Not everyone can afford a Samsung Galaxy Tab and enjoy many of its essential apps. Recent surveys found that since iPad’s first availability, only 11% of adult Americans own a tablet device. So if you’re a tablet gamer and want to play with nearby friends some multiplayer games over local wireless, you may be out of luck.
Instead of annoying your friends into buying something with money they don’t have, why not just provide entertainment for your group with just your own tablet? A few games in the Android Market offer multiplayer gameplay within a single device. They are not like single-player games which you play alone while your friends are watching droolingly beside you.
Here’s what we found:
Fruit Ninja
In this fruit slicing game, two modes are available for multiplayer. Classic Attack plays just like the classic single-player game where you must slash all the fruits that are tossed. Miss more than three and you’re out of the game. But there’s a new twist: you can send bombs to your opponent. Time it well and he might just hit it and lose the game.
Zen Duel, on the other hand, do not have bombs to avoid. Instead, within the given time you must score more points than your opponent. The trick here is to obtain bonus points by slashing at least three fruits in one fast swipe. The more fruits slashed, the more combo points earned.
Paper War
Paper War has three versus games readily available after installation. The first is Anti-Aircraft where you shoot at your opponent’s plane and reach a score of 30 first. Plane Smasher will have you in a killing frenzy by tapping airships of your opponents. But arguably the best game is Cannon Battle, where you blast a cannonball towards your opponent’s cannon, with the wind and aiming to be calculated.
Sharing the game via Facebook or Twitter will reward you of an ad-free version of the game as well as a 50% discount for the premium upgrade, which opens two more multiplayer games but in co-op or alliance mode this time.
Reactor
A collection of 14 minigames, Reactor requires a blend of patience and fast response in order to beat your challenger. The games range from spotting a sad smiley face, predicting when the countdown reaches past zero, to matching the country to its correct capital city. Using points, which can be earned by installing affiliated apps or by other methods, will let you add more minigames and customizations.
If 2-player mode is not satisfying enough, install 4-player Reactor instead, perhaps the only game in the Market to offer such feature.
Guerilla Bob
One of the few games I consider the best of all Android games, Guerilla Bob lets you play with an ally friend in a variety of modes. Arcade requires you to fight for points and fame. Mercenary, on the other hand, will have you collect money to buy awesome weapons. Lastly, Survival can either be the classic style or an endless wave after wave of enemies closing in at the both of you.
Besides the alliance games of Paper War, Guerilla Bob maybe the only game to offer cooperative gameplay in one device.
Glow Hockey 2
Pretty much like the actual air hockey, you have a puck to hit and slide into your opponent’s goal while at the same time defend your own goal when the puck returns in full force. The game can be very unpredictable especially if you happen to just hit the puck with your mallet without thinking of the direction and amount of force.
If you pay for the full version, you can have additional hockey table themes, and paddle and puck designs to choose from. But more importantly, there’s the championship mode that lets you determine who among your group of friends is the ultimate puck champion.
Panzer Panic
You might mistake Panzer Panic as one of the minigames found in Paper War, largely because of a similar paper background. But unlike the latter, Panzer Panic only has one game that you can play against an AI or a fellow player.
Given three tanks, you need to annihilate the same number of tanks of the opposing side in order to win the game. To make it more challenging, each turn you only have a certain amount of fuel or energy to use for moving and shooting. There are also obstacles in the game that can either impede your projectiles from hitting the enemy tanks or keep you safe from their attacks.
Wordsmith
While not exactly a game where you and your friend have both your fingers swiping and tapping at the same time, Wordsmith still fits our criterion of single device multiplayer gameplay. Actually, the game requires that each player be given privacy to think and play during his turn, and with good reason.
Wordsmith plays similar to Scrabble, so you can’t let your opponent know which letters you have in your possession. If he finds out, he might simply use it to his advantage by, for example, playing a word with letters that are hard for you to form a word with using your own letters!
Found a game that you can play together with a friend or two on a single device? Go ahead and comment below.
