The best arcade games for Android
Our favorite Android arcade titles, fighting games, pinball games and retro games.
Dig Dog - Treasure Hunter ($2.99/£2.79/AU$4.59)
Dig Dog - Treasure Hunter is a hectic arcade effort that plays out like Dig Dug or Boulder Dash in fast forward. The titular hound hunts for treasure, and must dig its way through levitating islands. Said islands are, naturally, populated by all manner of monsters, and happen to hang over spike pits.
Figuring out where the prize is, ensuring you’ve always got a route back toward the surface, and keeping baddies at bay, are all part and parcel of the pooch’s day – and it’s a hard life. Even when you master super-fast digging actions, it’s easy to miss a foe, or – after digging a little too far – find yourself rapidly heading towards the spikes.
Still, an easy mode gives you a fighting chance of getting to grips with a game that’s hugely rewarding when mastered, marrying old-school cool with modern app design.
Jumpgrid ($2.99/£2.89/AU$4.49)
Jumpgrid is the distillation of Pac-Man-style dot-munching, Frogger-like hopping, and manic Super Hexagon twitch gaming. Rather than you tackling mazes, though, each arena is an identical three-by-three grid. At its edges are eight spinning cubes; grab them all and you can dive into the exit that appears at the center. The problem is everything else.
Atop the basic playfield, you see, are whirling slices of geometric death. Shapes march across the screen, or pinwheel around like blocky weapons, ready to blast you to oblivion. Levels transform into a kind of clockwork mayhem, tasking you with spotting patterns within a blink of an eye, avoiding blocky protagonists to emerge victorious.
It’s demanding stuff, but this Android game is also a thrill ride that’s hugely rewarding once mastered – not least when you crack your high score in the compelling endless mode.
Vectronom ($5.49/£3.99/AU$6.99)
Vectronom is at its core a simple game: in minimalist 3D levels, you swipe to get your cube to an exit. The thing is, the entire world is hypnotized by pumping electronic beats, shifting and changing to the rhythm.
You soon realize that although it’s tempting to dart to the next piece of safe ground, you must instead understand the clockwork movement of the platforms – how and when they appear and disappear. You then swipe with the music. It’s like a puzzler’s been merged with a rhythm action title, where success depends on your ability to spot patterns and ‘dance’ your way to victory.
Defeat comes often, but the mix of polish, superb level design, and a kind of sadistic edge, sets Vectronom apart. What should be frustrating becomes grin-inducing. And although it’s quite brief, the experience will stick with you for a long time.
Witcheye ($2.99/£2.79/AU$4.69)
Witcheye has many of the ingredients of a retro platformer – colorful, chunky graphics; patrolling enemies; a difficulty level that can approach ‘punishing’. One thing it doesn’t have is platforming, because instead of leaping about, you control a floating eyeball.
It turns out that a witch is in hot pursuit of the knight who pilfered her stash. Naturally, being a witch, she transforms into a hovering eyeball to chase him down. (Broomsticks, apparently, are so last year.) Controls-wise, this leaves you swiping to move the eyeball and tapping to stop.
Sometimes, you can blaze through levels, avoiding bashing into enemies to dispatch them. But doing so robs you of the satisfaction of finding collectibles, and mastering eyeball movement so you have a shot at taking down bosses in wonderfully realized battles. In all, then, an iPad game that’s a great mix of old and new, ideally optimized for touch.
Solar Explorer: New Dawn ($2.99/£2.99/AU$4.99)
Solar Explorer: New Dawn finds you guiding a worryingly fragile rocket towards a planet or moon, as it hurtles past rocket-smashing asteroids. Blasts of air from thrusters shift your position, keeping you within the path of approach, lest you take on too much speed.
The viewpoint switches. Now it’s all about slowing down, again avoiding deadly rocks. Survive, and you end up in a modern take on Lunar Lander, gently coaxing your craft to touchdown on the surface of another world. One wrong move can be enough to find it instead sickeningly cartwheeling towards an explosive end.
With shiny visuals, an intense soundtrack and adrenaline-infused gameplay, Solar Explorer is a quick-fix arcade blast that gives your Android phone a much-needed swig of rocket fuel.
Thumper: Pocket Edition ($4.99/£4.59/AU$7.49)
Thumper: Pocket Edition is a bit like Guitar Hero crossed with a roller-coaster, set in some kind of horrific Lovecraftian hell where everything is encased in metal. And if the thought of that breaks your mind, wait until you play the game.
You careen along a track. Keeping your metal bug alive relies on performing gestures and taps at precisely the right moments, in time with an ominous and booming tribal soundtrack. If that wasn’t hard enough (and it really is), bosses sporadically show up, threatening you with their massive teeth and plentiful tentacles.
Thumper isn’t for the faint-hearted, and it’s easy to become frustrated with the sometimes brutal difficulty. But there’s no doubting this is one of the most polished and arresting games of its kind that’s ever come to mobile.
Power Hover (free + IAP)
There's a great sense of freedom from the second you immerse yourself in the strange and futuristic world of Power Hover. The robot protagonist has been charged with pursuing a thief who's stolen batteries that power the city.
The droid therefore grabs a hoverboard and scythes across gorgeous minimal landscapes, such as deserts filled with colossal marching automatons, glittering blue oceans, and a dead grey human city.
In lesser hands, Power Hover could have been utterly forgettable. After all, you're basically tapping left and right to change the direction of a hoverboard, in order to collect batteries and avoid obstacles. But the production values here are stunning.
Power Hover is a visual treat, boasts a fantastic soundtrack, and gives mere hints of a story, enabling your imagination to run wild. Best of all, the floaty controls are perfect; you might fight them at first, but once they click, Power Hover becomes a hugely rewarding experience.
(On Android, Power Hover is a free download; to play beyond the first eight levels requires a one-off IAP.)
Forget-Me-Not ($2.49/£2.39/AU$3.89)
At its core, Forget-Me-Not is Pac-Man mixed with Rogue. You scoot about algorithmically generated single-screen mazes, gobbling down flowers, grabbing a key, and then making a break for the exit.
But what makes Forget-Me-Not essential is how alive its tiny dungeons feel. Your enemies don't just gun for you, but are also out to obliterate each other and, frequently, the walls of the dungeon, reshaping it as you play.
There are tons of superb details to find buried within the game's many modes, and cheapskates can even get on board with the free version, although that locks much of its content away until you've munched enough flowers.
If there was any justice, Forget-Me-Not would have a permanent place at the top of the Google Play charts. It is one of the finest arcade experiences around, not just on Android, but on any platform - old or new.
Captain Cowboy ($0.99/£1.09/AU$1.39)
Coming across like a sandbox-oriented chill-out ‘zen’ take on seminal classic Boulder Dash, Captain Cowboy has your little space-faring hero exploring a massive handcrafted world peppered with walls, hero-squashing boulders, and plenty of bling.
Much like Boulder Dash, Captain Cowboy is mostly about not being crushed by massive rocks – you dig paths through dirt, aiming to strategically use boulders to take out threats rather than your own head. But everything here is played out without stress (due to endless continues) and sometimes in slow motion (when floating through zero-gravity sections of space).
The result feels very different from the title that inspired it, but it’s no less compelling. Tension is replaced by exploration, and single-screen arcade thrills are sacrificed for a longer game. As you dig deeper into Captain Cowboy’s world, there are plenty of things awaiting discovery, and even tackling the next screen of dirt and stones always proves enjoyable.
Edge ($2.99/£1.99/AU$2.99)
There’s a distinct sense of minimalism at the heart of Edge, along with a knowing nod to a few arcade classics of old. Bereft of a story, the game simply tasks you with guiding a trundling cube to the end of each blocky level. Along the way, you grab tiny glowing cubes. On reaching the goal, you get graded on your abilities.
This admittedly doesn’t sound like much on paper, but Edge is a superb arcade game. The isometric visuals are sharp, and the head-bobbing soundtrack urges you onwards. The level design is the real star, though, with surprisingly imaginative objectives and hazards hewn from the isometric landscape.
And even when you’ve picked your way to the very end, there’s still those grades to improve by shaving the odd second off of your times.
Still not sure? Try out the 12-level demo. Eager for more? Grab Edge Extended, which is every bit as good as the original.
Pumped BMX 3 ($3.99/£3.49/AU$5.49)
Pumped BMX 3 might initially give you the wrong impression. Colorful visuals and basic controls have it initially come across as a casual take on a BMX trials outing. But pretty rapidly, it bucks any complacency from the saddle and leaves it a shattered mess on the floor.
Whereas Pumped BMX 2 (also recommended) went for a more relaxed take on hurling a BMX into the air with merry abandon, this sequel is all about mastery. Try to wing it and you’ll be crushed, but properly learn course layouts and timings, and you’ll gradually work your way through each level.
That’s rewarding enough, but with confidence you can start peppering your runs with stunts to boost your scores, with routines that would make even seasoned BMX pros break out in hearty applause.
Holedown ($3.99/£3.99/AU$5.99)
Holedown is an arcade shooter that has you blast strings of balls at numbered blocks. When blocks are hit enough times, they blow up, allowing you to dig deeper. Some blocks hold up others, and should be prioritized – as should grabbing gems that allow you to upgrade your kit (more balls; new levels; a bigger gem bag) when you run out of shots and return to the surface.
The mechanics are nothing new on Android – there are loads of similar ball bouncers. What is new is the sense of personality, polish and fun Holedown brings to this style of game. This is a premium title and a labor of love. There’s still repetition at its core, but Holedown feels hypnotic and encouraging, rather than giving you the feeling that it’s digging into your wallet – in contrast to its freebie contemporaries.
Osmos HD ($2.49/£2.19/AU$3.39)
Osmos HD is a rare arcade game about patience and subtlety. Each unique level has you guide a ‘mote’, which moves by expelling tiny pieces of itself. Initially, it moves within microscopic goop, eating smaller motes, to expand and reign supreme.
At first, other motes don’t fight back, but the game soon immerses you in petri dish warfare, as motes tear whatever amounts to each-other's faces off. Then there’s the odd curveball, as challenges find you dealing with gravity as planet-like motes orbit deadly floating 'stars'.
It’s a beautiful, captivating game, with perfect touchscreen controls. And if you can convince a friend to join in, you can battle it out over Wi-Fi across six distinct arenas.
PAC-MAN Championship Edition DX ($1.99/£1.79/AU$3.09)
Since Pac-Man graced arcades in the early 1980s, titles featuring the rotund dot-muncher have typically been split between careful iterations on the original, and mostly duff attempts to shoe-horn the character into other genres. Championship Edition DX is ostensibly the former, although the changes made from the original radically transform the game, making it easily the best Pac-Man to date.
Here, the maze is split in two. Eat all the dots from one half and a special object appears on the other; eat that and the original half's dots are refilled in a new configuration.
All the while, dozing ghosts you brush past join a spectral conga that follows your every move. The result is an intoxicating speedrun take on a seminal arcade classic, combined with the even more ancient Snake; somehow, this combination ends up being fresh, exciting and essential.
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