The 40 best Android games you can get right now

The 40 best Android games you can get right now

Sometimes you really do get what you pay for. There are loads of great free games on Android, but spend a little cash and you can enjoy some of the best mobile gaming around. And when we say ‘a little bit’, we mean it. Most of the games covered here can be had for less than the price of a pint – and some are even free. Also, this being Stuff, we’re all about the very best. We’ve actually played all these games – probably a bit too much, if truth be told – and so whether you’re into high-octane endless survival games, blasting aliens, or having your brains smashed out by maddeningly tough puzzles, there’s something in this list for you.

ALONE…

Somewhere along the way, a great many games forgot how to be exciting. But ALONE… remembers those days of seat-of-the-pants roller-coaster gameplay, where a moment’s distraction spelled game over. Here, you’re piloting a tiny ship through deadly caverns at breakneck speed. Occasionally, alarms blare, to warn of incoming projectiles. All you have is your wits and reactions as your sliding finger directs the ship up and down, before it inevitably comes a cropper on the rocky face of one too many giant asteroids.

PINOUT

Pinball reinvented as an endless runner of sorts, PinOut has you smash a ball ever onwards while a timer relentlessly counts down. The table is essentially a huge neon corridor, punctuated by ramps and flippers. Each section is a miniature table – a puzzle you must quickly grok, before making the perfect shot to send the ball to the next challenge. It’s immediate but tense. Bonuses and mini-games help replenish the timer, but a few duff shots can leave you struggling on entering later, tougher zones.

SUPER HEXAGON

Super Hexagon is survival gaming as reimagined by a lunatic. A tiny craft sits in empty space, surrounded by an infinite number of walls that are rapidly closing in. All you can do is dart left and right, nipping through the gaps, holding off your inevitable demise. Games last mere seconds until you start noticing repeating patterns and mastering how to get through each unscathed. As 60 seconds finally pass (many attempts later), colours shift and the pace increases further, signifying that a new, faster and even more punishing challenge has been unlocked. It might be brutal, but Super Hexagon is also electrifying and absurdly addictive; enter at your peril.

IMPOSSIBLE ROAD

Less impossible than once it was, thanks to an update that gave the white ball some shaded definition against the all-white background. But, don’t worry, it’s still completely impossible. Keeping the ball on the track – though twists and turns, yumps, bumps and chicanes – is made harder by weird physics which give it apparent weight in the air but no directional momentum in the corners. And the fact that the simple left/right controls rotate the track around the ball, and the slightly sticky track edges occasionally repulse you into the white nothingness and time-out death.

DISNEY CROSSY ROAD

Endless Frogger meets Disney in a rare example of an indie dev/movie house tie-up that works perfectly. The mechanics will be familiar to anyone who’s played the excellent original — tap and swipe to have a blocky protagonist weave through traffic and deftly jump across rivers. The addition of Disney characters, though, finds you battling your way through retro versions of famous animated worlds, dodging tumbling blocks in Toy Story, filing memories for bonuses in Inside Out, and avoiding a psychotic suit of armour in Haunted House.

FORGET-ME-NOT

This one feels like someone mashed-up the best bits from classic arcade games and squeezed the result into your Android device. Your little square scoots about neon mazes, shooting, eating flowers, and trying to grab a key to unlock a hitherto hidden exit. Meanwhile, enemies periodically beam in and start wrecking the place.

OSMOS HD

Osmos is a game of warfare between ‘motes’ – blobs that absorb anything smaller than themselves, and which can sometimes propel themselves by ejecting matter. Initially, it takes place in what appears to be primordial soup, and you learn how to cope with the gloopy physics and manipulate time to speed up or slow down the movement of the tiny universe. Subsequent levels then introduce antimatter, ferocious hostile motes, and gravity-based constructions that shift Osmos towards what resembles a galactic scale.

PAC-MAN CE DX

If you’d visited Stuff HQ in early 2015 and told us mere months later Android would receive the best Pac-Man game ever made, we’d have laughed so hard you’d have been blown out of the window. But the joke would have been on us, because CE DX is marvellous. Following on from the original Pac-Man Championship Edition, this sequel is a fast-paced time-attack game, where you manage mazes split in half. Clear one side and a special object appears in the other; eat that and the now-empty section is refilled with a new dot configuration.

SPACETEAM

Spaceteam is a masterpiece in design — a multiplayer game that anyone can understand in an instant. The premise is your ship is falling to bits while attempting to outrun an exploding star. The only thing that will keep it going is responding quickly to commands that appear on your device. The snag is they may refer to your control panel or those on friends’ screens. The net result is lots of people maniacally yelling things like “WILL SOMEONE PLEASE SET THE SIGMACLAPPER TO ZERO?” while frantically searching their own screen for “a switch that looks like someone being eaten by a telephone”. Genius.

BADLAND

If you liked the idea of Flappy Bird but hated everything else about it, give Badland a go. It’s the best side-scrolling-one-button-physics-floater we’ve played (and we’ve played a lot), and is worthy of its place in this list for its gorgeous graphics alone. It’s also beautifully animated: we’ve never seen a fuzzy alien blob absorb a power-up and gently throb as it grows to 10 times the size, but we’re pretty sure this is exactly what it would look like.

GEOMETRY WARS 3: DIMENSIONS

This twin-stick shooter’s one for shoving in the faces of bores who bang on about how your Android device has only got rubbish games, unlike their amazing consoles. Sure, Geometry Wars 3 might not be drowning in depth and storylines, but it’s a truly stunning blaster that looks utterly gorgeous on your touchscreen display. As its name suggests, this is a more three-dimensional affair than its predecessors — this time, you’re blowing up all kinds of neon nasties while zooming around shapes lurching about in space.

DEATH ROAD TO CANADA

Described by its creators as a ‘randomly generated road-trip action-RPG’, Death Road to Canada has the heart of an arena shooter. More often than not, your little gang of looters – aiming to get from Florida to the reportedly zombie-free Canada – find themselves surrounded, weaving between the bitey and sometimes surprisingly spry undead, occasionally shooting them in the face. It’s relentlessly intense, whether you’re trying to sneak about a city at sunrise, or find yourself in a survival-based siege. And even moments of respite are nervy affairs, as you tackle pages seemingly torn from a sadistic Choose Your Own Adventure book, where the wrong decision can leave the last of your party gouged to death by an angry moose.

GALAXY ON FIRE 2 HD

A spaceship shooter with a 20-hour campaign and some of the best visuals Android has to offer, Galaxy On Fire 2 is about as close to Elite as you can get in a modern mobile game. Yes, there are ads and in-app purchases, but neither spoils the experience of making your way through this grand space opera.

TOWAGA

This visually arresting game plonks its protagonist atop a temple, hurls all kinds of terrifying creatures his way, mumbles something about a ritual, and then demands you prove yourself worthy by shooting everything and not dying. It comes across like a twin-stick shooter where someone’s uncharitably glued your feet to the floor. You whizz your light beam around to capture creatures, lifting your finger to obliterate those you’ve already frozen.

NEON SHADOW

Although we admire developers who try to cram console-style titles on to Android, a glass screen is a far cry from a gamepad. With Neon Shadow, though, you get something approximating a console FPS, but with enough mobile sensibilities that you won’t want to hurl your Android at a wall. It’s pacey, vibrant, and straightforward to control, resulting in a fun blast through a space-station crawling with angry mechanoids unleashed by an unhinged AI.

LARA CROFT GO

We can imagine the meeting room when someone piped up with: “Hey, why don’t we turn Tomb Raider into a turn-based puzzle game?” But any doubt must have instantly evaporated on playing Lara Croft GO. The game is gorgeous — rivalling Monument Valley in terms of breathtaking beauty — but, more importantly, it’s smart. Each step of the quest is a tiny puzzle, where you figure out a path, flick switches, grab swag, and try to avoid being mauled by giant scuttling spiders.

THREES!

One of the most criminally ripped-off games of recent years, Threes! is simple but ingenious; easy to play but infuriatingly difficult to master. A four-by-four grid and a series of sliding numbered tiles are your tools. Each numbered tile can only combine with one other type of tile, at which point it becomes a single tile whose values add up to its constituents.

LINELIGHT

With gaming having long ago hurled itself into the world of 3D, it’s amusing to tackle a puzzle adventure bordering on 1D. Linelight is a world of linear pathways and coloured sparks, moving to the beat of a minimal soundtrack. Your aim is simply to progress – but that’s easier said than done. Every step of your journey is peppered with barriers – switches to flick, bridges to cross, and rivals darting about. The last of those are to be avoided, but also manipulated into helping you, by timing it so they trigger switches that enable you to progress elsewhere.

FRAMED 2

The original Framed was a tactile joy on Android, with you manipulating animated comic book panels, in order to change the outcome of a nefarious plot involving several sneaky spies. Framed 2 is actually a prequel in terms of storyline, but the mechanics have moved on. Here, there’s far more emphasis on reusing panels, timing, and play. Puzzles can often be solved in various ways – but even failing is fun as you watch your sprinting spy come a cropper at the hands of the fuzz.

LAYTON’S MYSTERY JOURNEY

A criticism often levelled at mobile is it doesn’t get proper games – even proper mobile games. But Layton’s Mystery Journey is a full-fledged Layton adventure of the type you may have enjoyed on a Nintendo DS. Here, you play budding detective Katrielle, who cracks crimes by zipping about London and solving puzzles – and you get many hours of charming dialogue, a slew of frequently tricksy puzzles, and a game that radiates quality.

THIMBLEWEED PARK

A love letter to 1980s point-and-click adventures, Thimbleweed Park is (sort of) a murder mystery. It begins with a bloke being horribly killed by something with glowing red eyes. Then two feds show up, but they act weirdly and keep secrets from one another – and the player. In fact, everyone in the game has an agenda, is borderline nuts, or both.

SAMOROST 3

The mechanics of classic point-and-click adventures have transferred nicely to touchscreens, but the power in modern kit has enabled them to evolve in terms of artistry. Samorost 3 is a case in point: although it mostly involves pottering about, prodding the landscape, and figuring out where to use found objects, it’s the lush visuals and gorgeous soundtrack that prove hypnotic.

OCEANHORN

People who moan smartphones aren’t good for console-style fare need Oceanhorn thrust into their mitts. Yes, there’s a whiff of Zelda about the islands of the Uncharted Seas, but you’ll forget all that when immersed in this epic arcade adventure. The story begins with your father’s disappearance. He’s left a letter, a notebook and a mysterious necklace. Before long, you’re getting all questy, duffing up aggressive wildlife, and pilfering bling like it’s going out of fashion

VOYAGEUR

This ambitious title marries text-based adventuring from 80 Days and Lifeline… with the seemingly infinite universe seen in 8-bit classic Elite. The premise is mankind is scattered among the stars, but your ship is equipped with an alien ‘Descent Device’ that allows faster-than-light travel. The twist: you can only go one-way, towards the centre of the galaxy.

LOVE YOU TO BITS

This love-letter to classic point-and-clickers finds space explorer Kosmo trying to find bits of his robot girlfriend (don’t dwell on that part), which have been scattered throughout space. The locations he visits are wildly diverse, beautifully illustrated, and peppered with pop-culture references. There’s a cantina that could be in a galaxy far, far away; and one mudball you visit is populated by suspiciously intelligent apes.

SUPER CAT BROS

This adorable love letter to classic platformers looks like someone’s swapped out your Android device for a NES while you weren’t looking. It features a dinky cat scooting about, grabbing gold, avoiding monsters, and finding his siblings who’ve ended up stranded on a mysterious island. The short levels are ideally suited to mobile play, but the best bit is the two-thumb controls. Rather than a horrible virtual D-pad, you just get left and right arrows, which it turns out is enough for dashing, leaps, wall jumps, and cartoonish braking

MUSHROOM 11

Calling Mushroom 11 a platform game, while technically accurate, doesn’t get to the heart of it. In the glow of an irradiated wasteland, a self-multiplying blob of green gunk lurks. Touch one side of its mass and it’s burned away, quickly regrowing on the other side. Well done: you have discovered how to move. But that’s just the beginning, in a game that forces you to jump between simple puzzles (slice up the blob, have one bit flick a switch, so the remaining part can squeeze through a gap) to intense boss battles.

SUPER MARIO RUN

We know: this isn’t a proper Mario game. This one’s an auto-runner, which you can play entirely with one thumb. Horrors! Only, this is Nintendo, so you’re not being short-changed – instead, you’re getting Mario reimagined for touch. So, yes, the controls have been radically simplified: a sole digit activating in-context actions. but the 24 courses are deviously designed, packed with unique features and new tricks for Mario to learn, such as pause tiles, and arrows that hurl Mario backwards towards otherwise inaccessible areas.

ICYCLE

This one took its sweet time coming to Android, but now finally people without iThings can enjoy the eye-popping, terrifying journey of Dennis, a naked unicyclist battling his way through a surreal post-apocalyptic frozen wonderland. Whether picking your way through mutating, spike-infested psychedelia, or struggling towards a puckered-up reverse mermaid, you’ll never tire of iCycle’s ceaselessly imaginative surroundings.

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.

MINI METRO

Underground maps are beautiful things, and so it’s no surprise a game based on them looks wonderful. What is surprising is a strategy title focussed solely on passenger movement and carriage management is this compelling. On selecting a location, stations periodically appear, and it’s your job to connect them. The snag: you’ve a limited number of lines and carriages, and if a single station becomes too overcrowded, the entire network closes.

CARD THIEF

If you thought Hitman GO shook up stealth for mobile, Card Thief takes things a sneaky step further. Your arena of sorts is a deck of cards, dealt on to a three-by-three grid. During each turn, you tiptoe about, using stealth points to forge paths that involve grabbing loot, and aiming to avoid guards keen to hurl you into a cell. The game initially lobs a load of tutorials your way, and perplexes with its many nuances. But if you stick around, you’ll learn new techniques and tactics with every game as the rules begin to click.

FREEWAYS

If you’ve ever stared aghast at a hideous road junction and assumed you could do better, Freeways is ready to prove otherwise. It dumps you before dozens of screens, each empty bar the odd sign and building. Prod any of those and arrows detail where the traffic wants to go. Then it’s just a question of laying the roads. The snag is concrete pours from your finger as you drag across the screen, with all the finesse of a toddler with a crayon. And although you can build bridges, you’ll sooner or later jam up your tiny network and have to start again. It sounds dull. It really isn’t.

REIGNS: HER MAJESTY

The original Reigns was a clever spin on kingdom management strategy, distilling the entire interaction to Tinder-like left/right swipes. Follow-up Reigns: Her Majesty initially looks like more of the same. You must balance the demands of the church, military, public, and treasury, not allowing any to become too angry or dominant. But this sequel is smarter and deeper than its predecessor, with better writing, an inventory, and themes that weave their way through the ages as you reincarnate. Also, you’re a woman this time around – and women had it particularly tough in medieval times.

CONCRETE JUNGLE

This one’s more of a strategy title – albeit one that looks like someone tried to smash together Tetris and SimCity. The aim is to build a city, which you do by laying down units from a card deck. Each unit may impact positively or negatively on surrounding real estate, and houses must gain enough points to hit a row’s target. Manage that and the row vanishes, giving you more land to build on.

RIDGE RACER SLIPSTREAM

Namco’s racer sits at the midpoint between Asphalt 8’s demented arcade larks and Real Racing’s overly earnest simulation leanings. Like its coin-op ancestors, though, Ridge Racer is still all about barreling along at insane speeds, and having fun — you just have to work at success a bit more than in Asphalt. Here, driving like a total idiot will likely mean you’ll lose a race. Instead, you should only drive like a part-time maniac, slipstreaming the opposition, drifting through bends, and boosting past rivals.

HORIZON CHASE

A love letter to classic 1990s arcade racers, Horizon Chase channels Lotus Turbo Esprit Challenge and Top Gear, fusing them with a decidedly modern take on old-school visuals. The result is an intoxicating and vibrant blast through 73 tracks located in 32 cities around the globe. Realism’s broadly ignored in favour of speed as you battle from the back of the grid (every time, just like in the old days), bumping rivals aside to try for the chequered flag.

ASPHALT 8: AIRBORNE

There are two ways to approach racing games: you can try to recreate ‘reality’, pretend you’re crafting a ‘simulation’ and make all of the tracks very grey; or you can just go crazy. Asphalt takes the latter route, having you zoom at breakneck speeds around ludicrous hyper-real city courses, which occasionally catapult your car into the air in a manner that is totally not acceptable under your insurance plan.

PUMPED BMX 3

Imagine that little bird in Tiny Wings was a massive show-off on a BMX and that’s more or less Pumped BMX 3. You belt along increasingly insane tracks that would give any health and safety professional pause for thought, ‘pumping’ up slopes and then soaring into the air. At that point, it’s all about the stunts and the not-crashing. The former requires cunning flicks on a virtual joypad and taps of a Spin button; the latter’s all down to timing and not being a ham-fisted buffoon when your little biker’s ten metres in the air, upside-down, and about to discover how cruel gravity can be.

RECKLESS RACING 3

Although not nearly as ramshackle as the (excellent) first entry in the series, Reckless Racing 3 is a superb slice of overhead racing. For reasons best known to the competitors, you blaze around dodgy looking airports, abandoned nuclear plants with neon waste worryingly spilled everywhere, and serene mountaintop villages. Visually, the game’s a treat, and although the physics is lightweight, the handling’s fine once you’ve clocked it. Mostly, though, Reckless succeeds due to its smart track design and in not taking anything that seriously.