Games like Crossy Road

This page was planned as a repeat of the last one. One studio, several listings of the same game, and a money price that neither store prints. Two of those three held. The third did not: Google Play publishes a fourteen-item price list for Crossy Road, with real dollar amounts, and reading it against Hipster Whale’s own support FAQ produces the most useful piece of arithmetic we have found on a game so far.

The store that prints the prices is not the one you would guess

Scroll past the description on Crossy Road’s Google Play listing and there is a section headed In-game items and offers. It names fourteen things and prices every one of them: Bashy Beaver at $0.49; Ghost, Dragon, Android Robot, Slippy Penguin, Jelly Bear, Long Chicken, Baby Duck, Unihorse, Poopy Pigeon, Floppy Fish and Festive Chicken at $0.99 each; the Piggy Bank at $5.99; and the Ad Blocker Pack at $8.49, described on the listing as “Remove all ads forever!”. Derived from those figures, buying all fourteen comes to $25.86.

That matters because this site has said twice, on the Flappy Bird page and the Fruit Ninja page, that Google Play prints no figure at any point about a free game’s shop. On those listings it does not. On this one it does, and the correction is now recorded on all three pages rather than left to sit.

It is a per-listing choice rather than a store rule, which is what the controls show. We read the same stretch of five other free listings on 7 September 2026 — Fruit Ninja, Subway Surfers, Jetpack Joyride, PAC-MAN 256 and Hipster Whale’s own Piffle — and not one carries the section. So the same studio publishes a price list for Crossy Road on Google Play and none for Piffle, while on Apple it does the reverse: Piffle’s App Store page carries a promoted in-app purchase, the Starter Pack at $2.99, and Crossy Road’s carries nothing but “In-App Purchases: Yes”.

The honest summary of three pages of this now: both stores have a place to print prices, neither store requires it, and which prices you see depends on which listing a developer filled in. An absent price list says nothing about whether a shop is expensive.

The cheapest way to stop the ads is not the ad remover

The price list is only half of it. The other half is on hipsterwhale.com, where the Crossy Road support FAQ answers the question “What is the difference between purchasing a regular character to remove ads vs purchasing the Ad Blocker Pack?” with this: when you purchase any regular character, autoplay ads are removed forever. The Ad Blocker Pack, it goes on, removes those and also lets you collect the rewards behind coin banners, gifts, doublers, character re-rolls and any future placements without watching an ad.

Put the two documents together and the arithmetic is short. The cheapest character on the published list is $0.49 and eleven more are $0.99, against $8.49 for the pack. So the autoplay interstitials — the ads people actually complain about — can go for about a seventeenth of the pack’s price at $0.49, or about an eighth at $0.99. What the remaining $8.00 or $7.50 buys is stated rather than hidden: the reward ads, and whatever ad placements the game adds later.

One caveat, and it is the reason to give both bounds. The FAQ elsewhere calls the Piggy Bank a premium character, so the studio distinguishes regular characters from premium ones — and neither the FAQ nor the store price list says which of the fourteen items falls on which side. The $0.99 tier is plainly full of ordinary characters. Whether the $0.49 Bashy Beaver is one of them is not something either document answers, so we are publishing the range instead of the single number we would prefer.

None of this is a criticism, and it is worth saying so directly. Publishing fourteen prices and an FAQ that explains what each purchase removes puts Hipster Whale ahead of every publisher on these pages on disclosure. The point is narrower: the useful answer lives in two documents and neither one contains it. That is the same shape as the Swagbucks prepaid card costing 30 SB less than the same money on PayPal — visible only once you read the whole price list rather than the item you were sold.

What the price list does not cover

Thirteen of the fourteen items are characters. Crossy Road’s own store description advertises over 300 characters across 28 worlds. It does not follow that the other 287 are for sale, and Crossy Road has never claimed they are: the game hands out coins and a Prize Machine, and Play’s own content rating says some purchases include random items. It does mean the published list is a slice of the shop rather than the shop.

Google Play’s content rating names the randomness where Apple’s does not. Play rates Crossy Road Everyone and tags it “Comic Mischief” and “In-Game Purchases (Includes Random Items)”. Apple rates the same game 9+ with the descriptor “In-App Controls”. Neither is wrong; they are different rating systems answering different questionnaires. The practical consequence is that a parent reading only the App Store page learns the game has purchases and a parent reading only the Play page learns that some of them are randomized.

The parental controls are published too, and one of them has a price. The FAQ lists the options in the settings menu as disabling the daily online leaderboard and purchasing the Ad Blocker Pack, and adds that the pack “replaces the parental ad block which previously removed interstitial ads for young players”. The reason given is that the new pack removes every ad rather than only the interstitials, and that children can still claim all the prizes. That is a real improvement in what it does and a change in what it costs, and the FAQ says both halves.

Games like Crossy Road are mostly Crossy Road

The list is short for the same reason the Fruit Ninja list was short. Search Google Play for “cross the road game” and the first result is Crossy Road, followed by Stumble Guys, three crossword and puzzle apps, and Google Chrome. The only other genuine road-crosser in the whole set is Frogie: Cross Road Arcade from Kaio Games, at 2.6 stars across 23 reviews and 5,000-plus downloads. Apple’s You Might Also Like shelf on the Crossy Road listing recommends ten games — block stacking, a snake game, a golf game, two Talking Tom runners — and not one of them is a hopper.

The genre’s ancestor has left as well. Searching either store for Frogger on 7 September 2026 returns fan-made arcade games from individual developers and no Konami-published Frogger at all; Konami’s US App Store catalog is eFootball, three Yu-Gi-Oh! titles, a baseball game and Castlevania. So the honest structure of this page is Hipster Whale’s five listings, one small competitor, and a short section on games that share the sixty seconds rather than the road.

Disney Crossy Road is gone, and the studio says so

It was the second Crossy Road most people played, and it does not appear in either US store. Rather than infer that from an absence, the developer answers it directly: the Crossy Road support FAQ carries the question What happened to Disney Crossy Road?, and the answer is “Alas, Disney Crossy Road is no more and is something that is out of our control. We had some fun times, though. Didn’t we?”

The studio’s own homepage lists four games — Crossy Road Castle, Crossy Road, Piffle and PAC-MAN 256 — and Disney Crossy Road is not one of them. This is the third time a page here has settled a “what happened to it” question out of a developer’s own support site rather than out of coverage, after Flappy Bird and Shopkick. The company that made the thing usually has a page about where it went.

The clean version, and which phone you need for it

Crossy Road+ is the version with no ads and nothing to buy. Apple’s page carries the Arcade line — play over 200 games, no ads, no in-app purchases — its Information block has no In-App Purchases row at all, and its privacy panel lists Usage Data, not linked to you, and nothing under tracking. It comes with Apple Arcade, $6.99 a month or $49.99 a year, with Family Sharing for up to five people and three months free on a new eligible device for new and qualified returning subscribers.

There is no Android equivalent. Google Play’s More by HIPSTER WHALE shelf lists two games, Crossy Road and Piffle, and the studio’s five other iPhone listings — Crossy Road+, Crossy Road Castle, Crossy Road Castle Intro, Piffle+ and the Castle sticker pack — are Apple only. That is the exact reverse of Fruit Ninja, where the clean version is a $2.99 one-time purchase on Google Play and an Arcade subscription on iPhone. Two of the biggest casual studios in the world, two opposite answers to where the ad-free build lives, and in both cases the answer is decided by the phone rather than by the game.

The derived comparison, since the Ad Blocker Pack is the closest thing on the free version to the same outcome. $49.99 a year is $4.17 a month, so the $8.49 pack is about two months of the entire Arcade catalog at the annual rate, or about five weeks at the monthly one. Read the other way, $49.99 across more than 200 games is roughly 25 cents a game a year, which is the case for the subscription and we are not going to leave it out.

The free demo of a paid game

Crossy Road Castle Intro is the listing on this page with no precedent anywhere else on the site. It is free, it has no In-App Purchases row, its privacy panel lists nothing under tracking, and it is a playable slice of an Apple Arcade game: the first nine levels of Unihorse Tower plus Space Station 115, with multiplayer, and its own description says an Arcade subscription is required for the full game and that all progress carries over. 4.6 stars across 868 ratings, rated 4+.

Two oddities we can measure and cannot explain, published as such. The demo is 420.9 MB and the full Crossy Road Castle is 407.7 MB, so the slice is 13.2 MB larger than the whole thing. And on the other pair the sizes run the way you would expect and then stop: free Crossy Road is 256.4 MB against Crossy Road+ at 125.5 MB, roughly double, but free Piffle is 206.8 MB against Piffle+ at 238 MB, which is the other direction. We have measured our own six apps on exactly this question and found the analytics and ad block moves the number, so the temptation to explain the first pair that way is real. One pair is not a pattern and the studio’s other pair contradicts it, so no claim.

The other price, and the exception that matters

The Fruit Ninja page found that both stores itemize what a free game takes in data while neither itemizes what it takes in money, and that the free listing always declared more than the paid one. The first half holds here. The second half needs a correction, and it is the more useful finding.

The pattern first, because it does hold across three pairs. Free Crossy Road names location, identifiers, usage data and diagnostics as used to track you across other companies’ apps, and purchases as linked to your identity; Crossy Road+ names Usage Data, not linked to you, and nothing tracked. Free Piffle names the same four tracking categories; Piffle+ says “Data Not Collected”, which is the strongest declaration Apple offers. Play agrees from its side: Crossy Road may share approximate location, device or other IDs, user IDs and diagnostics with other companies, encrypted in transit, and the developer provides no way to request deletion.

Now the exception. PAC-MAN 256 is free, has a shop, carries ads on Android, and its App Store privacy panel says “Data Not Collected”. Its Google Play page for the same game says the opposite: approximate location and device or other IDs shared with other companies, data isn’t encrypted, data can’t be deleted. Frogie: Cross Road Arcade does something similar — a Contains ads badge above a data safety page reading no data shared and no data collected.

We are not going to resolve the PAC-MAN 256 contradiction, because nothing either store publishes would. One reading squares it: the two listings carry different titles, Arcade Run on Apple and Endless Maze on Play, only the Play one declares ads, and they may simply be different builds with different SDKs in them. We cannot check that from outside. What the disagreement does settle is the general point, and it is worth carrying into every page in this format: these panels are the developer’s own answers to a form, not the store’s measurement of the app. They are still the most itemized thing published about a free game. They are not an audit.

What to install, and which is which

• Crossy Road+ is the one to install if you have Apple Arcade or want it. 4.1 stars across 684 ratings, 9+, 125.5 MB, iOS 13 or later, Game Center leaderboards, updated two days before this page was written. The low rating against the free version’s 4.7 is worth knowing before you subscribe for it: it is a re-imagining rather than the 2014 game, and 684 people have judged it against 735,000.
• Crossy Road is the one everybody means, and it is by a distance the most alive. 4.7 stars across 735,000 Apple ratings, 4.5 across 4.57 million Play reviews and 100 million-plus downloads, an Editors’ Choice badge and eighth place on Apple’s Family chart. 256.4 MB, 9+ on Apple and Everyone on Play, iOS 15 or later, version 7.13 on 2 August 2026 and updated on Play on 23 July. Over 300 characters, 28 worlds, offline play, same-device multiplayer and 13 languages. It is also the one with the ads and the shop, both priced above.
• Crossy Road Castle is the co-op platformer rather than a hopper, and a genuinely different game. 4.7 stars across 48,000 ratings, 4+, 407.7 MB, on Apple Arcade with Apple Vision and Apple TV builds, and per Hipster Whale’s own homepage also on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series and Xbox One. We did not price the console versions and are not going to guess at them.
• Crossy Road Castle Intro is the free way to find out whether the subscription is worth it to you, and there is no equivalent for any other game on this page.
• PAC-MAN 256 is the same studio’s design under Bandai Namco’s name, and the closest thing on this page to Crossy Road’s feel: an endless arcade maze with a wall of glitch chasing you. Free with in-app purchases, 4.7 stars across 21,000 Apple ratings with an Editors’ Choice badge, 4.2 across 476,000 Play reviews and 10 million-plus downloads, 4+, 160 MB. Read both privacy declarations before you decide what it collects, for the reason above.
• Frogie: Cross Road Arcade is the only other road-crosser either store surfaced, and the numbers are the warning: 2.6 stars across 23 reviews, 5,000-plus downloads, ads and in-app purchases with no prices published, last updated 17 August 2026. It is on the page because leaving it off would misrepresent how thin this genre has become, not because we are recommending it.
• Ours, last and not a hopper: Taco Rain is a sixty-second catcher — tacos fall, you slide a basket, bombs are the thing to miss. Fifty levels across five worlds, an endless mode, fourteen badges and five power-ups that fall as pickups rather than being sold. Free, 4+, 65.6 MB, iOS 15 or later, and on Google Play for Android 7.0 or later, rated Everyone. It has no In-App Purchases row on Apple, nothing under tracking in its privacy panel, and a Contains ads badge on Play because a single banner outside gameplay is how it is paid for. It has no ratings on either store. If you want to hop across a freeway, install a Crossy Road.

All of them side by side

Store facts only, because those are the checkable part. Every figure is Apple’s, Google’s or the publisher’s own, read on 7 September 2026 and linked at the foot of this page.

The third column is not a ranking and a shop is not a fault. Crossy Road has the longest price list on this page and it is also the only game here still shipping events every few weeks after nearly twelve years, which is the trade the table cannot show. One number in it needs a caveat of its own: Play shows 4.5 stars across 4.57 million reviews at the top of the listing and 4.6 across 3.73 million further down, because the second figure is filtered to phones.

What these games do better than ours

Most things, and this section is compulsory on every page in this format so that it cannot be dropped when it is unflattering.

• Crossy Road is a landmark and ours is a first release. Over a hundred million Play downloads, 4.57 million Play reviews, 735,000 Apple ratings, an Editors’ Choice badge and updates running from 20 November 2014 to last month. Taco Rain has no ratings at all on either store. On a page meant to help you choose, a game hundreds of thousands of people have judged is worth more to you than one nobody has.
• Hipster Whale publishes more about its own economics than we do. Fourteen prices on Google Play, a support FAQ that says exactly what each purchase removes, a documented parental control screen and a plain answer about a game that no longer exists. Our own listing says there is nothing to buy and stops there, which is easier to say because there is nothing to explain.
• They ship the clean version and a free demo of it. Crossy Road+ has no ads at all, and Crossy Road Castle Intro lets you play a paid game before paying. Ours is free because it carries a banner, and we could match Crossy Road+ only by charging for it or by removing the one thing that pays for it.
• Reach and depth ours will not have: over 300 characters and 28 worlds against our fifty levels, 13 languages against our one, same-device multiplayer, controller support, Game Center leaderboards, Apple TV and Apple Vision builds, and console releases of Castle. Taco Rain stores its scores on the device and runs on a phone.
• Ours is not a hopper. Taco Rain is a catcher: the things come to you and you move sideways. If what you want is to time your way across a freeway one lane at a time, we do not make that, and nothing about ours being free changes the mismatch.

How to check any of this yourself

Four habits cover this page, and the first two are new since the last one. Scroll past the description on a Google Play listing and look for In-game items and offers: where a developer has filled it in, it is the most complete price list either store publishes, and where it is missing it means nothing at all. Then do the same on Apple, just above the App Privacy panel, where a promoted in-app purchase is the only place a price appears. Neither absence is evidence.

Third, read the developer’s own support site next to the store page. Everything useful on this page came from holding one against the other: the price list says what the Ad Blocker Pack costs and the FAQ says what a $0.49 character does instead, and neither document mentions the other. Fourth, when a studio publishes the same game more than once, read every listing — which is the rule the Fruit Ninja page ended on, and it has now held on a second studio and a third pair.

The version of that rule this page would add is about what those documents are. A store privacy panel is a form the developer filled in, not a measurement the store took, and when the same game answers the two forms differently the honest thing to publish is the disagreement. That is the same discipline the rest of this site uses on reward apps, where the number a company will not divide usually turns out to be printed somewhere it never expected anyone to look.