Top 10 best Android games (2010)

We covered the top 10 Android games of the year so far just a couple of months ago, but it’s been a while since we stood back and looked at the complete Android-gaming picture.

Now’s the perfect time do so, as the times, well, they are a-changin’. Android handset sales are soaring, major developers are finally taking notice (I wonder if there’s a link?), and the general standard (and frequency) of releases on the Android Market is improving.

So what are the best games available on Android at the moment? Our list is heavy on the more recent titles, which is fitting given the level of improvement we’ve seen over the past six months.

We’d love to know what your favourite Android games are in the comments section below.

It’s often said that the best sports games are enjoyed by people who have no interest in the sport itself. The likes of Virtua Tennis and Pro Evo (PS1 era) are a testament to that fact.

Homerun Battle 3D is the first of three titles on this list that match that description. It places you in control of a batter and tasks you with knocking each ball out of the stadium.

The way in which this is done is the clincher: you have to physically tilt your handset to line up each swing. Add in cross-platform online play and some killer 3D graphics and you have an experience that well and truly transcends the sport at its core.

Like Homerun Battle 3D, Backbreaker Football picks out a relatively esoteric American sport, zooms in on one particular element, and makes a fantastically fun arcade game out of it.

This time the focus is on American ‘Gridiron’ football – in particular those crazy little fellers who run the length of the pitch while half a dozen 18-stone gentlemen attempt to flatten them.

Backbreaker turns this into a high-score chasing obstacle course run, complete with the ability to 'showboat' across the finishing line for extra points.

The key to the game’s success is its phenomenal animation engine, which renders every twist, hurdle and crunching tackle in glorious 3D. Backbreaker looks, moves, and plays gloriously.

Who’d have thought it? Two baseball games making a British top 10 games list. Like Homerun Battle 3D, though, Baseball Superstars 2010 uses the sport as a springboard to new and exciting areas.

Rather than the zoomed-in arcade kicks of Com2uS’s game, though, Gamevil’s effort pans back and offers a rough overview of the game. As such, you get to take loose control of batting, pitching, and fielding – as well as your team selection and development.

Indeed, the game resembles an RPG as much as a sport game - particularly in the My League mode, which sees you running a single player’s career from training to match day. It’s far more exciting than it sounds.

There’s more than one way to skin a cat, and as Guns ‘n’ Glory shows, there’s more than one way to make a tower defence game.

Rather than adopting the standard 'let’s rip off Fieldrunners' approach, HandyGames gives us a wild west setting, units that can be moved according to the ebb and flow of battle and enemies who don’t obligingly stroll along single file.

There are loads of neat touches, such as the special train unit that can be outfitted with multiple Gatling guns and moved to-and-fro along its tracks. All this, and Guns ‘n' Glory can be had for free thanks to ad-funding.

MiniSquadron takes the simple premise of a 2D arena-based shooter and applies some glorious aerial combat physics to make the game truly special.

Attacking from above, initiating a loop-de-loop in order to get on your opponent’s tail, recovering from a stall – all skills that you might associate with a flight simulator, and each of which is quite possible in this arcade blaster.

The wonderful flight/combat system is more than enough to keep you going, but the dozens of unlockable planes and increasingly life-like AI opposition push the game into dangerously compulsive territory.

Perhaps Buka’s greatest achievement is making you care for a sentient blue orb. How many games have managed to do that, on any platform?

You form this bond with Buka (for it is she) through doing everything possible to protect her. Constantly harassed by incoming asteroids, you must deflect their attacks by touching the screen to create shockwaves, and holding it to create a powerful explosion.

You can also manoeuvre poor Buka out of immediate harm’s way, and it’s the finely pitched balancing act between these aggressive and passive defensive measures that gives Buka its beguiling appeal. It’s also the most stylish-looking game on this list.

While Gamevil is well known for making sports games that play a lot like RPGs (the Superstars series), they’re not half bad at making out and out RPGs either. Take Zenonia, for instance.

The game takes plenty of cues from classic 16-bit action RPGs, as well as their more stat-driven turn-based counterparts. The result is a mix of real-time action and in depth stat-based character progression.

Despite the obvious source material, Zenonia feels fresh because of this mix-and-match approach – as well as a colourfully scripted story and some gorgeous anime-influenced visuals.

The sequel should be with us in December, so we’d recommend playing through this in preparation.

Fruit Ninja is a master class in how to make the simplest, most run-of-the-mill task into an endlessly addictive video game.

All you have to do is slice fruit out of the air as it’s lobbed onto the screen. Other than a bonus combo system that rewards slicing multiple fruity items with a single slash, there’s precious little tactical depth or variation to the game.

Yet thanks to the deliciously squelchy, tactile joy of simply slicing melons and bananas in half, you’ll keep coming back for more. OpenFeint integration adds to the experience as you aim to climb the online leaderboards.

All of the games on this list stand out for their originality as much as their quality, but none are is downright quirky as Everlands.

It’s a dark fairytale concerning an animal kingdom at war thanks to a mysterious infection, with your expanding band of creatures on a quest to locate the source.

These battles play out like a strategy boardgame mixed with a healthy dose of top trumps. Each animal has its particular strengths and weaknesses, as well as special skills that logically relate to their nature.

Everlands is quite unlike any other game on the Android Market, which makes it stand out all the more.

Just as Guns ‘n’ Glory deals with tower defence in a novel way, so Galcon revamps the real-time strategy genre for mobile touchscreen play. It does so by stripping the genre back to its bare essentials.

The battlefield is a single screen filled with planets, the size and allegiance of each one’s occupying force denoted by a number and signature colour. Neutral and opposing planets need to be captured by sending half of a planet’s population to invade.

It’s a fascinating juggling act as you attempt to adopt an attacking approach without leaving yourself exposed to counter-attack.

With one or two opponents (AI or human controlled) doing the same thing, it soon becomes a deeply involving tactical battle – the finest to be found on Android, in fact.