, some of which are very odd. (Trains that are in fact massive frogs are the least of it.)
It does get a bit samey, and the online multiplayer is drab, but Infinite Train’s good for a quick blast, and if you get sick of the endless mode, there are stage-based challenges to tackle.
With its four-by-four grid and penchant for rapidly restricting the playfield, Topsoil comes across a bit like a horticultural Threes! There’s no sliding cards about, though – instead, you’re presented with a string of things to plant, and prod open spaces to plonk them down.
After three, you get a chance to harvest – and this is where things become more complicated. You get more points for harvesting many plants at once, which requires them to be on adjacent squares. But on harvesting anything, the soil beneath is turned over. Soil cycles between blue, yellow, and green, and groups of plants cannot cross different soil colors.
The net result is a clever game where you must plan ahead, and where you keep digging for strategies to last longer and discover new plants to grow and harvest.
It takes a lot to make a turn-based puzzle game stand out. NeoAngle ’s stark visuals are certainly arresting, but it’s the way in which you move around the isometric landscape that makes the game unique.
Essentially, the protagonist is a triangle that flips into an adjacent tile when moving, leaving a trail in its wake. The trail is solid and cannot be crossed again. A glowing exit is where you must head – but only after grabbing gems along the way. And those gems might be stuck behind doorways opened using switches, or be located behind teleporters.
Soon, you’re trying to figure out a labyrinthine pathway to victory, wondering how someone could make a journey across a little single-screen neon grid so convoluted – and so riveting.
Yet another into-the-screen endless runner, channeling Temple Run. Yawn. Only Sky Dancer has a certain something that keeps you playing – and that certain something is leaving your stomach in your throat every time you jump.
Much of this is down to the construction of Sky Dancer’s world, which comprises tiny chunks of land hanging in the air in a manner that rocks usually don’t have. As you hurl yourself off the edge of one, you must quickly maneuver to land on a platform below.
Battling gravity and inertia is exhilarating, especially when the game speeds up and you know the slightest miscalculation will result in you meeting a splattery end on the desert floor.
We’re in Mario-style platforming territory with Super Phantom Cat, although only if you imagine the entire production quaffed a ton of sugar first. The Phantom World is a lurid, gaudy place, full of deadly traps, bling, and plenty of secrets. (A good rule when playing: never believe any wall is actually solid.)
Retina-searing art style aside, the game feels like a slam-dunk for any fan of classic platformers. Level design is smart, rewarding repeat play, there are varied modes, and the controls can be resized and shifted about if the defaults require banana thumbs on your device.
It is a bit ad-infested at times, but not to the point momentum is knocked. All in all, Super Phantom Cat is loads of leapy furry fun.
Pinball infused with the DNA of an against-the-clock endless runner sounds like an odd combination – but it works. In PinOut ’s neon world – featuring a gorgeous electro soundtrack – a massive table stretches far into the distance. Within: dozens of miniature tables comprising flippers, ramps, and more than a few traps.
The basic aim at every turn is to keep moving forward to the next mini-table – and quickly. Accurate ramp shots are key, and so mastering the game’s physics and the layout of its various stages is essential.
For advocates, this is a fresh take on pinball that works brilliantly in mobile form. And for newcomers, PinOut is freed from the frequently arcane rules of pinball, but loses none of its frenetic excitement.
Coming across like Super Hexagon got infatuated with polygons, Polywarp is a brutally difficult arcade experience that’s also maddeningly compulsive.
The basics are simple: your polygon sits at the center of the screen, and walls close in from the edges. By tapping the left or right-hand side of the screen, respectively, you reduce or increase your polygon’s edge count, to match the next shape that’s aiming to crush you.
Everything moves at speed and whirls about, like you’re playing in a washing machine packed with an endless number of lurid shapes.
Initially, Polywarp feels impossible, but you soon recognize patterns to commit to memory and master. Last 60 seconds and you’ll feel like a champ – until you realize a new, tougher mode’s waiting to humiliate your thumbs.
One of the more abstract games you’re likely to install on your Android device, Cubway comprises over 50 minimal scenes you traverse as a tiny red square.
The aim is simply to reach a goal, but all kinds of objects block your path and respond to your presence in varying ways. You must figure out how to get past them all, despite being restricted in terms of movement – forward or backward are your only options, although you can (and will often have to) stop, move slowly, or backtrack, depending on the hazard before you.
As you travel, a story of sorts is revealed, although the text reads like a strange self-help guide. Otherwise, Cubway is a success – it’s intuitive, the mechanics are fresh and clever, and the aesthetics are unfalteringly atmospheric.
All the chicks have been captured, and so super-hen Cluckles sets off to save them, armed with the kind of massive sword most people would be surprised to find lurking in a henhouse.
From the outset, Cluckles’ Adventure is a very retro platformer – all chunky graphics, angular environments with enemies marching back and forth, and an unforgiving nature.
But while the very regular deaths can be off-putting (as can the virtual button placement, seemingly designed for banana thumbs on anything above a seven-inch tablet), it’s hard to stay mad at everything else.
The visuals are rough and ready but full of charm. And most importantly, the level design is smart, making it a mild challenge to reach an exit, but a much tougher test should you want to rescue every chick.
It’s one of the better platformers on Android, and one of the very best free ones, as well as being a reminder of simpler times.
Imagine Tomb Raider reworked as Pac-Man, slammed into Crossy Road, played in fast-forward, and dressed as if spat out of a ZX Spectrum circa 1983. That’s Tomb of the Mask.
You play as a hero aiming to ‘liberate’ gold from a tomb, but he finds a mask – and rashly puts it on. Recklessness here wins the day, since the mask bestows the wearer with the ability to climb walls and leap big gaps, giving him a fighting chance of reaching the end of scrolling caverns packed with deadly spikes, guns, and foes, and avoiding an encroaching glowing wall of death.
Whether playing through set-piece levels or the endless arcade mode, Tomb of the Mask is a fresh, fun, vibrant twitch game that marries the best of old and new.
If you’re the kind of person who’d rather stand up (and knock down) dominoes than play the actual game, Dominocity should appeal.
In this arcade puzzler, the idea is to place as few dominoes as possible to reach a goal, while grabbing golden amulets along the way.
