30 fantastic free Android games

Quite beautiful, is Badland. It’s a physics-based auto-scrolling game where you ‘push’ a bat-like creature through a series of atmospheric, silhouetted levels (and yeah, before you say it, we know its look is “heavily inspired” by Limbo). It sounds simple but the capricious physics engine and devilish, hazard-stocked levels make it frustrating tough at times – but if you get stuck there’s always the brilliant local multiplayer mode to fall back on, which lets up to four people play simultaneously on a single device.

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Super Monsters Ate My Condo! is a match-three game with a little bit of Jenga and a whole lot of mental. Coloured apartment floors relentlessly drop from the top of the screen. You swipe away unwanted ones to make matches and combos that ramp up your score. All the while, monsters flank the tower, demanding to be fed floors only of their colour, lest they get all stompy and destructive.

Everything's played at a breakneck pace and with the kind of neon-infused visuals that'll leave you exhausted and wondering if you've accidentally injected all the sherbet in the world directly into your eyeballs.

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Given that this is the eighth title in the Asphalt series, it probably comes as no surprise Gameloft's got a bit bored having sports cars merely zoom along at breakneck speeds and drift for ludicrous distances.

As this game's name suggests, Asphalt 8 now also regularly finds your vehicle catapulted into the air, whereupon it can perform crazy aerial stunts that are entirely not covered by your insurance plan. As ever, the hyper-real tracks are faintly barmy too.

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A “bullet hell” vertical scrolling shoot ‘em up very much inspired by the 1980s arcade classic 1942, iFighter sees you steering a US fighter through waves of Japanese planes, ships and ground-based enemies, with each stage culminating in an epic boss fight. Power-ups to boost your armaments are spread throughout the levels, and the coins you collect can be spent to upgrade your starting plane.

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A popular game franchise that has veered down a somewhat controversial freemium path, Plants vs Zombies 2 is what’s known as a “tower defence” game: you build towers and emplacements (or in this case, plant flowers, shrubs and veggies) to fight off hordes of incoming enemies (in this case, shambling hordes of undead). The badgering about micro-transactions can be a pain, but it doesn’t kill off the essential brilliance of PopCap’s game.

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A supremely simple game – you’re a Victorian gentleman on his daily constitutional, and must hold your finger on the screen every time the wind threatens to dislodge your top hat – Winter Walk succeeds through the sheer force of its charm. Lovely stuff.

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Scrabble by another name (well, with apparently just enough differences to prevent legal action), Words With Friends is an evergreen smartphone staple thanks to its simplicity, the fact that you play “with friends” (but only one per game) and the fact that it never rushes you: you have several days to take your turn, so it can be played whenever you have a spare minute.

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An old-school “roguelike” game of subterranean fantasy exploration with lovely pixel-art visuals, Pixel Dungeon’s automatically-generated levels deliver a different experience every time. Can you fight through the dungeon’s monsters and navigate its traps in order to find the Amulet of Yendor?

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Probably the best-known of the “endless runner” games (its developers have even sold the movie rights to a Hollywood studio) Temple Run 2 tasks you with sprinting for as long as possible, avoiding obstacles and staying a few steps ahead of the monkey-demon creatures in pursuit. Coins and power-ups keep you alive, while new unlockables keep you coming back time and time again.

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At turns cute and disturbing, this game sees you playing as gun-toting yellow blobs in the centre of a pitch black cave. Things run towards your little pool of light in the middle and you have only a moment to react: monsters must be shot before they can grab you, while other yellow blobs need to be left to join you and increase your powers. But the tension is such that you’ll sometimes find yourself blasting would-be blobby allies...

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Another longtime mobile favourite, Cut the Rope tasks you with solving increasingly elaborate physics-based puzzles with a well-timed swipe of your finger.

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A stormingly addictive casual title that spliced together Angry Birds, Worms and Tiger Woods, Super Stickman Golf 2 is one of those sweet spot-nailing games that has the potential to dominate your life – or at least tiny portions of it on a daily basis. It’s golf, but not as you know it.

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If Football Manager was Japanese, pixel-art cute and set in an alternative universe where players were far less greedy and far more professional, it’d be Pocket League Story 2. Kairosoft’s typically retro management title is twee-tastic, it’s true, but quite adorable with it. And it’s guaranteed to take up plenty of your time as you become gaffer to a tiny new soccer club with big aspirations. Can you take them to glory by boosting their stats and improving the club’s facilities?

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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.

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There’s no shortage of free Angry Birds games out there (seven at our last count), but we thought we’d go with one of the newer instalments in the physics-based catapult-birds-to-smash-down-blocks-and-kill-pigs series.

Based around the much-maligned Star Wars prequel trilogy, it features bird types inspired by Jedi and droids and a number of familiar locations. But the “just one more go” gameplay mechanics are much the same as with older Angry Birds games.

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Real Racing 3’s console-level visuals look so good that we’re still amazed we can play it on our smartphones. Throw in the easy-to-use motion-controlled steering (which actually works and doesn’t make us want to throw our phones at the wall in frustration) and you’ve got yourself one of the most polished racers in the Google Play Store.

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There aren’t many games where you get to play the bad guy, and in Plague Inc. you get to play the baddest guy of them all: a virus that kills off (if you play your cards right) the entire human race.

Choose where your plague starts and develop it to spread at the correct rate – all the while keeping one step ahead of those working on a cure – and chuckle to yourself as the world descends into absolute chaos and awfulness. The apocalypse has never been so much fun.

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Looking less like a game than a Damien Hirst piece worth more than your three-bedroom house, Dots is probably the most tasteful-looking game in this whole list. Where others are brash and plagued by ads and exhortations to buy add-ons, Dots feels like the work of a bearded graphic designer who probably works in a downtown loft with exposed beams and white walls. And drinks single-origin coffee.

The game itself is beautifully simple: you connect dots of the same colour to make them disappear, with each round having a 30 second limit. Making longer connections (or shapes such as squares) gives you more points, so there’s an element of skill in setting up the board for future moves.

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A side-scrolling parkour game that owes big debts to the likes of Canabalt and Mirror’s Edge, Vector manages to be stylish, addictive and maddeningly tough all at the same time.

The game sees you as a free-running Neo-in-The-Matrix type character pursued over rooftops and through buildings by taser-wielding agents. Complete a level by finishing ahead of your pursuer to progress – but if you’re anything like us, you’ll probably feel obliged to keep playing until you achieve a three-star rating on each one...

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The premise is simple. Strap on a Jetpack, and travel as far as you can through a hostile laboratory while destroying panicking scientists and avoiding lasers, missiles and more. A simple on-rails side-scroller, bolstered by tonnes of addictive upgrades and customisation options, it's easy to pick up and play for two minutes, and even easier to play for two hours.

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When people tell you that video games turn their players into lazy shut-ins, tell them about Ingress, a massively multiplayer augmented reality strategy game built around the concept of geocaching, it uses your phone’s location – a fact that forces you to get out of the house and visit points of interest in the real world.

Visit these “portals” in the real world and you’ll progress the game. They’re often tied to genuinely interesting locations (monuments, sculptures, street art etc.), which has the effect of helping you get to know your local area far more deeply. You can even submit your own locations for in-game portals.

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Action games are never particularly easy to play on a touchscreen, but Reaper is among the best: a cartoonish, side-scrolling hack-and-slasher with RPG elements and quests, it’s a blood-drenched blast.

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This side-on racer by the people behind Super Stickman Golf is a bit like what might happen if Tiny Wings was wrapped around an asteroid and hammered into Mario Kart.

The dinky space cars zoom along, and you tilt your device to make yours spin while airborne. Virtual buttons provide a magnet (for landing more rapidly) and nitro boost, and pick-ups enable you to unsportingly fire missiles at the race leader. It's fast, frantic, playable stuff. You could say we like it so much that we're OVER THE MOON! (Sorry.)

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New Star Soccer reimagines the beautiful game in an abstract and not entirely realistic fashion that owes a lot to ancient management games for the C64 and ZX Spectrum.

There's no FIFA-style TV-like action here; instead, you get a selection of mini-games, giving you chances to score and pass during matches and increase your skills during training. The remainder of the game is about balancing life, keeping your boss, team and partner happy, while occasionally sneaking out to the casino and buying the odd fighter jet. Hey, we said 'not entirely realistic'.

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At the dawn of smartphone gaming, path-drawing titles became hugely popular, the most famous having you land planes. Score! World Goals is more grounded, and also immerses you in a little history. You attempt to reproduce the path of balls during some of the greatest goals of all time.

It sounds like a mundane task, but it's compelling to work your way through so many dazzling moments, and the game's smart enough to realistically scupper any attempt to go off-plan and do your own thing.

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Smash Hit takes you on a deeply weird and oddly ethereal journey through a geometric world of glass barriers. Your only way forward: lobbing a rapidly depleting supply of metal balls to clear a path, and grabbing increasingly scarce top-ups as you go.

It's a strangely cathartic experience, and very demanding as you take on later levels with whirling glass contraptions and a spinning camera.

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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 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, and 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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Before all games had to be 3D by law, the 2D adventure-platformer reigned supreme. 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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If you're very old indeed, you might remember a ZX Spectrum title called Deathchase. There wasn't much to the game – you zoomed through a forest, tried very hard not to get killed by smashing into a tree, and shot bad guys – but it was brilliant.

Voxel Rush takes the concept, adds beautiful geometric 3D graphics, and shows off with crazy 'events' such as towers collapsing or the view flipping upside down. It's an adrenaline-fuelled breathless affair that feels more exhilarating than many proper racing games on Android, and it's far more exciting than most endless runners.

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Pinball often gets a duff deal, because many people just don't get it. A modern table isn't just about spanging a metal ball about – you must learn the table's rules, discover missions, and complete them with uncannily accurate aiming.

Zen Pinball layers on top of classic pinball a modern gaming sensibility, peppering tables with animated characters, vibrant visual effects and some amusingly awful voice acting. For free (with no ads), you get Sorcerer's Lair, and more tables are available via IAP, including some surprisingly great ones based on Star Wars

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READ MORE: 25 best free Android apps