Best free iPhone games 2017
Contents
In this article we round up the best free iPhone games, from fighting and sports games to puzzles and RPGs – kicking off with our twelve favourite freebies of all:
But there are many more – including reviews of the games above – in our main list.
When considering free iPhone games, you should witness out for annoying in-app payments and adverts, and other irritations. (We discuss these issues in Freemium is the worst thing in the history of gaming and Why apps need to be more expensive.) And if you have kids, make sure they know the dangers of in-app purchases – we’d recommend the use of parental controls to avoid an unpleasant bill.
Nevertheless, there are some excellent free iPhone games out there that earn their money fair and square: with unobtrusive adverts, or genuinely optional in-app payments that simply expand on the existing gameplay. Here are the best free iPhone games, listed in alphabetical order.
From ‘1010!’ to ‘Coolson’s Pocket Pack’
When creating the original version of Tetris, designer Alexey Pajitnov was intensely influenced by a box of tetrominoes, wooden shapes that you’d peak out on to a table and then attempt to fit back into the box. 1010! takes that basic idea, but adds the line-vanishing mechanic from Tetris, making for a elementary, engaging and theoretically endless puzzler.
During each round, you’re given three shapes, the smallest of which are one-by-one squares, and the largest of which are three-by-three blocks or long blocks a single square broad but five long. These are then duly dragged to the ten-by-ten canvas. When all three shapes have been used, you get three more. Finish a solid line horizontally or vertically, and it vanishes. All the while, you’re scoring points and most likely feeling a bit smug.
But while 1010! seems like the sort of game you could feasibly play in the background while doing something else, planning is key. At any point, you can be left with a tricky combination of blocks that makes removing lines raunchy. Manage your canvas poorly and you’ll soon be lumbered with a form that’s unlikely to place. At that point, it’s game over.
Ultimately, there’s little in the way of innovation here, but 1010! is nonetheless a pleasingly old-school puzzler that looks good, is effortless to get to grips with, and yet gives you ongoing food for thought when pursuing a high score. Craig Grannell
Alphabear
Another word game? Yes, but this one starlets bears! Even better, it’s indeed, truly good, and dead effortless to get into. You begin out with a board with some letters on. Tap out a word and the space the letters took up is instantly substituted by bears, which are instantly surrounded by more letters.
Added complications arrive in the form of countdown timers. Letters embark out as green, and then if unused over subsequent goes turn yellow, orange and then crimson. Overlook crimson letters at your peril, because they convert into rocks, blocking bears from expanding.
You might wonder about the use of ‘expanding’ and ‘bears’ in that previous sentence, but we haven’t erred – the bears in Alphabear indeed do spread to pack available space. So you’ll get tall and lean bears, weirdly broad and squat bears, and there’s the holy grail of the ‘packing the entire screen’ bear if you clear all of the letters. At the end of a round, such giant animals result in thick scores and immense satisfaction.
There are some minor drawbacks to the bear-oriented antics. The game requires a constant internet connection for online sync, and there are in-game currencies – one essentially for ‘energy’ to inject fresh rounds and the other to skip ahead by more rapidly accessing treasure events. It’s there you detect especially infrequent bears with special powers that earnestly boost your score in various ways when selected before a fresh round; but this mechanic serves more to over-complicate the game than improve it.
Still, for free, you can play a duo of truly joy rounds per day, and there’s always an ‘infinite honey’ IAP (£Four.99) if you can’t stand to wait for your next hairy fix. Craig Grannell
Asphalt 8: Airborne
Reality’s taken a leave of absence in Asphalt 8. In fact, given how nitro-happy the game is, reality’s likely been burned to a crisp and gleefully blasted into the wind, dispersed ashen fodder for sports cars that zoom past, mostly on the ground but often spinning, whirling and leaping through the air.
This game is the antithesis to the staid grind of Real Racing Three. It’s joyful, colourful, smashy joy that doesn’t take itself gravely and is all the better for it. Branched courses weave through hyper-real cities, from time to time coming to life by way of a shuttle launch or deadly avalanche. All the while, you’re aiming to reach the chequered flag, ramming competition aside, and driving like an idiot.
Given that this is a Gameloft title, it of course has an IAP-sized bubble dome welded to its dayglo Bugatti Veyron, and some events are cynically locked by requiring specific (frequently expensive) cars. But there’s slew of absurdly joy racing larks to be had for nowt, and in a good racing game you’ll want to replay tracks time and again anyway. And one thing’s for sure: this is certainly a very good racing game. Craig Grannell
Battle Golf
Developer Colin Lane emerges to be attempting to corner the market in ridiculous sports games. Very first, there was Golf is Hard, a side-on ball-thwacker that required you to hit a hole-in-one every time, because it’s clearly wrong and evil to walk on the grass. Then came Wrassling, a demented wrestling (of sorts) game that looked like it had fallen out of a Commodore 64. Now, Lane’s returned to hitting lil’ nutsack with jams in Battle Golf.
Again, this one’s all about holes-in-one, but putting greens now emerge from a meaty expanse of water. You must therefore tap twice (to set angle and then power) and hope for the best. Hazards include hole-blocking seagulls and from time to time having to cautiously aim for the top of a giant octopus. Albeit flawlessly fine in its single-player time-attack incarnation, Battle Golf truly comes into its own when the ‘battle’ bit is added via the same-device two-player mode. Players face off at opposite edges of the water, and frantically race to five points. As a bonus, you can cheekily temporarily knock out your rival by smacking them in the head with a ball, providing you a few precious seconds to win a point without them interfering.
There’s only one IAP – £1.99/$1.99 gets rid of the ads, albeit these are unobtrusive and don’t interrupt your games. Only flinging your (ex) friend’s iPhone out of the window when they get a last-gasp fluky shot to win 5-4 can do that. Craig Grannell
The Battle of Polytopia
At the begin of The Battle of Polytopia (formerly known as Super Tribes), you find yourself in a little town, surrounded by the unknown, with a single warrior unit under your guideline. The game gives you thirty turns to explore, locate and ally with or attack other miniature empires, research technologies, and advance your civilisation.
Much of the game is based around careful strategising, making the best use of limited resource allowances. Would it be beneficial this turn to research hunting and utilise nearby (and tasty) wildlife? Or would the wise budge be getting the technology to forge yam-sized swords, subsequently enabling you to gleefully conquer rival cities?
In essence, then, this is Civilization in microcosm – a brilliantly conceived mobile take on 4X gaming (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate) that betters actual Civ games that have appeared on iPhone. In limiting your turns and providing you a score at the end, the game also feels puzzlish, since you must figure out how to better your lot with very limited resources and time. (For more bloodthirsty players, there’s also a ‘dominance’ mode, where you play until only one tribe remains standing.)
The Battle of Polytopia could arguably do with a touch more hand-holding – you’re often left to figure out the game’s nuances; but perhaps that’s apt, letting you detect it as your lil’ citizens detect their little world. Craig Grannell
Bejeweled Blitz
This ultra-moreish puzzle game takes the ‘match three’ mechanic and squashes it into minute-long blasts of dazzling colours and crazy point tallies. It’s astonishingly addictive.
You have to exchange coloured jewels within a grid, using ordinary finger swipes, so that three or more line up; the matched jewels will vanish and more will substitute them. The tense gameplay, drip-feed of prizes and social-media integration combine to make a game that will expand to pack any time period available. David Price
Underneath The Lighthouse
We’ve never been underneath a lighthouse. We’d always assumed it’d mostly be rocks. How wrong we were. It turns out that underneath a lighthouse – or at least this particular one – you find almost certain death, in the form of spinning rooms that have spikes all over the place. If you’re a rotund boy attempting to find his lost Grandpa and get the lighthouse’s light shining again, that’s a problem.
What you get here, then, is an act puzzler, where through a combination of deft finger-work and a bit of brainpower you make your way securely into the innards of the lighthouse. The clever bit is the controls. You haul the on-screen wheel to shift the circular rooms, and gravity gets your little chap rolling (or, as is often the case, hurtling) about. The other clever bit is the level design, which starts off very slightly challenging, and becomes increasingly murderous as the game goes on.
For free, you get access to everything, but there’s a lives system in play. Get killed three times during any level, and an extra set for that attempt only becomes available on watching an ad. That seems eminently fair, albeit those lives soon vanish – especially if you want to speedrun through the game like a maniac, in order to win yourself shiny prizes. Craig Grannell
Binary Dash
This fast-paced auto-runner hasn’t got time to waste with storylines and subtlety. Instead, it dumps your grinning square into dozens of speedy horizontally scrolling miniature worlds, peppered with spikes, missiles, dangling spiders, and other horrors intent on your instantaneous destruction.
With weaponry in brief supply for regular quadrilaterals, our hero’s only chance of survival rests in its capability to leap and spin. To leap, you prod the right-hand side of the screen. Tap the left and the square zips underneath the landscape. All of a sudden, every hill becomes a valley, as you belt along upside-down.
This is, of course, nothing fresh: roll auto-runners have been around for some time on iOS. However, Binary Dash makes this list because of some exceptional level design. As you progress, the game leisurely turns up the warmth, until the point you’re cursing your thumbs for failing you on a particularly nasty chunk of gaming choreography for the umpteenth time. It’s brash, noisy, colourful joy. Craig Grannell
For free, Binary Dash gives you forty eight levels: twenty four normal and twenty four hard. If you pay a one-off 99p IAP, you build up access to an extra forty six levels, and the capability to unlock ‘skins’ for your character by using keys earned during the game.
Blocky Highway
Ah, the open road. In this case, the open road that opens up on forever, with nary a arch in view. Still, it’s rather a busy road, with innumerable vehicles you must deftly avoid, because a single collision spells the end of your go. To drive the message home, even the slightest prang finds your truck hurled into the air, returning to the ground as a heap of twisted and blackened pixels. Dramatic!
There’s not much originality here and the chunky visual style is overly familiar, but Blocky Highway is nonetheless compelling. You get a choice of touch or tilt controls, with the latter being a bit slippy and unwieldy, yet this oddly makes for a more titillating game. It’s fairly something for your chunky vehicle to zig-zag along a busy freeway, avoiding collisions by a hair’s breadth.
Over time, the game adds to the challenge through various means. Roadwork from time to time and abruptly blocks your way, and train tracks cross your path; in the latter case, the game offers a novel means to avoid speeding locomotives: yam-sized pads that bounce you into the air. Other helpers infrequently show up, too – there’s a helicopter that for a brief while lifts you above the busy road, and a truck you can drive on top of that gleefully bulldozes traffic out of your way. And when your game ultimately comes to its smashy end, you get a chance to grab a few extra points by landing your bouncing wreck on other cars presumably driven by significantly more careful road users. Craig Grannell
Breakneck
It’s not the best of days. The world is occupied by hostile invaders, intent on hunting you down. Worse, you just zoomed away in a spaceship clearly designed by an idiot. It never runs out of fuel, but has the steering capabilities of a cow on an ice rink. And albeit it boasts a boost function – handy for keeping ahead of, say, ferocious aliens with massive laser cannons – it’s charged by perilously having your badly steering craft ‘graze’ plane surfaces.
What this makes for, however, is an exhilarating videogame. You blast through gorgeous 3D environments, avoiding obstacles in the desolate landscape, cautiously timing boosts whenever your alien pursuer ventures a bit too near. Phantoms of your best and previous runs are displayed, so you can potentially execute a brilliant manoeuvre a 2nd time round while at the same time avoiding that less-brilliant stir where you slammed into a massive wall.
We’d choose Breakneck if the craft was more manoeuvrable – there’s no deft weaving and zig-zagging here. Instead, you drift in a manner akin to the developer’s own endless horror runner, Into the Dead. Still, that adds strategy – the environment resets every day, and your craft’s inadequacies force you to find shortcuts and quickly learn the best routes. And when you’re approaching the end of a zone, boost tank empty, and your siren starts blaring about an imminent alien attack, this is one of the most titillating 3D avoid ’em ups around. Craig Grannell
Cally’s Caves Three
You’ll most likely be some way into Cally’s Caves three when you commence to wonder what the catch is. “Surely,” you’ll say, “the developers haven’t given me an expansive and beautifully designed – if frequently frustrating and challenging in an old-school kind of way – platform game with oodles of blasting.” At least that’s what we said, cursing our thumbs whenever we died, and wondering at what point the game would lock up and commence requiring money.
As it turns out, the developers are xxx gamers and have no truck with terrible monetisation. Therefore, you get unobtrusive ads on static screens, and are otherwise left to your own devices. And the game is excellent.
The backstory involves Cally’s parents being kidnapped for a third time by an evil scientist. She therefore resolves to rescue them, primarily by leaping about the place and throating away all manner of adversaries using the kind of high-powered weaponry not usually associated with a youthfull damsel with pig-tails. Level layouts are varied, and weapon power-ups are cleverly designed, based around how much you use each item. The one niggle is the map, which is checkpoint-based – it’s a bit too effortless to find yourself replaying a trio of levels again and again to get to a place further along in your journey where you can restart.
Still, that merely coerces you to take a little more care, rather than blundering about the place, and to breathe in the softly designed pixellated landscapes. And should you determine you want to throw money at the developers, there are optional IAPs that unlock fresh game modes, or a stream of coins if you want to splurge in the in-game store without working for your money. Craig Grannell
Capitals
We do like a good word game, and Capitals is a very good word game. There are echoes here of Letterpress (mentioned further down in this alphabetically ordered feature), in the sense that Capitals combines Risk-style land-grabbing with the need to create words from a jumble of letters. However, while Letterpress for the most part benefits players able to style lengthy words, Capitals is more about where the letters you choose to use are located.
The game plays out on a hexagonal grid, either with two players using the same device or battling it out online thanks to a Game Center match-up. All letters on the board can be used to create a word, but only those linked to your territory roll to your colour on submitting a budge. The significant thing is to keep your capital surrounded by territory rather than letters. If you don’t and your rival’s budge includes letters adjacent to your capital, it’s captured. They then get a free turn, and since the objective of the game is total and utter annihilation, that extra stir is often enough to bounty victory.
For no money at all, Capitals is one of the best games around for word-game nuts, albeit we’ll admit to being a smidgeon miffed about the ad model; in miserly style, it only gives up a solitary game for every advert observed. Still, since a game can often play out as a days-long tug o’ war, the ads are hardly a big drain on your time for what you get in comeback. Craig Grannell
Circle Affinity
Paid-for title Circa Infinity was an innovative, chaotic and continuously engaging platformer. With you essentially leaping into concentric circles patrolled by monsters, its dizzying and disorienting nature was strangely compelling and captivating. Circle Affinity is essentially a zero-outlay take on the original, suggesting an endless mode for free, and enabling you to get rid of the adverts for £1.49, or unlock the rest of the game’s modes for £Two.29.
For nowt, tho’, you get something that’s fairly brilliant and unique. The aim is always to come in the pie-slice section of the current circle and then leap into the smaller orb bobbing about within. But that’s lighter said than done when battling your brain’s capability to track a little chap running here and there, spinning inbetween the outside and inwards of a disc, while also keeping an eye on various beasties wandering and flitting about.
Additionally, string up about too long and gigantic tooth-like spikes encroach from the screen edges, to the sound effect of some kind of malevolent alien predator growling that it’s planning to chew your gams off. That’s certainly an encouragement to get moving! Craig Grannell
Circle Breakout
Breakout was the original brick basher. Based on Pong, you directed a bat left and right to smash a ball back at a wall of bricks. Albeit conceived by Nolan Bushnell and Steve Bristow, the game was infused into the history of Apple through being built by Steve Wozniak (under the ‘guidance’ of Steve Jobs, who stiffed Woz on a lucrative bonus payment). Breakout then informed much of the design of the Apple II, because Woz desired a colourful and noisy version running on the computer to display off to his pals.
There are innumerable Breakout iterations on modern Apple hardware, but Circle Breakout provides a fresh spin on things by having your bat hug a circular danger zone. And rather than you having direct control, you tap the screen to switch the direction of its automatic movement. With the bat’s speed remaining constant, you’re frequently in a risk/prize script: do you go for bonuses (bombs; multiballs; bullets) or play it safe, knowing you’ll make the next shot?
The end result is an oddly tense take on a classic, not least because you know you’re done for sooner or later. (Smash a wall of bricks and another nonchalantly slips in. There’s no respite – ever.) Craig Grannell
Clash Royale
With developer Supercell known for some of the biggest-grossing (and, in IAP terms, grossest) games on the App Store, you might treatment its latest, Clash Royale, with suspicion. After all, it feeds off of a kind of collector mentality, and is rammed total of IAP, which tops out at a mammoth $99.99/£79.99 for a ‘mountain of gems’. But look past this and you’ll find one of the most infuriatingly compulsive multiplayer titles around.
The basic set-up has you battling other players online, on little single-screen arenas. Each player has a King tower and two smaller flanking buildings. Units are placed on the battlefield by selecting cards from your deck (four being available at any one time) and each costs some ‘elixir’ (which leisurely refills). Duels are all about figuring out how to best your opponent by countering their attacks and releasing surprises of your own.
This could all have gone so wrong, but Clash Royale is a remarkably fair game. Sure, if you want the best units and access to the top arena instantaneously, you’re going to have to pay a petite fortune. But if you’re glad scrapping away in the lower leagues, you can play and leisurely build a better deck without spending a penny. And even the timer system to unlock chests won in combat doesn’t prove irksome, given that without it, you’d most likely end up playing Clash Royale around the clock. Craig Grannell
Coolson’s Pocket Pack
There’s nothing like a cleverly designed and fast-paced word game for making you feel stupid, instantly leaving behind every three-letter construction when it truly matters.
Here, hand-drawn chocolate squares drop into a well, and you must quickly swipe them into empty slots, which quickly vanish in comeback for points. Stay and a wobbling and utter column of letters explodes all over the screen, just to drive the message home of how rubbish you are. Conversely, a monocle-wearing penguin affirms his appreciation for any and all fish-based words by leaning into the screen and glaring at you.
So this isn’t exactly Scrabble, then, but it’s all the better for it. Coolson’s Pocket Pack eschews much planning and pondering, instead fostering an obsession with speed, not least when you clock the chaining mechanic. Avoid interchanging letters in the well or returning any from the slots and you quickly rack up giant points. This turns Pocket Pack from what was already a challenging affair into a word game of quick thinking and steely reserve, holding your nerve waiting for the right letter to emerge, while several towers menace major chocolate spillage. Craig Grannell
Want more games? We’ve only just got commenced! Turn to the next page to read more recommendations of brilliant free iPhone games.