Top 5 Free iPhone Games!

Free iPhone Games - How good are they really? We decides to find out - and have posted what we think are the best ones below (download links provided - and no need for a complicated NES emulator or anything - these download straight to your iPhone!)

iPhone games have been very popular - to say the least. In fact, according to Google, searches for “iphone games” have averaged around 300,000 a month for the last 12 months! And this interest has been matched with enthusiasm by new games developed for iPhones.

There are now over a thousand games in the App store and nearly a third of them are FREE! At first that was a pretty exciting deal for us iPhone owners. But now there are just so many - mostly poor - free iPhone games on offer in iTunes that its easy to get overwhelmed - and even to just ignore them!

Now, Apple does make some attempt to help us, by providing lists like the “top free Apps” shown below

But here’s the problem with this list.

The topped ranked game - Super Monkey Ball Lite - has only a 3-star rating (mainly because it only has three levels).

But it gets worse!

The iPhonegizmo team went bizerk and read every review written for these games!

As a result, we could not really understand the reasoning behind the rankings given for these games.

For example, three of the four “top ranked games” - iSniper lite, Save kitty, and duck shoot - only get 2 star ratings by users. With Falling Balls managing a slightly better, 2.5 stars. Not very encouraging.

Now the above image is for the US “Top Free Apps” - but we checked and found that other countries have much the same games in the top ten apps list!

So, we wondered - does this mean that all free iPhone games suck?

So we actually went (painfully) through the long list of free iPhone games listed in the App stores for both US and UK to see if we could find any better games. And we did!

iShoot Lite

But not many! Sadly, we found that few free games got better than 3.5 star ratings. (We are currently doing a survey of paid games as well - results will be posted in the near future). Here are our results:

Top Free iPhoneGames (rated by users as 3.5 stars or better):

1) iShoot Lite - 4 stars (Released Dec 08 );

2) Galcon lite - 3.5 stars (Released Sep 08);

3) Bounce On Lite - 3.5 stars (Released Jan 09);

4) Fastlane Street Racing Lite - 3.5 stars (Released Jan 09),

5) Downhill Bowling Lite - 3.5 stars (Released Feb 09);

6) Trace - 3.5 stars (US) (Released Oct 08)

7) Tap Defence - 3.5 stars (US) (Released Nov 08)

We were prepared to include games earlier than Sep 08 only if they had a rating of at least 4 stars as we reckon a lot of the games released back in July to September 08 had the benefit of being the glamorous first to be appreciated and so were met with the kind of rave reviews not seen since! And because we figured the good ones would be well known, anyway. But we did not find any!

So what did we take away from this exercise?

1) Most free games get very poor reviews

2) There are only two or three free games that are worth getting (out of hundreds!)

3) iTunes is a major pain to navigate! Unless you know the game you want it is just too much trouble to browse through what is available.