The best platform games for Android

Our favorite Android platform games, including side-scrolling 2D efforts, exploration games and console-style adventures.

Ordia ($3.99/£3.99/AU$5.99)

Ordia is a platform game, featuring an underwater critter trying to escape from a hostile world. It plays out vertically, having you fire the blob Angry-Birds-style between hooks and surfaces on which it can cling.

Although primarily a game about precision – not least if you want to grab every collectable on your way up – Ordia feels like a game that just wants you to play. Although later levels are admittedly tricky, the game throughout is peppered with restart points. And although each level offers challenges for more dedicated players, you needn’t complete them in order to progress.

The pace constantly shifts and changes. Some areas are like endearingly silly bouts of pinball; elsewhere, you’ll ping like mad, trying to escape from a vicious predator. Throughout, you’ll revel in one of the most perfectly realized platformers on mobile.

Linn: Path of Orchards ($2.99/£2.79/AU$4.69)

Linn: Path of Orchards messes with the conventions of platform games, in that the platforms refuse to stay still. And the doesn’t mean the odd levitating platform – here, levels are akin to strange clockwork devices, all too keen to hurl you into oblivion.

The ‘clockwork’ bit is very important – each level has a distinct pattern. Figure that out, and you should be able to grab all the bling and reach the exit in a tiny number of moves. The end result therefore ends up somewhere between turn-based puzzler and single-screen plaformer, integrating the best aspects of each, and fusing it with gorgeous visuals.

Not sure? Check out the free version first, although be mindful that it’s infested with ads, which rather detract from the game’s otherwise ethereal nature.

Oddmar (free + $4.99/£3.69/AU$6.49)

Oddmar is a mobile platform game good enough to rub shoulders with console-originated equivalents. It features the titular Oddmar, a buffoonish Viking shunned by his fellows, but when they disappear and he snarfs some magic mushrooms (really), he becomes a hero, out to save his kin.

The basics are as you’d expect – run, jump, grab bling, and try not to get killed  –  but Oddmar is far from predictable. The visuals are dazzling to the point it often looks like an interactive cartoon; the pacing is frequently shaken up as you battle giant bosses and tackle auto-scrolling maze-like levels; and although traditional controls are available, the gestural defaults are pitch-perfect.

In short, Oddmar sets a new standard for platform games on mobile; and on Android, you even get to play the first few levels for free.

see/saw ($2.99/£2.59/AU$4.29)

see/saw hints at the troubles ahead for its protagonists in a note from the professor running a series of tests: “Die to succeed.”

The subjects probably shouldn’t have signed up for these trials, frankly, given that they’re sealed in rooms packed with massive spikes and saw blades, and tasked with collecting coins. Black humor abounds when you realize some can only be reached by killing the subject and cunningly hurling their corpse in the appropriate direction.

The controls are superb – two thumbs are all you need – and the game feels perfect as well. So whether you’ll crack all 150 levels is mostly down to your dexterity, and whether your inner vicious streak will figure out how to chop and impale your character in a manner that will – posthumously – allow them to achieve their goal.

Spitkiss ($1.99/£1.99/AU$3.69)

Spitkiss is a mashup of arcade shooty larks and platforming action, where you aim to get the bodily fluids of one Spitkiss to another. That might sound a bit grim, but this is actually a sweet-natured game played primarily in cartoonish silhouette.

Even so, your emission, once it’s hurled through the air and gone splat on a platform, starts to gloop downwards. You can then make it leap again, and – several hops later – splatter on your intended love.

Especially on larger screens, Spitkiss works really nicely. The visuals are vibrant, and the basics are easy to grasp. But as you get deeper into the game’s 80 levels, the twists and turns required to win get tougher to pull off – even when you hold down the screen for much-needed Matrix-style slo-mo.

Limbo ($4.99/£3.88/AU$6.85)

The term 'masterpiece' is perhaps bandied about too often in gaming circles, but Limbo undoubtedly deserves such high praise. It features a boy picking his way through a creepy monochrome world, looking for his sister. At its core, Limbo is a fairly simple platform game with a smattering of puzzles, but its stark visuals, eerie ambience, and superb level design transforms it into something else entirely.

You'll get a chill the first time a chittering figure sneaks off in the distance, and your heart will pump when being chased by a giant arachnid, intent on spearing your tiny frame with one of its colossal spiked legs. That death is never the end — each scene can be played unlimited times until you progress — only adds to Limbo's disturbing nature.

Leo's Fortune ($4.99/£4.89/AU$7.49)

The bar's set so low in modern mobile gaming that the word 'premium' has become almost meaningless. But Leo's Fortune bucks the trend, and truly deserves the term. It's a somewhat old-school side-on platform game, featuring a gruff furball hunting down the thief who stole his gold (and then, as is always the way, dropped coins at precise, regular intervals along a lengthy, perilous pathway).

The game is visually stunning, from the protagonist's animation through to the lush, varied backdrops. The game also frequently shakes things up, varying its pace from Sonic-style loops to precise pixel-perfect leaps.

It at times perhaps pushes you a bit too far — late on, we found some sections a bit too finicky and demanding. But you can have as many cracks at a section as you please, and if you master the entire thing, there's a hardcore speedrun mode that challenges you to complete the entire journey without dying.

Traps n' Gemstones ($4.99/£3.99/AU$4.99)

Harking back to classic side-on platformers, Traps n' Gemstones dumps an Indiana Jones wannabe into a massive pyramid, filled with mummies, spiders and traps; from here he must figure out how to steal all the bling, uncover all the secrets, and then finally escape.

Beyond having you leap about, grab diamonds, and keep indigenous explorer-killing critters at bay, Traps n' Gemstones is keen to have you explore. Work your way deeper into the pyramid and you’ll find objects that when placed somewhere specific open up new pathways.

But although this one’s happy to hurl you back to gaming’s halcyon days, it’s a mite kinder to newcomers than the games that inspired it.

Get killed and you can carry on from where you left off. More of a hardcore player? Death wipes your score, so to doff your fedora in a truly smug manner, you’ll have to complete the entire thing without falling to the game’s difficult challenges.

iCycle ($2.99/£2.99/AU$4.49)

Hero of the hour Dennis finds himself unicycling naked in this gorgeous platform game best described as flat-out nuts. In iCycle, you dodder left or right, leap over obstacles, and break your fall with a handy umbrella, all the while attempting to grab ice as surreal landscapes collapse and morph around you.

The mission feels like a journey into what might happen if Monty Python’s Terry Gilliam were let loose on game design. One minute, you’re entering a top-hatted gent’s ear to find and kiss a ‘reverse mermaid’ on a levitating bike; the next you’re in a terrifying silhouette funfair that might have burst forth from a fevered mind during a particularly unpleasant nightmare.

Some of the levels are tough, and there’s a bit of grinding to unlock new outfits. But if you want something a bit more creative on your Android, you can’t do much better than iCycle.

Mushroom 11 ($4.99/£4.89/AU$6.49)

Mushroom 11 finds you exploring the decaying ruins of a devastated world. And you do so as a blob of green goo. Movement comes by way of you ‘erasing’ chunks of this creature with a circular ‘brush’. Over time, you learn how this can urge the blob to move in certain ways, or how you can split it in two, so half can flick a switch, while the other half moves onward.

This probably sounds a bit weird – and it is. But Mushroom 11 is perfectly suited to the touchscreen. The tactile way you interact with the protagonist feels just right, and although your surroundings are desolate, they’re also oddly beautiful, augmented by a superb ethereal soundtrack.

There are moments of frustration – the odd difficulty wall. But with regular restart points, and countless ingenious obstacles and puzzles, Mushroom 11 is a strange creature you should immediately squeeze into whatever space exists on your Android device.