The Android Play Store is still pretty hard to traverse and find new games. KYMI picks the 5 best racing games in the store
It seems that the inherent need for speed in humans ensures that
racing games are loved by everyone, irrespective of age. As the Android
Play Store is expanding, it gets slightly difficult to separate out the
noise from the best products. We have done the difficult part of the
job. Here are 5 Android racing games that we loved the most:
1. Asphalt 7: Heat
- Asphalt 7 provides an immersive experience in the streets of some
world-famous cities. The arcade street racing game has great visuals,
good replay value and is challenging enough to keep you coming back. You
have to slam cars, drift with finesse and fill your nitro meter to be
the best in the world. Available for Rs. 55.
2. Real Racing 3
- If you are a purist who cringes at the absurd physics and handling of
arcade racing games, look no further. This realistic racing game has
beautiful visuals, an impressive portfolio of licensed cars and an
extremely challenging gameplay. The game follows the Free to Play.
3. Need For Speed : Most Wanted
- When talking about racing games, can NFS be left far behind? The
Android version of the popular street racing game has a lot of variation
in the game modes it offers and will satisfy all your adrenaline needs.
Most expensive of the lot at Rs. 270.
4. Riptide GP 2
- Breaking away from the car racing category, Riptide GP 2 will put you
in the driver’s seat of a jet ski. The game handles physics
beautifully, with the water and your vehicle working in perfect, natural
tandem. The game has a bit of a steep price tag at Rs. 170.
5. Carmageddon:
Anyone growing up in the 90’s would testify to the sheer pleasure that
Carmageddon was. Ported from the PC, Carmageddon was amongst the first
games that allowed you to go unchecked in a city, wrecking havoc and
creating mayhem. If you have a taste for games in this genre (and you
got yourself a copy of GTA V), then don’t give this game a miss. Priced
at Rs. 107.
The
amazingly popular iOS game moved to Android a while ago, earning over
two million downloads during its first weekend of availability.
The
Android version is free, unlike the Apple release, with maker Rovio
opting to stick a few adverts on it rather than charge an upfront fee.
The result is a massive and very challenging physics puzzler that's
incredibly polished and professional. For free. It defies all the laws
of modern retail. Angry Birds for Android was first available to download from app store GetJar but is now available through Google Play.
2. Bebbled
Bebbled
is your standard gem-shuffling thing, only presented in a professional
style you wouldn't be surprised to see running on something featuring a
Nintendo badge with an asking price of £19.99.
You only drop gems
on other gems to nuke larger groups of the same colour, but with
ever-tightening demands for score combos and scenes that require you to
rotate your phone to flip the play field on its head, Bebbled soon morphs into an incredibly complex challenge.
3. Red Stone
There's an awful lot of square-shuffling games on Android and Red Stone
is one of the best. And one of the hardest. You start off with a big
fat 'King' square that's four times of the normal 'pawn' squares, then
set about shuffling things so the fat King can get through to an exit at
the top of the screen.
It's hard to accurately describe a puzzle game in the written word, but seriously, it's a good game.
4. Newton
Released in beta form, Newton
is a maths/physics challenge that has you lining up shots at a target -
but having to contend with the laws of nature, in the form of pushers,
pullers, benders (no laughing), mirrors and traps, all deflecting your
shot from its target.
The developer is still adding levels to it at the moment, so one day Newton might be finished and might cost money. But for now it's free and a great indie creation.
5. Angry Birds Star Wars
The
Angry physics phenomenon took a turn for the weird late in 2012, with
Rovio acquiring the rights to blend Star Wars characters with its
popular Angry Birds play mechanics. Angry Birds Star Wars
is actually pretty nice, with players using Star Wars weaponry to smash
down scenery alongside the usual destructive physics action. Not the
car crash IP clash we were expecting.
6. Drop
Some might call Drop
a game, others might classify it as a tech demo that illustrates the
accuracy of the Android platform's accelerometer, thanks to how playing
it simply involves tilting your phone while making a little bouncy ball
falls between gaps in the platforms. Either way it'll amuse you for a
while and inform you of the accuracy of your accelerometer - a win-win
situation.
7. Frozen Bubble
Another key theme of the independent Android gaming scene is (ports of) clones of popular titles. Like Frozen Bubble,
which is based around the ancient and many-times-copied concept of
firing gems up a screen to make little groups of similarly coloured
clusters. That's what you do. You've probably done it a million times
before, so if it's your thing get this downloaded.
8. Replica Island
Replica Island
is an extremely polished platform game that pulls off the shock result
of being very playable on an Android trackball. The heavy momentum of
the character means you're only switching direction with the ball or
d-pad, letting you whizz about the levels with ease. Then there's
jumping, bottom-bouncing, collecting and all the other usual platform
formalities.
9. Gem Miner
In Gem Miner
you are a sort of mole character that likes to dig things out of the
ground. But that's not important. The game itself has you micro-managing
the raw materials you find, upgrading your digging powers and buying
bigger and better tools and maps. Looks great, plays well on Android's
limited button array. Go on, suck the very life out of the planet.
10. ConnecToo
Another coloured-square-based puzzle game, only ConnecToo
has you joining them up. Link red to red, then blue to blue - then see
if you've left a pathway through to link yellow to yellow. You probably
haven't, so delete it all and try again.
A brilliantly simple concept. ConnecToo used to be a paid-for game, but was recently switched to an ad-supported model - meaning it now costs you £0.00.
11. Titres
Once you're successfully rewired your brain's 25 years of playing Tetris in a certain way with certain buttons and got used to tapping the screen to rotate your blocks, it's... Tetris.
It hinges on how much you enjoy placing things with your phone's trackball or pad. If you're good at it, it's a superb Tetris clone. Let's hope it doesn't get sued out of existence. UPDATE: While Titres seems to have been removed from Google Play, there's now an official Tetris app available to download.
12. Trap!
Not
the best-looking game you'll ever play, with its shabby brown
backgrounds and rudimentary text making it look like something you'd
find running on a PC in the year 1985. But Trap! is good.
You
draw lines to box in moving spheres, gaining points for cordoning off
chunks of the screen. That sounds rubbish, so please invest two minutes
of your time having a go on it so you don't think we're talking
nonsense.
13. Jewels
Coloured
gems again, and this time your job is to switch pairs to make larger
groups which then disappear. That might also sound quite familiar. The
good thing about Jewels
is its size and presentation, managing to look professional while
packing in more levels than should really be given away for free.
14. OpenSudoku
We had to put one Sudoku game in here, so we'll go with OpenSudoku - which lives up to its open tag thanks to letting users install packs of new puzzles generated by Sudoku makers. It's entirely possible you could use this to play new Sudoku puzzles for the rest of your life, if that's not too terrifying a thought.
15. Abduction!
Abduction! is a sweet little platform jumping game, presented in a similarly quirky and hand-drawn style as the super-fashionable Doodle Jump.
You can't argue with cute cows and penguins with parachutes, or a game
that's easy to play with one hand thanks to its super accessible
accelerometer controls.
16. The Great Land Grab
A cross between a map tool and Foursquare, The Great Land Grab
sorts your local area into small rectangular packets of land - which
you take ownership of by travelling through them in real-time and buying
them up.
Then someone else nicks them off you the next day, a bit like real-world Risk.
A great idea, as long as you don't mind nuking your battery by leaving
your phone sitting there on the train with its GPS radio on.
17. Brain Genius Deluxe
Our
basic legal training tells us it's better to use the word "homage" than
to label something a "rip-off", so we'll recommend this as a simple
"homage" to the famed Nintendo Brain Training franchise.
Clearly Brain Genius Deluxe
is not going to be as slick, but there's enough content in here to keep
you "brain training" (yes, it even uses that phrase) until your battery
dies. The presentation's painfully slow, but then again that might be
the game teaching you patience.
18. Coloroid
Coloroid is aery, very simple and has the look of the aftermath of an explosion in a Tetris
factory, but it works. All you do is expand coloured areas, trying to
fill them in with colours in as few moves as possible - like using
Photoshop's fill tool at a competitive level.
19. Cestos
Cestos
is sort of a futuristic recreation of curling, where players chuck
marbles at each other to try and smash everyone else's balls/gems down
the drain and out of the zone. The best part is this all happens online
against real humans, so as long as there's a few other bored people out
there at the same time you'll have a real, devious, cheating, quitting
person to play against. Great.
20. Air Control
One
of the other common themes on the Android gaming scene is clones of
games based around pretending to be an air traffic controller, where you
guide planes to landing strips with a swish of your finger. There are
loads of them, all pretty much the same thing - we've chosen Air Control as it's an ad-supported release, so is technically free.