The best free endless runners for Android
Our favorite free Android games where you run, hop, drive or pinball towards a high score – or an abrupt end.
Box It Up! Inc
Box It Up! Inc is an action puzzler that finds you sorting boxes on a conveyor belt, to ensure they head through the correct wrapping slot. In theory, this should all be simple: red, yellow and blue boxes merely need to be shoved into position, so they’re in the correct lane. And it is – at first.
But Box It Up! Inc soon starts sending all kinds of additional complications your way: staff will dump boxes on the belt, packages will need putting into their boxes, and power-ups will shake everything up, sometimes triggering a breakneck-pace mini-game.
On repeat play, the game does feel a touch repetitive – the same kind of puzzles (if not always identical layouts) always appear in each respective level. But at its best, this is an exhilarating and characterful endless puzzler.
Crashy Cats
Crashy Cats finds a naughty kitty smashing its way through houses, offices, and museums. Its sole aim is to rack up the kind of damage bill that’d even make Jeff Bezos sweat. Coins are collected to subsequently buy stylish cat hats, and if that was all Crashy Cats had to offer, it would still be worth a download.
This free Android game goes further, though. It looks gorgeous, with delicate hand-drawn old-school pixel art. It’s smart too, with level design that gradually introduces new ideas, including cats to collect during your travels (thereby creating a kind of kitty conga that works rather like extra lives), and a trippy bonus section that will bring a smile to the face of Nyan Cat fans.
Even if you’ve had your fill of one-thumb endless titles, give this one a go, because it’s furry good.
Star Jolt
Star Jolt is an endless survival high-score chaser where the end comes swiftly. Plot-wise, you’re collecting space junk, but quite why this all exists in a tunnel you barrel along at insane speeds is never made clear.
Still, it’s an exhilarating arcade experience as you slide your finger left and right, escaping death by the skin of your teeth, before inevitably smashing into a wall. A few goes later, you may even hoover up several hundred pieces of junk before the game removes most of the roadside visuals, making survival even harder.
That all might sound punishing and slight, but Star Jolt is a free Android game that keeps you coming back for more. Its mix of oddball humor, retro-tribute visuals, and hard-as-nails breakneck gameplay demands one more go – even if you’ve already had a dozen.
Saily Seas
Saily Seas is a one-thumb endless game that sets you on a tiny raft, points you at an endless sea, and challenges you to survive. Doing so isn’t easy. Navigating massive waves is straightforward enough – tap to ‘climb’, hold to jump, and swipe to dive – but it’s everything else lurking in and above the water that’s the problem.
For a start, linger by not going fast enough and you’re eaten by a massive whale. And the further you sail, the more likely you are to be smashed to a watery grave by a shark, eagle, or massive octopus.
This could all be quite repetitive, but Saily Seas is clever. It shakes things up visually with light and weather effects, and the sea is – as in the real world – always similar but ever changing. A game with hidden depths.
ChessFinity
ChessFinity offers a very different take on chess, fusing it with the guts of an endless runner. Instead of playing on an eight-by-eight board, ChessFinity plonks you on one that’s only five squares wide – but infinitely long. You’ve only got a single piece to use at any given moment, too.
Fortunately, you can swap pieces as you go, in order to make the best possible move – or, when stuck, to sacrifice a pawn rather than a queen. Your game’s up when you run out of pieces or time.
Yep, this one’s against the clock – it’s chess not only played on an endless board, but also at lightning speed. Still, there are power-ups lurking as well, which go way beyond saying ‘check’ in a funny voice and hoping it puts off your opponent.
Race the Sun Challenge Edition
Race the Sun Challenge Edition finds you piloting a solar-powered craft at breakneck speed for… some reason. It’s never explained why you feel the need to dice with death (which mostly comes by way of smashing into a very solid structure), nor, for that matter, why you’re flying a craft that fails the instant the sun sets.
Anyway, we’re in arcade territory here, so nothing’s really meant to make sense. What this kind of game is supposed to do is ramp up the adrenaline – and in that, Race the Sun succeeds. You’ll squee as you escape death by a whisker, and grab a power-up to gain the extra seconds required to complete a stage. Daily challenges should also keep you playing long after the sun has set on this game’s contemporaries.
PAKO Forever
PAKO Forever is the third entry in a car chase series gradually leaving behind all semblance of reality. If its predecessors were a bit odd at times, Forever is decidedly nutty. It dumps you in the world’s largest car park, with a seemingly unlimited number of cop cars out for the kill.
If you’re rammed just once, your game is over. Initially, that will take mere seconds. But you soon figure out how to drift and snake around obstacles to eke out some extra seconds. At that point, you can start collecting temporary bonus weapons, or chancing upon bizarre ‘events’ like UFOs and volcanic eruptions.
The game’s a touch crude, and should arguably be more forgiving; but for a quick blast of high-octane racing survival, it hits the spot.
Alto’s Odyssey
Alto’s Odyssey finds the titular board-obsessed protagonist move from the snowy slopes of Alto’s Adventure to sandy dunes. Again, he’s on an endless journey, zooming through eye-dazzling scenery, and regularly flinging himself into the air for the odd bit of show-off and score-chasing stunt work.
The game starts off very similar to its predecessor, to the point it might feel like you’re just getting new visuals. You prod the screen to leap, hold to somersault, and must regularly clear massive ravines. You still get chased, too, albeit by rabid wildlife rather than angry elders.
But soon you discover new places to explore, and novel ideas like the ability to wall ride. And if working your way through the game’s increasingly tough achievements gets too stressful, there’s a chill-out risk-free ‘Zen’ mode that’s just you, an endless desert, and some moody music.
Will Hero
Will Hero is a superb, daft, frenetic one-thumb platform game featuring a bunch of squares. Perhaps it’s easier to animate such creatures, but a lack of torsos and limbs hasn’t made Will and his enemies any less violent. Instead, they’re intent on hacking each other to pieces.
Initially, you largely spend your time prodding the screen to move forward and attempting to jump on bouncing enemy heads, like a simplified geometric Mario. But grab a chest and all bets are off. You might find a massive sword or missiles within.
Will Hero then becomes a blast – a glorious minute or two of gore and destruction, before you lose your concentration for a moment and are sliced in half by an inconveniently placed and surprisingly dangerous windmill. This one’s great – install it immediately.
Power Hover: Cruise
Power Hover: Cruise is a spin-off from futuristic hoverboarding game Power Hover. Whereas that game mostly featured heavily choreographed levels punctuated by the odd boss battle, this one’s all about endless challenges that involve the robot protagonist eventually becoming a pile of scrap metal.
The journey, though, is wonderful. Several of Power Hover: Cruise’s modes could lay claim to being among the best endless runners on Android, and you get over half a dozen here, each with its own distinct feel, hazards and challenges.
As you arc across the screen, learning to master the board’s heavy inertia, you’ll be thrilled when dodging dancing lasers inside a pyramid by a hair’s breadth, whirling around a track snaking through the sky, and avoiding projectiles hurled your way by a psychotic monster living deep in an underground tunnel – and who everyone probably should have left alone.
Glitch Dash
Glitch Dash is a premium auto-runner. It’s also really, really hard. It essentially dumps you in an abstract world of checkerboard corridors peppered with traps. You must swipe to dodge, leap and slide, avoiding walls, laser grids, and massive scythes that some nutcase has left swinging from above.
The high-octane gameplay is augmented by an intense electronic soundtrack that broadly matches the moves you must make in order to survive. And unlike the majority of entries in this genre, Glitch Dash’s levels are hand-crafted.
This means when you fail (and you will – often, and sometimes when tantalizingly close to your goal), it’s down to your lack of mastery and an inability to make your thumbs do what you want them to. But you’ll try again right away. After all, you’re not going to let a game beat you.
Infiniroom
Infiniroom is Canabalt in a box, infused with the sadistic nature of Super Hexagon. You prod the screen to make the auto-running protagonist leap to avoid electrified boxes that appear from every surface of a room you’re trapped in. And like a certain superhero, he happily runs up any wall he reaches, then along the ceiling and back down again.
It’s dizzying and chaotic, but Infiniroom further ramps up the tension by continually chopping and changing the play field. At any moment, you may get a second’s warning before a chunk of space disappears (don’t be there when it does), or a new area opens up. And then the game starts gleefully lobbing saw blades and lasers at you.
Not a relaxing game, then, but one you’ll want to play again and again. And given how short Infiniroom games are, you can pack plenty into the shortest break.
Flipping Legend
Flipping Legend is a demanding endless runner smashed into an RPG-like upgrade system. The protagonist embarks on an orgy of destruction atop a chessboard-like pathway, and can only leap diagonally.
This initially makes your head spin, not least because the path is a wraparound one. This means if you leap off of its left-hand side, you reappear on the right – something you frequently have to make use of, to avoid the many hazards in your way.
To further complicate matters, your health bar drains at an alarming rate, and only refills when you biff enemies. Grab enough bling and you can unlock power-ups for taking out multiple foes.
With an energetic soundtrack, a bunch of alternate characters, and a very smart chunky art style, Flipping Legend shows there’s still life left in endless runners (albeit as the hero is busy killing everything in this one).
Binary Dash
Zero points for innovation in Binary Dash, which is another side-scrolling auto-runner where you tap to jump, and tap somewhere else to flip upside-down.
But many points for the combination of super-fast gameplay, superb level design, and a visual aesthetic that thumbs its nose at the modern-day penchant for mid-80s pixel art, instead hurling you back to the lurid charms of late 1970s gaming.
Yes, Binary Dash more looks like it’s been vomited out of an ancient Atari console, but it nonetheless has a quirky charm. And the game itself is great. It eases you in gently, helping you get to grips with flipping above and below the horizon, thus turning game-ending pillars into pits to leap over when you’re upside-down.
Before long, though, your thumbs will be seriously challenged by the tight choreography required to jump and flip your way to the ends of later levels.
Sky Dancer
Yet another into-the-screen endless runner, channeling Temple Run. Yawn. Only Sky Dancer has a certain something that keeps you playing – and that certain something is leaving your stomach in your throat every time you jump.
Much of this is down to the construction of Sky Dancer’s world, which comprises tiny chunks of land hanging in the air in a manner that rocks usually don’t have. As you hurl yourself off the edge of one, you must quickly maneuver to land on a platform below.
Battling gravity and inertia is exhilarating, especially when the game speeds up and you know the slightest miscalculation will result in you meeting a splattery end on the desert floor.
PinOut
Pinball infused with the DNA of an against-the-clock endless runner sounds like an odd combination – but it works. In PinOut’s neon world – featuring a gorgeous electro soundtrack – a massive table stretches far into the distance. Within: dozens of miniature tables comprising flippers, ramps, and more than a few traps.
The basic aim at every turn is to keep moving forward to the next mini-table – and quickly. Accurate ramp shots are key, and so mastering the game’s physics and the layout of its various stages is essential.
For advocates, this is a fresh take on pinball that works brilliantly in mobile form. And for newcomers, PinOut is freed from the frequently arcane rules of pinball, but loses none of its frenetic excitement.
Disney Crossy Road
We're big fans of Crossy Road, which is both a lesson in how to update a classic arcade game (Frogger), and create a free-to-play business model that isn't hateful. (In short, throw free coins at players, don't make anything pay to win, and add loads of tempting but entirely optional characters to buy.)
With Disney Crossy Road, anything could have happened, but this is far from a cheap cash-in. Sure, it starts off very much like Crossy Road - just starring Mickey Mouse. But unlock a few characters (you'll have at least three within ten minutes) and you suddenly find yourself immersed in chunky takes on famous movies, such as Toy Story, Wreck-It Ralph, and The Lion King.
Even better, these aren't mere skins on the original. Each world has unique features, from tiny graphical details that will thrill fans, through to subtle shifts in how the game is played that force you to dramatically change your approach.
Alto's Adventure
You might think there's little new in Alto's Adventure, which is essentially endless leapy game Canabalt on ice. But refined visuals best even Monument Valley, with an eye-popping day/night cycle and gorgeous weather effects; additionally, there's a delightful soundtrack, and a kind of effortless elegance that permeates throughout, propelling Alto's Adventure beyond its contemporaries.
Ostensibly, Alto's Adventure is a game about collecting escaped llamas, but mostly Alto is keen on mucking about on snowy slopes. You zoom down hills, catapult yourself into the air, and try to somersault before face-planting. Extra challenge arrives in the form of chaining stunts to increase your speed, and outrunning elders, angry you're having fun rather than sitting in a stinky llama pen.
Rust Bucket
In Rust Bucket, a cartoon helmet with a sword dodders about a vibrant dungeon, offing all manner of cute but deadly adversaries — skittering skulls, angry armoured pigs, and spooky ghosts. This is a turn-based affair, echoing classic RPGs, but its endless dungeon and savage nature transform it into a puzzle game perfect for quickfire mobile sessions. You must learn how foes move and react, plan every step and always keep in mind a single error can spell doom.
In its current incarnation, Rust Bucket cleverly balances enough depth to keep you coming back with the brevity that makes it ideal for on-the-go roguelike larks. Future plans include finite puzzle modes and expanded endless content.
