The Best Games For Android

There are a bunch of great games available for Android phones and tablets, including lots of the best games that are also on Apple’s iPhones and iPads. Below, our list of the 12 best games for Android.

Hitman games are famous for their open-ended sandboxes. At their best, they let you creep around a party or a museum, find your target, and creatively take them out. Hitman GO… doesn’t really do that. What it does do, however, is offer a bunch of smart, tightly designed puzzles that gradually become more complicated as you go, but are never too complicated to finish off in the space of a single bus ride. With its stripped down board-game aesthetic and abstract violence, it may not look much like a Hitman game, but it still manages to capture the series’ meticulous, satisfying nature.

In Super Mario Run, Mario runs forward of his own accord. Your primary job is to tap the screen to make him jump, which you’ll have to do to help him collect the hundreds of coins strewn throughout each level. That may sound simple, but the creative designers at Nintendo have added a healthy amount of depth to that basic formula. There are touch-pads that stop Mario in his tracks, multiple paths to each objective, and each level can be replayed several times with increasingly complex coin configurations. The more you put into Super Mario Run, the more you’ll get out of it

You’re alone on an island, surrounded by puzzles. That’s The Witness, an extremely complicated game that is really very simple. Some of the puzzles are obvious: They’re on screens right in front of you, stacked in orderly rows. Other puzzles are much less easy to find. All of them will stymie and confound you, but over time you’ll gradually dismantle them until the game’s grand design is laid out in front of you like the workings of a finely crafted watch. Some games make you level up your character to access new areas; this one makes you level up yourself. There are few more satisfying feelings in gaming than when you finally realize the solution to a puzzle in The Witness. With a click, a new door opens. The Witness carries over all its brilliance to mobile devices, and works well on the go

Rymdkapsel is a real-time-strategy base-building game with a Tetris twist. It’s simple. Place odd-shaped floors of different colors on a plane in outer space. Command little rectangular men to farm on or work in these spaces to generate resources to build more spaces and feed more workers. Rally the little men to defend the base against alien invaders every so often. Survive and repeat.

This is a minimalist game, a stripping down of the real-time-strategy genre that went baroque with visually and technically complex games like StarCraft and Company of Heroes. Rymdkapsel makes its more ornate competitors feel needlessly garnished.

Threes is basically a game about math. You slide a bunch of little numbers around a tiled pad, trying to get two like numbers next to each other. If you can do that, they’ll get friendly and combine to form a new, bigger number. Keep on moving, keep on combining, and your score will climb and climb. Threes is an immaculately designed game made all the more winning for its aesthetics. Charming, musical, and deviously addictive, it’ll become a new obsession.

Remember Magic: The Gathering? Sure you do. Blizzard’s card game Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft is a lot like that, albeit streamlined and easier to pick up and play... and way more addictive. Hearthstone began on PC but seemed destined for mobile devices, and boy oh boy does it fit right in. After an hour or two you’ll be building your own custom decks and challenging your friends and strangers to matches, either online or, if you’ve both got phones in the same room, in person. Each match is over in a matter of minutes, making it easy to fit into your everyday life. And while eventually you might feel tempted to start paying for the random card booster packs, you can wring a whole lot of enjoyment out of Hearthstone without paying a nickel.

The Room: Old Sins is just the latest in Fireproof Games’ tremendous Roomseries. While it expands the “puzzles, except creepy” aesthetic of the first three games, it’s really just the latest in a series that we think you should check out in its entirety. The very first Room is just as fascinating as it was when it came out, and you can’t go wrong downloading the entire collection. Old Sins builds on the sturdy foundation laid by The Room Threeas you explore yet another spooky, puzzle-filled old house. Play this game, but really, play all of them.

By boat, by land, by airship, by giant mechanized city with legs, do you have what it takes to make it… Around the World in 80 Days? That’s the question at the heart of 80 Days, a fantastical re-imagining of Jules Verne’s famous novel that casts you as Passepartout, manservant to the gentleman Phileas Fogg. As a valet, you are responsible for packing the bags, negotiating at markets, and planning the itinerary on your journey ‘round the globe. Each trip will be different from the one before it, and thanks to the game’s peppy writing and frequent surprise detours, each trip will be great deal of fun. 80 Days captures the joy and melancholy of travel with unusual wit and humanity

Framed 2 replaces its predecessor Framed on this list for an obvious reason: it takes all of the original’s ideas and expands on them, usually with terrific results. The basic game is the same: you’re watching a series of mysterious, noir-inspired events play out from left to right as if in an animated comic book. However, you have the power to rearrange the panels and cause events to play out differently. The puzzles start simple but quickly become more complicated, forcing you to think creatively and rearrange and even rotate panels on the fly to get each character through their scene safely. Framed 2 makes for a great pairing with the original, despite being the stronger and more fully realized game. Just play ‘em both.

You wouldn’t think that a game that stitches together fishing and firearms would be a sublime mobile experience. Well, maybe you would think that... and if you did, you’re right, so good for you. Everything about Ridiculous Fishing: A Tale of Redemption is both as ridiculous and as great as the title suggests. You’ll be playing, fishing, and shooting for many hours to come.

You’re in a cold, dark room. First, you get a fire going. Then, you head out in search of wood. After that… well, things develop. To say more would be to spoil what makes A Dark Room special, but suffice it to say: This game grows far beyond its humble origins, and the journey from here to there is an engrossing one.

Easily one of the most celebrated video games of all time, Final Fantasy Tactics feels right at home on a mobile phone. It’s a sweeping saga, but individual turn-based battles unfold in manageable chunks, which makes it a fantastic commuting game. The mobile port brings over the dialogue enhancements from the PSP version, but with none of the frame-rate issues. If you haven’t played this classic, it’s absolutely worth downloading it. And even if you have, it’s never a bad time to play it again.