There are loads of great games available for Android, but how can you pick out the gems from the dross, and amazing touchscreen experiences from botched console ports? With our lists, that’s how!
We cover the best titles on Android right now, including the finest racers, puzzlers, adventure games, arcade titles and more.
- Racing games
- Adventure games
- Arcade games
- Endless runners
- Platform games
- Puzzle games
- Shooting games
- Sports games
- Strategy games
- Word games
We've tried these games out, and looked to see where the costs come in - there might be a free sticker added to some of these in the Google Play Store, but sometimes you'll need an in app purchase (IAP) to get the real benefit - so we'll make sure you know about that ahead of the download.
Check back every week for a new game, and click through to the following pages to see the best of the best divided into the genres that best represent what people are playing right now.
Golf Peaks looks like a mini-golf game, but is in fact a turn-based logic puzzle. X force keygen adobe cc. The aim is still to get a ball to a hole, but instead of smacking it with clubs, you smack it with your brain.
Well, sort of. In each level you get a set of cards, and play them to move the ball. What you need to figure out is the correct order – easy enough when the levels are basic, but not so much when you’re faced with a course peppered with ravines, or loads of hills for the ball to inconveniently roll down.
No lucky holes-in-one here, then – just victory by way of cunning tactics, reading the course, and playing the right shot at the right moment. Hmm… perhaps it’s not too far off real golf after all.
Our favorite Android top-down, 3D and retro racers.
Rush Rally 3 brings console-style rally racing to Android. For quick blasts, you can delve into single rally mode, with a co-driver bellowing in your ear; or there’s the grinding metal of rallycross, pitting you against computer cars apparently fueled by aggression. If you’re in it for the long haul, immerse yourself in a full career mode.
None of those options would matter a jot if the racing wasn’t up to much. Fortunately, it’s really good. The game looks the part, with very smart visuals and viewpoints, whether belting around a racing circuit or blazing through a forest.
The controls work well, too, providing a number of setups to accommodate a range of preferences (tilt; virtual buttons) – and skill levels. All in all, it’s enough for the game to get that coveted checkered flag.
If you're fed up with racing games paying more attention to whether the tarmac looks photorealistic rather than how much fun it should be to zoom along at insane speeds, check out Horizon Chase. This tribute to old-school arcade titles is all about the sheer joy of racing, rather than boring realism.
The visuals are vibrant, the soundtrack is jolly and cheesy, and the racing finds you constantly battling your way to the front of an aggressive pack.
If you fondly recall Lotus Turbo Esprit Challenge and Top Gear, don't miss this one. (Note that Horizon Chase gives you five tracks for free. To unlock the rest, there's a single £2.29/US$2.99 IAP.)
Anyone expecting the kind of free-roaming racing from the console versions of this title are going to be miffed, but Need for Speed: Most Wanted is nonetheless one of the finest games of its kind on Android. Yes, the tracks are linear, with only the odd shortcut, but the actual racing bit is superb.
You belt along the seedy streets of a drab, gray city, trying to win events that will boost your ego and reputation alike. Wins swell your coffers, enabling you to buy new vehicles for entering special events.
The game looks gorgeous on Android and has a high-octane soundtrack to urge you onwards. But mostly, this one’s about the controls – a slick combination of responsive tilt and effortless drifting that makes everything feel closer to OutRun 2 than typically sub-optimal mobile racing fare.
The first two Riptide games had you zoom along undulating watery circuits surrounded by gleaming metal towers. Riptide GP: Renegade offers another slice of splashy futuristic racing, but this time finds you immersed in the seedy underbelly of the sport.
As with the previous games, you’re still piloting a hydrofoil, and racing involves not only going very, very fast, but also being a massive show-off at every available opportunity.
If you hit a ramp or wave that hurls you into the air, you’d best fling your ride about or do a handstand, in order to get turbo-boost on landing. Sensible racers get nothing.
The career mode finds you earning cash, upgrading your ride, and probably ignoring the slightly tiresome story bits. The racing, though, is superb – an exhilarating mix of old-school arcade thrills and modern mobile touchscreen smarts.
Mini Motor Racing is a frenetic top-down racer that finds tiny vehicles darting about claustrophobic circuits that twist and turn in a clear effort to have you repeatedly drive into walls. The cars handle more like remote control cars than real fare, meaning that races are typically tight – and easily lost if you glance away from the screen for just a moment.
There’s a ton of content here – many dozens of races set across a wide range of environments. You zoom through ruins, and scoot about beachside tracks. The AI’s sometimes a bit too aggressive, but with savvy car upgrades, and nitro boost usage when racing, you’ll be taking more than the occasional checkered flag.
Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit exists in a world where the police seem to think it’s perfectly okay to use their extremely expensive cars to ram fleeing criminals into submission. And when they’re not doing that, they belt along the streets, racing each other to (presumably) decide who pays for the day’s doughnuts.
It’s a fairly simple racer – you’re basically weaving your way through the landscape, smashing into other cars, and triggering the odd trap – but it’s exhilarating, breezy fun that echoes classic racers like Chase H.Q.
And once you’ve had your fill of being one of the nitro-happy fuzz, you can play out a career as the pursued as well, getting stuck into the kind of cop-smashing criminal antics that totally won’t be covered by your car manufacturer’s warranty.
Final Freeway 2R is a retro racing game, quite blatantly inspired by Sega’s classic OutRun. You belt along in a red car, tearing up a road where everyone’s rather suspiciously driving in the same direction. Every now and again, you hit a fork, allowing you to select your route. All the while, cheesy music blares out of your device’s speakers.
For old hands, you’ll be in a kind of gaming heaven. And arguably, this game’s better than the one that inspired it, feeling more fluid and nuanced. If you’re used to more realistic fare, give Final Freeway 2R a go – you might find yourself converted by its breezy attitude, colorful visuals, and need for truly insane speed.
Motorsport Manager Mobile 3 is a racing management game without the boring bits. Rather than sitting you in front of a glorified spreadsheet, the game is a well-balanced mix of accessibility and depth, enabling you to delve into the nitty gritty of teams, sponsors, mechanics, and even livery.
When you’re all set, you get to watch surprisingly tense and exciting top-down racing. (This being surprising because you’re largely watching numbered discs zoom around circuits.) One-off races give you a feel for things, but the real meat is starting from the bottom of the pile in the career mode, with the ultimate aim of becoming a winner.
It’s all streamlined, slick, and mobile-friendly, and a big leap on from the relatively simplistic original Motorsport Manager Mobile.
We all know that free Android games aren’t always free these days, but many of them are very close if you have a little patience. Most Freemium bottlenecks occur when players get impatient and waiting the game out can usually get around those pitfalls. What we have here are the best free Android games that you should be able to play comfortably without engaging in too many in-app purchases and we hope you enjoy them! If you want free Android games with no in-app purchases, we have that linked just below. Let’s get started. Fortnite probably should be on this list. It is a freemium game like PUBG is. However, many are a little worried about installing games that aren’t on the Google Play Store. If you aren’t one of them, you can see our install guide here!
Read Next:10 best upcoming Android games — action, racing, strategy, and more
If we missed any of the best free Android games, tell us about them in the comments! To see our complete list of best app lists, click here.
Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.Gaming on mobile has been improving at a far greater rate than any technology that came before it. Android games seems to hit new heights every year. With the release of Android Nougat and Vulkan API, it only stands to get better and better over time. It won’t be long before mobile sees some even more impressive titles than we have now! Without further delay, here are the best Android games available right now! Fortnite should probably be on this list. However, many are squeamish about it not being on Google Play. If you want to try it, here is our install guide! Also, click the video above for our list of the best Android games released in 2018!
If we missed any of the best Android games, tell us about them in the comments!
Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.What’s better than a free game? Pretty much nothing. Except when it’s terrible and you’ve wasted time on downloading and playing it. Fortunately, there are loads of fantastic free games for Android – and we list the very best here.
Whether you’re into word games, endless runners, platformers or puzzles, there’s something here for you.
Click through to the next pages to see each category or read on below for our pick of the week. And check back weekly for our latest pick.
The VideoKid is an intense endless skating game that has beamed in most of 1980s pop culture. During games you’ll spot everything from much-loved classic cartoon characters to the Bluesmobile, Depicted in blocky voxel style.
Your task is to hurl video tapes at subscriber mailboxes, and make it to the end of your shift without getting run over – which is easier said than done. The road might be straight, but it’s full of hazards. Intersections are especially perilous, whether you suddenly find yourself down in the sewers before a massive ’gator, or weaving between brawling transforming robots.
Still, it’s fun trying, and The VideoKid showcases that with the addition of charm and smarts, creaky old arcade games (in this case, 1985’s Paperboy) can cut it in the modern day.
Our favorite free Android 3D, retro, 2D and on-rails racers.
Beach Buggy Racing 2 is a high-octane kart racer. True to form, your dinky vehicle belts along larger-than-life tracks, taking in everything from medieval castles with fire-breathing dragons, to an ancient world full of dinosaurs – and gigantic sea creatures you can bounce off.
Naturally, your aim is to get to the checkered flag first, across just two laps. To do this, you must find shortcuts, and make use of power-ups that can turn opponents into a block of ice, blast them into the heavens, and far more besides.
Sadly, there are no leagues, and Beach Buggy Racing 2 only ever offers you two race choices at any given time. But the compulsion loop is extremely strong, the upgrade/unlock path reasonable, and the racing action some of the best around on Android.
Disc Drivin’ 2 is the turn-based driving game which was presumably created when someone reimagined shuffleboard as Mario Kart and shoved that strange concoction online for web-based multiplayer contests.
The concept of a turn-based racer is bonkers and it shouldn’t work, but it really does. As you flick your little disc about tracks suspended in space, the tension ramps up as you home in on your opponent. You will learn to master shortcuts, zip past hazards, and also how to make best use of bonus powers afforded to your little disc.
It’s absurd to think that one of the best mobile racers on Android is about flicking a coin around a race track, but there we have it. Miss this one at your peril.
Asphalt 9: Legends, like its predecessors, is a decidedly nitro-happy, larger-than-life take on arcade racing. It has you belt along at insane speeds, regularly soaring into the air, your car spinning and pinwheeling in a manner that’d have your car insurance company angrily tear up your policy documents.
This racer also differentiates itself by streamlining controls to the point you needn’t steer. The car moves on rails, with you swiping between lanes, and timing actions like boosts and drifts. That might sound reductive, but this doesn’t detract from the racing feel, it gives you a keen sense of focus on timing, and there’s a manual option if you really want that.
Being an Asphalt game, there’s some grind, but this is offset by you being immersed in the most outlandish and eye-dazzling arcade racing on Android.
Carmageddon is a blast from the past of PC gaming. It masquerades as a racer, but often feels like you’re hunting prey – albeit while encased in a suit of speeding metal.
The game’s freeform ‘arenas’ are networks of roads in a dystopian future. People and cows blithely amble about while deranged drivers smash each other to pieces. Victories come by way of completing laps, wrecking all your opponents, or mowing down every living thing in the vicinity.
In the 1990s, this was shocking to the point of Carmageddon being banned in some countries. Today, the lo-fi violence seems quaint. But the game’s tongue-in-cheek humor survives, sitting nicely alongside bouncy physics, madcap sort-of-racing, and deranged cops attempting to crush you into oblivion should you cross their path.
Asphalt 8: Airborne is a high-octane racer that gave a cursory glance towards realism. It then decided against bothering with such a trifling issue, and decided it’d much prefer you to pelt along at insane speeds under the power of glorious nitro, which frequently sends your car soaring into the air.
Not one for the simulation crowd, then, but this racer is perfect for everyone else. The larger-than-life branched courses – hyper-real takes on real-world locations – are madcap and exciting. Rather than doing laps around a boring circuit surrounded by gravel traps, you blast through rocket launch sites, and blaze through volcanos.
There are downsides – cynical IAPs and timers abound, welding a massive comedy tailfin to this otherwise sleek racer’s stylings. But for dizzying speed, mid-air barrel rolls, and loads of laughs, this racer is tough to beat.
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.
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.
In the world of Splash Cars, it appears everyone's a miserable grump apart from you. Their world is dull and grey, but your magical vehicle brings colour to anything it goes near. The police aren't happy about this and aim to bring your hue-based shenanigans to a close, by ramming your car into oblivion. There's also the tiny snag of a petrol tank that runs dry alarmingly quickly.
Splash Cars therefore becomes a fun game of fleeing from the fuzz, zooming past buildings by a hair's breadth, grabbing petrol and coins carelessly left lying about, and trying to hit an amount-painted target before the timer runs out. Succeed and you go on to bigger and better locations, with increasingly powerful cars.