Hiya everybody, Nips here, and this is the first installment of my ongoing search for the best free mobile games! What is that, you ask? Read the title, ya big dummy! Why are we even going over this?

In each episode I will be focusing on 5–count ’em–5 different mobile games that I think are worth checking out. What’s more, each game is (technically) totally free! Are you a cheapskate like me, but still enjoy playing some fun games on your mobile device? Then boy, do I have your fix! In this episode–our very first!–I will be focusing on one of my favorite types of mobile entertainment: Driving games. Let’s get started.

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1. MMX Hill Dash–OffRoad Racing

Developer: Hutch

In my constant search for the best free mobile games, MMX Hill Dash–OffRoad Racing hopped onto my radar pretty early on. Sporting a side-scrolling style, Hill Dash looked like one of those Trials clones where your challenge is more about performing and landing epic jumps, tricks, and flips than it is about steering. And I was basically right! Featuring a huge assortment of different vehicles, from race cars to monster trucks and everything in between, Hill Dash pits the player against levels of ever-increasing difficulty with some basic level-up attachments along the way that will improve each car’s performance.

Much like the Trials series, MMX Hill Dash features this cool mechanic where you can rotate your car midair. These actions are performed with the very same gas pedal and brake that you use while on the ground, meaning that you only need to tap the two sides of your screen in order to play this game. Because of this, Hill Dash is a fairly easy game to pick up and put down if you’re on the go, not to mention the rush you feel when you land a particularly sick jump.

Just like every other game I’ll be talking about, MMX Hill Dash is technically free-to-play, but there are some bonuses that you can unlock by paying a little bit of cash. Bar that, you might be spending a lot more time than you’d like on the same levels to force the game to unlock its secrets. MMX Hill Dash–OffRoad Racing is, nevertheless, a rather enjoyable game that I spent plenty of hours with.

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2. MMX Hill Dash 2 – Race Offroad

Developer: Hutch

Would you believe it? Within just the past year Hutch pumped our yet another Hill Dash! This time around, the developers trimmed down the number of vehicles in favor of ones that are a bit more unique. On top of that, MMX Hill Dash 2 – Race Offroad features different terrains for you to traverse, each of them interacting uniquely with all of the distinct vehicles. So now you can say hello to racing through waters on your amphibious boat-tank or powering through ice on your four-wheeler! What I find especially fun about this title is taking vehicles through terrain they weren’t necessarily meant for, like slogging through the mud in your low-suspension race car or driving your monster truck at the bottom of a lake. A really neat bonus is that you now have a little dude (their new mascot, I guess) that rides each of your vehicles, and his body goes flying when you explode!

Despite these improvements, MMX Hill Dash 2 retains at least one huge problem from its predecessor, that being its reliance on grinding. You could be the best mobile game player out there, but there are just some levels that you aren’t meant to beat if you haven’t upgraded certain vehicles all the way. And the only two ways to do that are by paying your way through (if you feel like chuckin’ your brass around), or by playing the same levels over, and over, and over, until you grind out enough in-game currency to buy those upgrades. Unfortunately, Hill Dash 2 does this to a much more extreme degree than the first game does, so it kept my attention for a much shorter time than its predecessor. That said, I was still able to chuck away a few hours on this game, no problem.

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 3. Donuts Drift

Developer: Voodoo

You’re going to be hearing a lot about Voodoo. Donuts Drift was one of my first exposures to this developer, and man is this game fun. Controlling your race car from a top-down perspective, your goal is to perform donuts around these little circles on the map in order to collect cash coins and gain power-ups.

Completing a perfect donut will reward you with extra money and fuel, plus you get a heckin’ boost that kicks you forward, which can be bad or good; while you get extra distance, drifting is a bit trickier while boosting. Get three perfect boosts in a row and your car will kick into overdrive mode for a little while. And that’s basically it for the gameplay. There are some obstacles here and there that you have to dodge, and the drift circles get bigger and bigger, but it’s basically a gauntlet to see how many donuts you can do before running out of fuel.

There are a lot of fun little cars to unlock along the way. They don’t offer any gameplay advantages, but they do look nice. Aside from cars, you can permanently upgrade things like your fuel tank, allowing for longer runs. Furthermore, if you spend money on this game, all it does is take the ads away, meaning that you can’t pay to win this game. Personally, I think this is a much more preferable model to the pay-to-play format that a lot of other mobile games seem to love so much.

I thought I’d had my fun with Donuts Drift quite a while ago, but I picked it up just recently to discover that the developers had implemented a fresh new update! This update adds a “campaign” mode that challenges you to get to a certain distance each time, which gives you a constant goal to shoot for. I actually had a lot of fun with this new campaign system, as it added yet another way to make in-game currency and level up while adding to the overall challenge. This game is seriously a lot of fun and I would recommend it to anyone who is a fan of driving or arcade-style mobile games.

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4. Best Rally

Developer: Oddrok Oy

The Best Rally? As in the best of the rallies? Well, Best Rally may or may not be the best rally racing game, but it sure is damn good. Controlling a tiny car from an angled (“orthographic”) perspective, your goal is to guide your vehicle through a sick array of crazy racetrack levels to get to the end. Dodge obstacles, traverse bridges, and race against the time in this exciting romp!

Best Rally features some really impressive driving controls; they’re pretty easy to pick up, but hard to master. Your car will drive in a straight line, but as soon as you start to turn, things get a bit slippery, allowing for some really sweet drifts around corners. On top of that, this game utilizes an actual physics system that reads whether or not your car is situated completely on a raised surface. Let your car drift too far over the edge of a bridge, and you’ll tumble right down into the dirt.

The levels in Best Rally are all excellently designed to put the player’s abilities to the test, namely through its 3-star rating system. Future levels unlock in a fashion similar to a lot of Super Mario games, locked away behind certain star counts that the player must achieve. And achieving these star counts is not always a walk in the park; this game is hard! I had several encounters where a level would be seemingly easy, only to find out that my unimpressive performance rewarded me with a single paltry star. For some of its levels, Best Rally really demands the most out of you, turning this game into a veritable arcade-like experience.

Furthermore, just like Donuts Drift, Best Rally does not opt for the pay-to-win format. Instead, paying a few bucks will simply remove ads. On top of that, you can pay a few more bucks for some cool-looking cars, but these changes are cosmetic only. So hats off to Best Rally!

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5. Retro Highway

Developer: Gearhead Games ApS

This game is so freakin’ cool. Riding down a crowded highway, you are the badass biker who weaves through traffic, then weaves through oncoming traffic, and makes sweet jumps off of the backs of semi-trucks. Okay, maybe these types of bikers don’t exist, cause if they did, they’d have extremely short lifespans. Anyway, Retro Highway is the game for you if you like a good old-fashioned highway-speeding adrenaline rush.

Like a lot of these racing games, Retro Highway features only a couple of different controls; tapping the sides of the screen will lean you left and right, and there’s only one other control for using your boost. The controls feel really good and smooth, and the graphics have that Super Mario Kart aesthetic where the visuals are deceptively simple, yet the player is still capable of performing some surprisingly precise and intricate movements.

And, like any decent free mobile game, Retro Highway keeps you playing through its use of challenges and unlockables. The challenges are pretty tough, allowing you to unlock upgrades to your powerups, new bikes with different stats, and new levels. These levels are all really well-developed aesthetically, and each one introduces a new configuration of variables that adds to the challenge, but after a while it starts to get really hard to unlock further levels and bikes. On top of that, Retro Highway is not a pay-to-play title; paying a couple bucks just gets rid of the ads.

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At that does it for the first episode of Nerd Bacon’s Search for the Best Free Mobile Games! Have you tried any of these games? What do you think? What games should I play next? Catch y’all next time!