The 9 best free iPhone and iPad games... that are actually free

Ever wondered why the App Store isn't deluged in free, fan-made games without in-app purchases? Because it costs 99 bucks a per year to distribute games on iOS. That's why.

It's one thing to use your time to make a game for the love of it. Quite another to stump up a substantial chunk of hard-earned cash for the right to let others play it.

As a result, there are almost no quality free games available for iOS that don't try and tap you for money somehow. Quite right too: developers need to house themselves and eat like the rest of us.

That doesn't mean that there aren't any good games that you can pick up for nothing and play long-term without feeling a needling itch for purchases, though. And that's why we're here.

The criteria for this list are somewhat nebulous, but here are nine titles that we at Pocket Gamer think you can enjoy with nary a whiff of pay to win.

That doesn't mean you shouldn't buy anything in the game though. Even developers have to buy new underpants occasionally.

Trainyard Express
by Matt Rix - free on iPhone and iPad

You'd be forgiven for looking at the title and the screenshot and assuming this was a priority-juggling transport game like Flight Control. And you'd be kind of right. The clever thing about it is the way it blends this style seamlessly with neuron-frying puzzle aspects as you build your train track.

Saying it's got no in-app purchases is a bit of a cheat because there's a premium version available as a separate app. But get this: the sixty levels in this Express version aren't in the paid one. So you can play a good long time without spending a penny and still get full enjoyment if you decide to stump up the cash.

Dumb Ways To Die
by Metro Trains Melbourne - free on iPhone and iPad

About the only way someone is going to pay that $99 a year and still offer a free game with no strings attached is if the game promotes something.

Most games in this category promote dull but worthy causes, or try and sell you something. This one aims to keep you alive so you can play it some more.

Created to raise awareness of personal safety issues, Dumb Ways to Die offers a dazzling variety of microgames using all aspects of your mobile's input from screen to microphone.

The object is always to keep some Darwin-award grade idiot to survive. If you can stand the subject matter, you won't get much more entertainment for absolutely nothing.

Legend of Equip Pants
by Zachstronaut - free on iPhone and iPad

The world is divided into two kinds of people. Those who'll weep with joy at the mere concept of a naked adventurer questing for his lost trousers, and the terminally dull. If you're in the former camp run, don't walk, to pick up this hilarious adventure.

Subsisting on nothing other than tips you hand over at bars, the developer still managers to add additional content to this on a regular basis. The replay value isn't great, but it's worth time (and money, though that's optional) to enjoy the never-ending procession of pants-related puns.

Orbit1
by Caffeine Monster Software- free on iPhone and iPad

Orbit1 is one of those games so minimal, yet so brilliant, that you'll wish you'd thought of it first. It plays up to four at the same time, and everyone takes a corner, with a button. They have a ship orbiting a central planet and you press the button to move in and out, trying to collide with good things and avoid bad things.

The best thing to collide with, though, is another player. And that's what transforms an idyllic-sounding game into a frenzy of shouting, screaming hatred and frustration. Best of all, you can lose all your friends for nothing at all, so you can lavish more money on buying the affections of new ones.

Solomon's Boneyeard
by Rapisoft - free on iPhone and iPad

We have to admit that this one is skirting on the edges of the list. It's a twin-stick shooter where you have to survive as long as possible, and in-game gold will help buy items to do that. And you can buy in-game gold with out-of-game gold.

But it cares so little about making money that it's quite hard to find where you even make the purchases. And it's a bit of a favourite round here, with its sublime blend of action, role-playing and a little smidgen of strategy. Besides, when the screen fills up with zombies, all your precious toys won't help you survive any more than a few seconds longer.

Frotz
by Craig Smith - free on iPhone and iPad

Once upon a time there were adventure games you could only interact with by typing commands. The puzzles mostly consisted of working out what very limited sets of words the game actually understood. Today, these are fondly remembered as "interactive fiction".

Except that the concept has come on leaps and bounds since the days of 8-bit computing. These games are now absorbing, clever and are good at pretending to understand a larger chunk of the dictionary. And you can play a whole load of them for free by downloading Frotz.

Letterpress
by atebits - free on iPhone and iPad

Letterpress is a multiplayer asynchronous word game. But don't click away just yet, because this one has an extra dimension. You take turns picking out letters from a grid to spell a word, and doing so switches them to your colour. If you can surround a letter with your own colour, it then becomes ineligible for your opponent.

This simple twist transforms a humdrum lexical puzzler into a devious and addictive game of strategy. Yet it's free in spite of it's brilliance: the main in-app purchase just allows you to run multiple games at once. Trust us though, the games is so good that the self-discipline required to resist is harder than it sounds.

Marathon 1
by Soli Deo Gloria Productions - free on iPhone and iPad

That there's a fun, fully-featured, free first person shooter available on the app store is impressive enough. That it originated on Mac from Bungie, the studio who'd go on to create the Halo series for Xbox, is just astonishing.

It's punishingly tough, which may be off-putting for some, and there's an in-app purchase for a "Master Chief" mode to give you an easier ride. But people who stump up are wimping out.

Crossy Road
by Hipster Whale - free on iPhone and iPad

You knew this was coming, so that's why it's last on the list. Crossy Road takes an archaic arcade game, Frogger, and transforms it into a bizarre form of endless runner. Guiding your character over a never-ending series of roads, rivers and rails might sound like a dreadful Sisyphean punishment, but it's actually rather fun.

Characters are the only thing you'll pay for in Crossy Road, and even then only if you want a specific one: you can win a random one in-game for free. The only effect they have on the game is cosmetic, so this may be the ultimate definition of a truly free, fun iOS game.