iPHONE GAMES

Quiet games to play online

iPhones and iPads sport quite the gaming library, and to any new owner of either device, it can be quite overwhelming. Thankfully, there are an incredible amount of free games ready for you to download right now, all of them excellent. Take a look at this list of 20 of the very best the App Store has to offer. Also, this list includes games that are completely free, not just trials of paid games. Some may include microtransactions, but the game itself is free to download.

1. Alphabear Alphabear is the adorable yet challenging game in which players are simply required to make words from tiles of letters on a board. Sounds like a simple game of Scrabble, but the catch is each letter has a limited number of turns for it to be used before it turns to stone, affecting future turns, and your ability to create a larger board, and thus, a bigger bear at the end of the game. Daily challenges and dozens of bears with different stat boosts make this more than a game you play for a few train journeys. Alphabear is a great time for those who enjoy word games.

2. Hex FRVR Think of Tetris without the falling pieces and taking place on a hexagonal board and you have Hex FRVR. This is a fiendishly-difficult puzzler that’s incredibly easy to pick up, but to get the high scores takes time and careful planning. Much like many of the games on this list, Hex FRVR scratches that “one more turn” itch that’ll keep you coming back way more than you originally planned to when you booted up the app.

3. Temple Run 2 For a quick dash for a few minutes on the trip to work, Temple Run 2 is a great little game. Also, it’s the only game on the list that lets you play as Bruce Lee. By jumping, ducking and dodging obstacles, the objective is to make it as far as you can in this endless runner. Unfortunately, the better you get at it, the longer you’ll be playing it, so you soon may need to start taking the scenic route to the office.

4. Crossy Road An update of the classic Frogger, only with an all-star lineup of different animals and people, Crossy Road is a wonderful, if addictive, endless runner. The game rewards you for returning to it with coins to unlock new characters, which is always a good reason to jump back in and try to dodge the swathes of traffic.

5. Fallout Shelter Bethesda produced a quite brilliant vault-management sim in Fallout Shelter. Starting with just a few rooms and inhabitants, you’ll soon be expanding your dwelling with generator rooms, labs, gyms and welcoming new Vault dwellers whom you can watch interact with each other during their stay. Also, eventually, some couples will form and further add to your flock. Training your team for the outside, post-apocalyptic world will keep you playing for hours on end.

6. Bejeweled Blitz One of the App Store’s most popular puzzle games demands a spot on your iOS device. frantically matching jewels against the clock to get the highest score can be tense, but it’s good fun in short bursts, and easy to pick up for 90 seconds at a time.

7. Jetpack Joyride Another endless runner, but one that has you riding robot dragons and jumping in mech suits on your journey to travel as far as you can in a cartoony science lab. Your jetpack also shoots bullets as you travel, which looks really cool on-screen.

8. Asphalt 8 Airborne Driving games can be hard to get right on a touch screen, but Asphalt 8 Airborne has a great sense of speed and throws realism out the window in the name of fun. It’s a big ask on your memory, but may be worth the investment for racing fans. For those who prefer their racing a little more realistic, Real Racing 3 is an excellent alternative, but again is a huge download file so keep that in mind.

9. Candy Crush: Soda Saga The Candy Crush series has produced a series of very addictive puzzle games, and Soda Saga is the latest and greatest of the bunch. By connecting with Facebook you can also see what levels your friends are currently on, which doesn’t help when you planned to stop playing 10 minutes ago. The overly-adorable presentation verges on the sickly, but that can’t intrude on the underlying solid puzzling.

10. Score! Hero Creating incredible goals with a Subbuteo-style glide of your finger is far more fun than it has any right to be, but the team behind Score! Hero struck gold with this game. By playing the ball around the pitch, players have the ability to create some truly terrific goals. It can be fiddly at times, especially on the smaller iPhone screens, which can make the limited lives very frustrating as easy chances are squandered, but the overall quality make this game well worth a punt for football fans.

11. Simpsons Tapped Out Building your very own Springfield sounds like a very enticing prospect to any Simpsons fan, and that’s what you get to do in Tapped Out. For those whom this game doesn’t ‘click’, it can seem repetitive, but there’s a reason it’s hung around as one of the highest-grossing games on the App Store since it launched in 2012, and simply maintaining your very own town can become quite the challenge. If you want to avoid microtransactions there’ll be times you have to wait for things to be built, but it’s worth stepping away from the game for a bit if it means you can play for free.

12. Dots Like many iOS games, the simplest concepts remain the most addictive and enjoyable. Dots is no different, as place literally look at a grid of coloured dots and try to make squares. You can play timed, endless or limited moves matches, all presenting their own challenges. Again, easy to play, difficult to master.

13. Pac-Man 256 Perhaps the endless runner to end all endless runners, Bandai Namco’s Pac-Man 256 modernises the classic game with a mobile twist. The name is based on a glitch from the original game, where on map 256 the right side of the screen became a jumbled mess, making the game impossible to beat. Now fans get to enjoy an endless isometric maze and see how long you can flee Inky, Blinky, Pinky and Clyde.

14. Plants vs Zombies 2 Plants vs Zombies is an excellent strategy game that gradually eases players into all the tools and items that you’ll eventually be deploying across your gardens in the hope of stopping the zombies from making it to the porch. Eventually games will become incredibly hectic, with so much going on on-screen, but knowing what Plants to place at which points on the grid is the difference between the green green grass and the zombie apocalypse.

15. Angry Birds No list of the best free iOS games would be complete without Angry Birds. There are so many versions of Angry Birds available on the App Store, all of which are brilliant, but it’s always good to start where it all began as a new user.