We all love a freebie. That's why the free-to-play model is becoming so popular amongst gamers. It offers us a chance to try games before we sink any cash into them, or--in some instances--entertain ourselves for hours without paying a thing. While many older free-to-play games constantly demanded that we pay up or leave, modern examples take a more polite approach. "Excuse me sir, would you like to buy this fancy hat and help keep an honest developer in business?"

So, we've rounded up the 31 best free games available on PC, Xbox 360 and PS3 right now. They're in no particular order. Think most of them will be cheap MMOs and five-minute indie games? Think again. We've got shooters, strategy, sims, driving games, text adventures and, yes, a handful of fantasy MMORPGs (but you'd be better off checking out our complete list of best free MMORPGs). We think you're guaranteed to find something you like in this list and, fortunately, you won't have to pay a penny to find out…

The daddy of free-to-play shooters, it’s staggering how much game you get for free in Planetside 2. Maps are vast, there are three different factions, and you get 100s of players stuffed onto the servers during most games. In fact, we really recommend either taking a friend with you or learning about the game before you begin--there is so much to understand here. You should also know that while progression can be slow if you don’t hand over some cash, the starting weaponry is decent enough to give you a fighting chance in any skirmish, so expect to be competitive from the start.

With over 70 million sign-ups, League of Legends is the most popular game in the world. It’s a multiplayer online battle arena game (MOBA), which means that players split into teams of five and scrap it out across a series of large maps. The game has been going for years, so the choice of characters is staggering and you’ll always find a decent selection of sessions to jump into. Be warned, though: it’s incredibly competitive (some even play LoL professionally) and learning all the rules and strategies can take months.

If the idea of getting your face lasered to pieces by precocious teenagers in Call of Duty is your idea of hell, then World of Tanks might be for you. This game is all about strategy, out-smarting opponents, and pimping out your tank with the right armaments to suit your style of play. Nine times out of ten, a well prepared assault will smash a quick trigger finger, so it’s ideal for older players looking to inflict violence at a more considered pace.

Think mech games are slow and boring? Well, yes, most of them are… but not Hawken. Here they move at a frightening pace and come bristling with a decent variety of weapons and gadgets to help you smash your human opponents into scrap. It’s essentially a first-person shooter with a focus on customising your mech to suit whatever play-style you choose to adopt. The developers recently added taunts too, so you can belittle enemies at the press of a key instead of awkwardly trying to tea-bag them from inside a 100ft killing machine.

When Crytek announced they were going free-to-play, eyebrows were raised. These are the guys who gave us Crysis, the series that continues to mock the pathetic attempts of gaming rigs to actually run it. Warface is far less beautiful than Crysis, but no less ambitious. It's both a multiplayer and co-op shooter, set in the future, and you can apply for a Beta key now. While it doesn't offer anything truly unique the shooting is excellent, it looks amazing, and it combines well with some incredibly smart map design.

This game topped our list of the best free MMOs for a good reason--you get the full experience without paying a dime. Despite being reasonably old (six years in April) Lord of the Rings Online still stands up as one of the best MMOs around thanks to its substantial expansions and all the races, classes and kit they’ve brought with them. Sure, some of the best items are only available to paying VIP members, but it’s tough to begrudge paying for a game with this much depth.

Battlefield Play4Free is essentially a mash-up of multiplayer from Battlefield 2 and Bad Company 2, all given away for free to those unwilling to stump up for Battlefield 3. You get two classic BF gameplay modes--Rush and Assault (this is basically Conquest)--and the four soldier classes from Bad Company 2. Most of the maps are lifted from BF2, like Strike at Karkand and Dragon Valley, making this an authentic Battlefield experience for free.

Much like Battlefield Play4Free, you’ll be surprised at how solidly Ghost Recon Online simulates the full-fat Ghost Recon experience. Fans of the older, more hardcore Recons will enjoy the fact that this game is both tactical and unremittingly punishing--relying on slow pace and precision aiming to take opponents down, rather than running and gunning. Of course, players who spend a little sugar (well, hard cash actually) will get better kit earlier, but you can grind out a decent character if you put the hours in.

Another great MMO that has moved from subscription to free-to-play. TERA stands for The Exiled Realm of Arborea, a name that better encapsulates the game’s deep fantasy themes. All the usual MMO features are present and correct: crafting, questing, seven races to choose from, PvP etc, and following the latest update there is no cap on how far you can play as a free user. Sure, paying premium members will get better loot drops, discounts on items, and other advantages, but you can suck the juice out of TERA for free.

It’s pretty amazing to see how great The Settlers Online looks running in your browser. This is the full empire-building experience, and if you’re a patient player you never need to spend any money on in-game items, as monetization revolves around players buying blue gems to speed up production times on buildings. There’s a lively marketplace for trading resources with other players, and Ubisoft regularly run themed events within the game (like covering the world in snow for Christmas) to add a little variety.

One of the original free-to-play games, and arguably the best. This Valve-made shooter continues to evolve as support drops in from both developer and community, so it feels as fresh today as it did at launch. It’s class-based--so, full of variety--and hugely competitive without becoming intimidating. Microtransactions are all about incidental items (like new hats) so you don’t have to pay anything to get the full TF2 experience. In fact, you can even make money by playing Team Fortress 2, if you decide to start creating your own in-game items to sell on to other players.

If Team Fortress 2 is the good cop of free-to-play shooters, Tribes: Ascend is definitely the bad cop. It’s tough, despite the fact that the match-making system tries to throw you into games with similarly ranked opponents, largely because jetpacks play such a key role. Keeping track of enemies is difficult when half of them are in the air and the other half are around the next corner--you have been warned. Get good at Tribes, though, and you’ll be able to show off all your achievements using the game’s rank system. It’s a more dignified way of boasting about how awesome you are.

Look! It’s Quake III Arena, running in your browser! And you’re still getting your ass kicked on Longest Yard! Ok, so Quake isn’t the most technically demanding game, but we’re amazed at how well the twitchy combat holds up in this free version. The only drawback with this version is that--unless you pay--some of the server options and gameplay types are locked. Not a great loss in our opinion.

You can play World of Warcraft up to level 20 for free. After that, you need to get your wallet out and pay, especially if you’re looking to get hold of your very first mount. It’s a great move by Blizzard to get players involved in the world’s best-known MMO before hitting them up with subscription feesyou will play for hours before hitting that level 20 mark. Worried that the game will look and feel ‘old’? Check out the new Mists of Pandaria expansion, which looks every inch a modern game.

Good news for PC owners! Six-vs-six multiplayer shooter Gotham City Imposters is free for you--high-fives all round! Console owners… yeah, sorry, you still have to pay. It’s an odd use of the Batman license, pitting Dark Knight wannabes against criminals imitating the Joker, but the great use of gadgets elevates the action above ‘Call of Duty in fancy dress’. Mid-game challenges keep things fresh too, offering the chance to unlock rewards by doing more than just killing enemies.

Need for Speed World can be thought of as a mix between Need for Speed Most Wanted (the 2005 version) and Need for Speed Carbon--a street racer with a focus on cops vs crims. World wasn’t great when it first launched back in 2010, but since then patches have added fresh modes (like Treasure Hunt) fixed bugs, and--after the game reached 1 million registrations--implemented the free-to-play model. MMO options remain the weak-link, with the ability to drive around and pick races serving as nothing more than a grand lobby, but the sheer volume of content makes this the best F2P racer out there.

Perhaps you don’t want to be an anonymous cog in the League of Legends machine. Perhaps DOTA2 scares you with its hardcore rep. And yet you still want to play a decent MOBA game. Fussy, aren’t you… OK, we recommend you try SMITE, an up-and-coming multiplayer battler that focuses on scraps between gods from almost every religion and faith. Before you ask, no, you can’t play as Jesus. The community is small enough to be inclusive, but large enough to guarantee full servers, and the game is constantly updated with fresh characters and maps. Yes, it’s free, but a one-off payment gets you the Ultimate Gods Pack, which grants access to all the fighters and any subsequent updates.

Heroes & Generals has several very neat tricks up its sleeve. First, it lets you choose to play the game as either a first-person shooter or a strategy game. As a ‘Hero’ you’re in the field, shooting men; as a ‘General’ you’re lazily sat back with a glass of fine port (optional) moving troops around a battlefield. Cleverly, Generals can influence the battles fought by Heroes by allocating resources (tanks, bombers etc) at the start of the match, and pushing through reinforcements mid-game. It’s full of ideas, which is why we can forgive the fact that it’s a little ugly at the moment.

While Star Wars The Old Republic is still very much a subscription-based MMO, you can play a large chunk of it for free. Sure, you’ll be heavily restricted as this chart shows and you won’t get any luxuries like er, the ability to sprint, but you will get a sweet taste of Galactic adventure. Since launch, SWTOR has gone from strength to strength, and now boasts over 200,000 lines of dialogue and a stack of those great character romance options that BioWare do so well. Its first major expansion--Rise of the Hutt Cartel--went live in October 2012 too, so there is loads of game to play.

The new, ‘proper’, free-to-play Command & Conquer game is perilously close to open Beta but, while you wait for that, we recommend giving Tiberium Alliances a try. It’s more of a social game (as the name suggests), asking you to form alliances with other players to become truly dominant, and action time is limited for free users. On the plus side, it’s really approachable and while gameplay differs from traditional C&C games, it’s still incredibly tactical and potentially rewarding.

Part text adventure, part mystery RPG, Fallen London tells the bizarre story of an alternative London governed by creatures you’d expect to find in an HP Lovecraft novel. You’ll struggle to orientate yourself at first as you grapple with the navigation system, but once you get hooked on the story Fallen London will be something you log into every day and constantly nibble at. There are now more than 1,000,000 lines of text in the game, so expect to be playing/reading for months as you slowly uncover the secrets of the city.

How well do you know your friends? Really? Neptune's Pride will help you find out. It’s a strategy sim set in space, and your aim is to become the dominant force in your galaxy. You do this by sending ships to colonise worlds, fighting battles, and forming alliances. Sessions take place over the period of several weeks (it can take a ship several hours to travel to a planet) and in that time you’ll secretly forge alliances with friends, while stabbing others in the back to remove the competition. All chat is done by secure email so you never know who is talking to who. So--how well do you know your friends? Can you really trust them?

Honestly, you’d be pretty upset if you’d paid $50 for this kind of abuse. Judging by the name, you’d assume Offensive Combat was yet another Modern Warfare clone, wheeled out to get some easy hits from the COD crowd. Well, it isn’t. Sure it’s a first-person shooter, but visually it has much more in common with Team Fortress 2 than the furrowed-brow military shooter crowd. The ‘offensive’ part of the name comes from the fact that you’re encouraged to humiliate opponents once you’ve killed them, and there are loads of crude animations to activate after a kill. It’s free--so if you grow tired of the abuse, you can always leave.

The cops vs. criminals shoote APB Reloaded has gone slightly mad since launch. You show up for the shooting, which is competent and competitive, but stay for the madness of watching characters dressed up in all kinds of crazy outfits charging around the city. The way combat works is fantastic--you choose to be either cop or criminal and gain notoriety based on your actions within the MMO city. Become well-known and more opposition players will try to attack you because they’ll get a larger reward for taking you down.

Yeah, we went there. One Button Bob is exactly what its name suggests--an adventure game where you control everything with the tap of a single button. Think of it as Uncharted from the mid-90s. Don’t let this simplicity fool you though: Bob’s adventure is tricky to finish and super-competitive if you start trying to climb the Best Times leader boards.

Sure, Path of Exile is technically in its open beta phase--but we'll be darned if this isn't one of the absolute best hack-n-slash dungeon crawlers we've ever played. It's darker tone helps seperate it from the more colorful offerings out there, while its lack of gold as a currency means you'll trade resources for loot. Plus, its got one of the deepest character customization mechanics out there, allowing you to build any kind of character you could possibly dream up. And it's 100-percent free.

Quite simply, DC Universe Online is the most free-to-play fun you can have on console. It has been kicking around on PS3 for a few years, and despite a rocky start, it’s now a fully fledged MMORPG with a huge roster of super-heroes and villains. It comes with a hefty initial download, which takes especially long if you’re squeezing the game through PSN (it’s also available on PC), but after that you get stacks of game for free, and some of the downloadable paid-for content is incredible value.

Look at you - all sad because there aren’t many racing games on this list. Well, we’ve added another, and it’s a good one. F1 Online is not only a decent browser-based racer that lets you compete against 23 other players, but it also lets you build and manage your own race team online. There are 19 licensed circuits and plenty of ways to develop your individual cars. No, it doesn’t offer the level of simulation as the full boxed versions of F1, but it’s a neat time-sink for racing enthusiasts.

Hey, maybe you don’t own a PS3 or a gaming PC, but still want a piece of the free-to-play pie. Luckily for you, the 360 has Happy Wars, a third-person online battler with a heavy emphasis on teamwork. The objective in each game is to storm your opponent’s fortress, using different classes of soldier, and combat – although quite pedestrian – is frantic. You get a decent wedge of game for free, but don’t expect to feel inadequate next to higher level players, who have likely coughed up a little cash.

For some, the fast-paced mech action of Hawken is a turn-off. So, if you fancy some hardcore tactical play with your giant killing machines, give Mech Warrior Online a try. It’s deeper and more complex than Hawken, but that just makes team-play more rewarding. The game is still in Beta, but it has built up a tidy community of players, who are more welcoming than most. A word of caution, though – it takes a while to learn the intricacies, so you won’t be world-class from the start.

Do not underestimate Robot Unicorn Attack. The ingredients are all wrong – colourful, sugar-rush worlds, a looping electro soundtrack, and the limited appeal of an endless running game – and yet this is one of the best browser games you’ll find online. “Just one go” you’ll say, and you’ll still be enraptured by its catchy presentation and moreish gameplay several hours later. Again, we accept no responsibility for the work that won’t get done while you’re transfixed by Robot Unicorn Attack. And the best part is that there are loads of different variants, including a Metal version that we think is superior to the original…

We're pretty confident that you've already started playing one or more of the games in this feature. Enjoy them! However, maybe you think we missed something? Or perhaps your favourite isn't on there. Maybe you just love paying for games. Let us know.

If you're still hungry for game recommendations, why not check out our list of the best MMORPGs or - if you want to know about the absolute best gaming has to offer - take a look at our Top 100 Games of All Time.