It doesn’t matter if you’re into soccer, American football, racing, basketball or even good old baseball – if you love sports in real life, you will surely enjoy its virtual counterpart in games! Here are some of my favorite free-to-play virtual sports games and I’ve also included a description of what you can expect when you play them!

Let’s kick things off with a sphere covered with a mosaic of white and black hexagons... can you guess what that is? That’s right – it is used in one of the most, if not THE most, popular sport game in the world and of all time... soccer! In the virtual world, most soccer games, such as Goal United and Top Eleven tend to allow you to play as the manager of a soccer team. After all, they are the strategists in equation and play as important a role as the players themselves! However, for this sort of games, its soccer matches are all auto-resolved by the magic of the random number generator after taking account of the stats of your players.

If you fancy playing soccer games not as the manager but as the players yourself, well, allow me to introduce this amazing free-to-play soccer game to you - Kamicat Football: Soccer 3D! It may not be as realistic as other soccer games like the FIFA franchise, but considering that it’s free-to-play, it is pretty good enough! The mechanism and rules of soccer in this game are similar to any other soccer game and Kamicat Football also provides helpful replays whenever a goal is scored or when something important (yellow or red-card worthy perhaps) happen. However, if you want to enjoy a more casual soccer experience, well, there is also a shuffleboard-like soccer game, called Soccer Stars that everybody, including yourself, can enjoy due to its simpler controls!

The second most popular sports game is definitely motor racing! Who doesn’t like the look of a sleek new luxury sports car, right? Similarly to soccer, there are 2 ways you can enjoy motor racing games... either as a manager (which is admittedly rare in motor racing games as opposed to soccer games) or the racer him/herself! One of the most brilliant car racing games is, without contest, Need for Speed: World!

Despite its rather bad micro-transaction system, the game has plenty of quality graphics as befit a game that was derived from the highly popular Need for Speed franchise. This includes the cars and the sceneries! In Need for Speed: World, you can enjoy racing in a brilliantly developed and rendered open world. Besides the normal racing, this game offers drag racing as well as thrilling police pursuit scenarios. You can even cruise and just enjoy the sceneries if you like. However, if you fancy playing as the law enforcement in the car chase, pursuing other illegal racers on the road, well, you will definitely enjoy Driver XP instead! There are also some of the more casual racing games, such as Highway Racer that requires you to pass by other traffic on the road while driving at high speeds to score points or StreetRace Rivals, a pure drag racing multiplayer game!

Coming up in the third spot is another racing game, but this time instead of driving in a beast of a car, you’ll be riding on the back of a magnificent beast – a horse! Most horse games are tamer in terms of their gameplay and sometimes, outright unrealistic... winged horses? Nah! In sports, we are all about the gritty down-to-earth stuff! This means virtual horses that are modeled after real ones in real life!

As usual, horse games can also be separated into 2 types where you can play as the rider or the equestrian, or you can play as the owner of a team/ stable of race horses. If you want to play the latter type of horse game, well, be warned that most such games are text-based and lack animations. You’ll just be looking at tables of stats and scores. It can be pretty boring... besides the part where you can place bets on horses in races.

If you fancy something more “hands-on”, you’re in luck! I have several of them lined up just for you! In Ride! Equestrian Simulation, you can enjoy the finer art of horse showmanship, namely in dressage, jumping, and cross-country eventing. Although, technically, this is not a free game, you can get the 1-hour demo for free from Big Fish Games and it is too good a game to pass up mentioning!

However, if you’re looking for a realistic and fully free-to-play horse game, well, you’ll certainly be interested to check out Riding Club Championships on Facebook! The game allows you to ride your horse in third person as you urge your horse to go faster and to leap over fences and obstacles in a course. This game focuses more on the jumping and agility aspects of horse riding as opposed to racing, showmanship or stable management. You are even allowed to create your own obstacle or agility course too!

None of these are what you seek? Well, perhaps you may be interested in a more carefree horse riding or even racing game? If that is so, you will definitely enjoy the MMO horse game, Star Stable! In this game, you are allowed more freedom in terms of riding as you can ride and explore the game’s open world at your own pace. You can do quests and some quests require you to complete exhilarating and challenging races within the period of time provided. This is, without doubt, the closest that you can get to enjoy horse riding virtually for free!

Hopefully, the description and games recommended are useful in helping you to decide which sports games to go into as well as which games to play! There are of course plenty other sports-related games that are covered in WWGDB, but is not (yet!) covered in this article. So, do keep an eye out here for the part 2 for this article! You’ll be amazed at the different types of sports that you can play virtually for free these days!