There are hundreds of fantastic games available for Android, and a lot of them are available for absolutely nothing. Whether ad-supported or based on a (boo and indeed hiss) “freemium” model, these titles are free – and guaranteed to make your morning commute a little less painful. To help you find just the sort of thing you're after, we've grouped the games into sections.
First up is racing games, then sports, followed by platformers and endless runners, then shooters and strategy and word games, next up is puzzle and match games, and finally arcade games. If you can't find something you like in all that lot you must hate games. In which case, this is an odd article for you to be reading. Calling Data Wing a racing game almost seems reductive once you’ve played it, but the basis of the game is speeding around circuits in a tiny triangular craft. It feels like Asteroids meets top-down racing as you battle inertia, scraping the edge of circuits for boost. But there’s far more to Data Wing than time trials and multi-ship races: some levels head into puzzle-oriented adventure territory, with you fighting gravity and hunting down keys. And throughout, a dual-narrative plays out, telling the story of the mobile OS you’re a part of, and the real-life trials troubling your owner.
It’s all great stuff we’d recommend for a fiver. For free, it’s a bafflingly generous bargain.
If you’d have told us a while back that one of the finest racers on mobile would be a turn-based online multiplayer shove ha’penny, we’d have given you a funny look – and then backed away slowly. But that’s more or less Disc Drivin’ 2, which adds a smattering of MarioKart by way of power-ups and twisty circuits. Surprisingly, the game’s turn-based approach doesn’t rob the racing of excitement and tension.