The best new free Android game
Get an instant fix with the free Android games tickling our fancy right now.
Vampire Survivors
Yes, this devilishly simple roguelike shoot ’em up has been out on mobile for over a year now, but dammit we still can’t put it down. Making the jump from PC and console indie darling to mobile was pretty much seamless, and there’s a ridiculous amount of content to unlock for determined players, and the free-to-play design with optional, unobtrusive ads is a great way to get newcomers on board without first breaking out the credit card.
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The best free Android platform games
Super Cat Tales: PAWS
This follow-up to our previous favourite Android platforming freebie somehow manages to improve on its predecessor. You get that whiff of classic platforming, directing a band of moggies through brightly colored settings. They leap about, grab bling, avoid nasty enemies, and occasionally slide down walls with that look cats get on biting off more than they can chew.
The controls are superb – two thumbs are all you need to run (double tap), jump (leap from a platform), and wall jump (tap in the opposite direction). It’s so good, you’ll want all virtual D-pads summarily banned. But the game itself is even better, with smartly designed levels and surprising moments aplenty. There’s even a lovely downtime game where the feline heroes get to fish for their dinner – something your own cats will look enviously upon.
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Swordigo
Before all games had to be 3D by law, the 2D adventure-platformer reigned supreme. You’d scoot about a vibrant world with a suspicious number of floating platforms, nab bling, and occasionally kick the living daylights out of monsters daft enough to get in your way.
On touchscreens, these games are usually a bit rubbish, due to iffy design and even worse controls, but Swordigo bucks the trend. You get a huge magical realm of monsters to fight, treasures to find, and towns to explore. Any whiff of nostalgia is rapidly expunged as you become engrossed in the plot, give giant spiders a serious kicking, and do your best Harry Potter impersonation with the aid of enemy-troubling spells.
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Dadish 3
Hey, kids! Don’t hop on any old bus under the promise of a ‘field trip’ – especially if you’re a radish and the person running said trip has a thing for radish soup. That’s the set up for this tasty platform game that has the surprisingly serene Dadish bounce through dozens of levels, to rescue his kids.
You won’t be serene, mind, because Dadish 3 is ferocious. It’s a platform game that punishes the slightest error, and where restart points are rare. Stick with it, though, and you’ll revel in its tight level design, oddball sense of humor, and sewer dolphins. Yes, you read that right.
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Bean Dreams
This deceptively simple platform game strips the genre right back, placing a firm emphasis on learning levels, timing, and exploration. Your jumping bean never stops bouncing, and you simply guide it left or right. The usual platform-game tropes are evident: monsters to jump on; fruit and gems to gather.
But Bean Dreams cleverly adds replay value by way of missions that can’t all be completed on a single run: sticking to a bounce count; finding hidden pet axolotls; and collecting all the fruit. What first seems simple and reductive is really a big challenge, but the straightforward controls are perfect for touchscreens, rather than you spending most of your time battling a hideous virtual D-pad.
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Sad But Ded
Like many platformers, Sad But Ded features a leapy protagonist and a goal. But this game’s on-screen controls are a row of single-use buttons to direct an auto-running protagonist. Time things right and Ded reaches the flag; get things wrong and he dies. No wonder he spends the entire game screaming.
This would all be tricky enough, but the game’s creator has a devious streak. Just as you’re getting to grips with everything, the game’s mechanics will change. (Keep a close eye on level titles – they are more important than you’ll first realize.)
The entire thing’s very silly but also a stiff challenge – especially if you avoid the easy mode with its endless lives and instead take on the hardcore level or speedrun mode.
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Bit of a banger: It’s full of Sparks
Like Canabalt with explosions, It’s full of Sparks has you tap the screen to direct a jumping firecracker to a body of water that’ll stop it going boom. Before long, things get tougher, and you’ll end up performing deranged finger gymnastics as your panicking firework darts about, desperate to survive.
The best free Android endless runners
Alto’s Odyssey
In Alto’s Adventure, the titular hero was supposed to be capturing escaped llamas. But mostly he performed show-off stunts on snowy slopes, and tried to stay ahead of spoilsport elders with sticks, angry at Alto’s maverick nature and distaste at sitting in a pen full of llama poop.
This sequel retains the original’s elegance and gorgeous aesthetics. Again, one thumb controls fling Alto into the air and trigger tricks. But now Alto’s blazing through a vast desert, peppered with colossal dunes and death-defying valleys.
It at first feels like a reskin, but Odyssey soon opens up, offering new ideas like bouncing off of hot-air balloons and wall-riding along cliffs. And should you want a more meditative affair, there’s a Zen mode, which pits you against an endless landscape, Alto picking himself up whenever he comes a cropper.
Download Alto’s Odyssey
Saily Seas
Even if you have your sea legs, you might think twice about mimicking the hero of this splashy tale of survival. Armed with what appears to be a sheet nailed to a twig rammed into a log, the hardy protagonist braves the high seas – and even higher waves.
By way of tapping, pressing, and swiping, you try to avoid drowning or getting clonked by vicious sea life, all the while trying to outpace a massive, hungry whale determined to make you a lunchtime snack.
Still, if the tension ramps up a bit too much, you can at least gawp at the lovely visuals, shortly before your sailor meets their untimely demise.
Download Saily Seas
Will Hero
Hero of the hour Will is a bit of a square – but so is everyone else in this amusingly over the top mash-up of platforming, endless running, and wanton violence.
You use a single thumb to have Will bounce forwards, the aim being to land on enemy heads, avoid pits, and not get sliced in half by surprisingly deadly windmills. But grab a chest and you’re suddenly heavily armed, unleashing everything from missiles to giant axes.
The gameplay’s fast, furious and demented, but it doesn’t wear thin – this hero’s got plenty of missions to complete, and helmets to find, each of which bestows special powers.
Download Will Hero
The best free Android arcade games
Super Fowlst 2
It’s not easy being a chicken tasked with saving the world from a demon invasion –especially when your only weapon is a rotund rear. But that’s how this multi-screen flapper begins, with you arcing awkwardly across the screen, smacking into enemies to knock them flying.
As you progress, it doesn’t get any less weird. You’ll face bosses like a giant avocado that hurls its stone at you, and occasionally get to stomp about in a chicken mech suit. Grab enough coins and you’ll also be able to start games by pooping homing missiles out of your bum.
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Knight Brawl
If you thought the battle with the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail was silly, it’s got nothing on Knight Brawl. This absurdist hack ’em up finds your sword-wielding protagonist whirling arms and bouncing about as if on a trampoline.
Wrestle with the controls and you’ll eventually elevate yourself to stabby mastery in a range of free-for-all scraps and one-on-one bouts. And when you hanker for bling rather than glory, you can partake in some pilfering and murdering, leaping about castles and unsportingly slicing unsuspecting guards up from behind.
It’s entertainingly bonkers, even if the sound is sadly limited to clangs and grunts, rather than an overly confident foe yelling “had worse” and yelling that they’ll “bite your legs off” when relieved of their own.
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Street fighter: Beat Street
Successfully punching old into new Beat Street echoes scrolling retro fare like Streets of Rage and Double Dragon, but you duff up enemies using only a single digit. And, yes, you can still unsportingly smash their evil faces in with a baseball bat – but that’s OK, because you’re the hero.
PinOut!
Pinball on smartphones always feels cramped, like someone tried to squeeze a house into a shoebox. PinOut! is different. Its single massive table stretches far into the distance, challenging you with belting a ball along against the clock.
The table’s divided into short sections, which you get past by successfully hitting ramps. If the ball drops between the flippers, you don’t lose lives, but time.
The entire game’s drenched in neon and synth-pop, like you’ve been hurled into a fusion of Tron, pinball and a 1980s disco. But it works brilliantly even on the smallest screen, ramping up the tension as the clock ticks down and your sausage fingers prevent you from reaching the bonuses that temporarily reset the timer.
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Flip out: Williams Pinball
Want conventional ball-spanging? Then get Williams Pinball, which painstakingly recreates a bunch of classic tables. There’s grind to unlock them all – although ‘grind’ in this case is ‘playing great pinball’. Pick wisely (Attack from Mars/Medieval Madness/The Getaway) for your free table, though, because you’ll play it a lot.
Spaceteam
Multi-device party games are usually a bit glib, but Spaceteam bucks the trend with a quirky and oddball take on co-op gameplay. Between two and four players are part of the ‘Spaceteam’ (red jerseys are optional), and must give orders, to try and stop your ship exploding, a ship — naturally — that happens to be attempting to outrun an exploding star.
It’s a very silly game as you all bark out orders, and get frustrated when no-one’s listening, mostly because it turns out said orders tend to refer to something on someone else’s screen. Still, you can’t help but love anything on Google Play that has ‘Beveled Nanobuzzers’ as an item in its feature list.
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The best free shooting games on Android
Shadowgun Legends
It’s the future, and humanity’s at war with deadly alien foes. Naturally, the best way to turn the tide of war is to send in a bunch of armored nutcases with massive guns – and then turn their escapades into some kind of absurdist and extremely violent reality TV show.
That’s Shadowgun Legends in a nutshell: a mobile FPS with the underlying aim of becoming a legendary warrior, to the point your adoring fans build a statue of you in the game’s main hub. Before then, there’s loads of shooty action to immerse yourself in – 200 missions, set across four worlds. Just remember to smile for the cameras.
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Time Locker
If you thought vertical shooters would be a mite easier if you could freeze the action, Time Locker suggests otherwise. In this dazzling low-poly world of heavily armed critters, everything moves only when you do – bar a relentlessly encroaching all-devouring darkness.
This is initially disorienting, but the action nonetheless feels fresh from the off. And Time Locker really grabs hold as you learn to play with time, slowing down to weave between swarms of enemies, carefully maneuvering to pick off gun emplacements, and risking blazing ahead when bosses and the deadly abyss are in hot pursuit.
Download Time Locker
PewPew Live
Ah, to return to those halcyon days where you’d sit in front of a CRT screen, neon visuals searing your retinas as you zoomed around a tiny arena, blasting everything in sight. But wait! You can do all that right now with PewPew Live.
OK, so you won’t get the CRT bit (unless you do something very weird with your Android blower, cables and a very old telly), but this title otherwise brings back the joy of classic twin-stick shooty larks like Robotron: 2084. And it also moves beyond mere blasting, with alternate modes that have you dodge rather than shoot, or deal with pesky space rocks keen to smash you into next week.
For a fiver, we’d recommend it. For free, you’d be pewty daft to miss it.
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Shooty Quest
If you’re a nefarious evil type, you should know better than to blow up someone’s house when they’re called The Deadly Arrow. And most definitely don’t steal their cat and leave a calling card. Idiots. Still, as Mr Arrow, you get to take your revenge by – as the game’s name suggests – getting all shooty.
Levels play out with you standing at the screen’s center while enemies dart in from the edges. Tap to fire off arrows. Easy. Except it isn’t, because before long each enemy can only be defeated with a specific weapon. This transforms Shooty Quest from mindless blaster to deranged and frenetic juggling act.
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Missile Command: Recharged
The original Missile Command coin-op had you fend off increasingly intense nuclear missile attacks. You’d frantically spin the trackball and fire off your own strikes, before eventually succumbing to your inevitable demise. To hammer home the futile nature of nuclear conflict, the game eschewed the traditional ‘game over’ message for the more chilling ‘the end’.
This touchscreen effort doesn’t have a trackball and nor can you manage which silos to shoot from. Missile launches are automated when you tap the display to target the latest barrage from an endless onslaught of neon destruction. Those changes might make veterans grumble, but they work – and you can always fire up an emulator on Android if you want the original. Instead, Recharged rethinks a classic and is a rare example of a redesign that’s a blast to play.
Get Missile Comand: Recharged
The best free Android puzzle, match and word games
Please, Touch the Artwork 2
Fed up with tiresome types banging on that games can’t be art? Show them this oddball puzzler and point out it is literal art. At least in the sense its various puzzles are based around the work of Belgian modern artist James Ensor.
If all that sounds a bit highbrow, don’t worry. Even if art isn’t your thing, this is a superb lightweight point-and-tapper, where the artwork comes alive in Gilliamesque fashion as you roam miniature painterly scenes to find objects for various subjects. Only when they’re sated to further paintings open up to your prodding digits.
It’s cheaper than a trip to your local gallery and arguably more fun. There aren’t even any ads. If you think it’s a pretty picture, also check out the equally compelling Mondrian-inspired predecessor.
Download Please, Touch The Artwork 2
