Top 16 Android games that play best on tablets (2014)

As regular readers of the Top 10 best Android games of the month feature will know, Android gaming is in a pretty good place these days.

Once the home of shoddy three-year-old iOS ports, dodgy Sudoku clones, and the odd Nvidia Tegra graphics showcase, things have gotten much better.

Many major games are launch simultaneously with, or at least soon after, the iOS version. Meanwhile the general quality of these cross-platform games has improved thanks to a better average level of Android hardware.

Android games will also generally run on phone and tablet alike - there's little of that walling off that you sometimes get with iOS.

Still, some games are simply better played on a tablet. Games that benefit from 7-inch or above display due to control or viewpoint considerations.

Like these, for example.

The Room Two
By Fireproof Games

This opulent, incredibly detailed mystery-puzzler was designed with tablets firmly in mind. It's still the best way to play it.

DrawRace 2
By RedLynx

As a rule of thumb, all line-drawing games play better on tablets, because you get more nuanced control. That's doubly so when you're sketching out precise racing lines.

Kingdom Rush
By Ironhide Studio

Kingdom Rush (and all tower defence games for that matter) requires a zoomed-out overview of proceedings, yet fine control over individual units. Ergo, it should really only be played on a tablet.

Fieldrunners 2
By Subatomic Studios

See Kingdom Rush. Tower defence is what your tablet was made for.

XCOM: Enemy Unknown
By 2K Games

XCOM: Enemy Unknown is a hugely ambitious conversion of a brilliant yet complex console strategy game. That means that it's been designed to be played on a large screen.

Ticket to Ride
By Days of Wonder

You wouldn't play Monopoly on a board the size of a passport, would you? Then why would you consider playing this superb boardgame conversion on a smartphone? WHY?

Monument Valley
By ustwo

This one's perhaps debatable, as Monument Valley is quite simple mechanically. Yet the whole point of this gorgeous spatial puzzler is its beautifully odd Escher environments, which need a distant perspective yet clear detail to appreciate.

Magic 2015
By Wizards of the Coast

On iOS, Magic 2015 isn't even available for iPhone. Admittedly, that's because iPhone's have been pipsqueak-small until recently, but the fact remains the ultimate deck-building strategy game is far easier to deal with on tablet.

Terraria
505 Games

Terraria looks like a retro 2D platformer, but it's actually a sprawling, freeform world-builder. As a PC conversion, it's a little fiddly without physical controls, but you can lessen that significantly by playing on a tablet.

CastleStorm - Free to Siege
By Zen Studios

CastleStorm crams in so much. It's got strategy, it's got hack 'n' slashing, it's got Angry Birds physics puzzling. It's great, but the bigger the screen, the more comfortably those elements fit together.

Skulls of the Shogun
By 17-BIT

17-BIT's charming strategy game, set in a cartoony feudal Japan underworld, was made with Xbox 360 and Windows 8 tablets in mind. It stands to reason, then, that the Android version should work best on full-sized tablets.

Blek
By kunabi brother

Blek is one of the freshest mobile games around, but it's also a right pig to play. It's all about sketching out a path around and between intricate dot formations, which means every extra inch of screen space is an advantage.

First Strike
By Feinheit kreativ studio

First Strike literally places the world in your hands - and then tasks you with destroying it with thermonuclear weapons. Such a big task requires a big tool. So to speak. Ahem.

Machinarium
By Amanita Design

Machinarium is all about falling into a richly detailed world, observing beautifully drawn scenes for clues and interactive elements, and then interacting with them. It's a point-'n'-click adventure, essentially, and that genre needs space to breathe.

Icebreaker: A Viking Voyage
By Nitrome

An almost perfect physics puzzler that has as its basis a delicate ice-carving system. You must draw lines to cut away chunks of the chilly stuff, and it can be rather fiddly on a smartphone.

Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP
By Capybara Games

Another weird and wonderfully enigmatic adventure-puzzler, Superbrother often feels like you're playing an interactive painting of an imagined Amiga classic. If that makes sense. It doesn't? Play it on a tablet, and it might just start to.