I am always on the lookout for free or free to play games. Mostly cause games can get expensive and spending money on them doesn't guarantee you a finished or working product. For example, I was very disappointed with the latest Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. But that's a story for another time. For now, here are five games that you can play right now and don't have to spend any money. This list is in no particular order.

1. Paladins

Paladins is a game I spent a lot of time in before I got into Overwatch. It was kind of my first PvP game. It has a large selection of champions but be warned, if you're playing for free it's going to take a very long time to unlock them all. There are two main in game currencies. First one is gold which you earn simply by playing the game and leveling up. The other one is crystals which is one of the ways they monetize the game. You can buy crystals for real money but you can also earn them by leveling up in the battle pass. Even the free battle pass will give you some amount of crystals, so to my knowledge, if you don't mind the grind you can get pretty much the full experience playing for free.

The champions are split into four classes. Damage, Flank, Tank and Healer. One thing that makes the game interesting and sort of gives you more choice regarding play style is the card loadout system. You can create your custom loadouts of cards that fir your way of playing. Maybe you want your champion to run faster? Maybe do more damage? It depends on you and how you balance your loadout. On top of that, there is an item buying system where you buy items in the middle of games using points you earn during the match. This is a way of countering other champions if you feel your champion of choice is not good against the enemy's champions. This differs from Overwatch where you just switch heroes whenever you want to counter other heroes.

My biggest critique of the game is it's past bugs. I recently got back into the game and the bugs seem more under control now, but I remeber when the bugs were absolutely ridiculous. Like, reeeeeeally bad. Today, the game still feels a bit clunky to me, especially compared to Overwatch which despite it's bugs mostly provides a smooth experience. Another concern I have is there seems to be no real balance. There are champions that are severely OP and some are completely useless. That is of course my opinion, but it sometimes feel like if you pick the wrong champion, what's the point of even playing the match. The last problem I will talk about is the community. You often peer pressured into playing tanks and healers and you have to have thick skin and ignore the voice and text chat if you just want to have fun playing the champions you want to play. Another community problem is people behaving like children and sitting in spawn if things don't go their way. it happens quite often actually and gets annoying fast.

Either way, you can play Paladins for free by downloading it from Steam or the Epic Games store.

2. Apex Legends

What was supposed to be "the Fortnite killer". Didn't turn out to be true but it still is a good challenger. To be honest, I'm not really a fan of battle royale games, but Apex Legends is one that i can tolerate and I can have fun playing it with friends. It's a character based battle royale that put's you in a team of three and you guessed it, throws you on and island where you have to eliminate other squads and be the only squad standing. One thing I really like about this game is the movement. It feels really good to run around, climb walls and slide down hills. Te gun play feels fun too but I'm personally not a fan of the fact that every weapon is projectile.

As a free player you start of with a limited selection of characters (Legends), you can unlock additional legends by playing the game and earning the in game currency. Or if you want to skip the grind you can buy Apex Coins and buy the legends that way. By playing and leveling up you will also be rewarded with Apex packs which are lootboxes containing skins (both character and weapon), voice lines, titles and crafting material which you can use to craft the skins.

There is a competitive mode and I personally like the ranking system cause it's based on how well you do in games, meaning you don't have to actually be the number 1 squad to rank up. If you do good you will rank up. Of course, you will have to do really good to get into higher ranks. When you start a competitive match you give up a certain amount of points, and you earn those points back by doing well in game and hopefully you will earn more points than you gave up to enter the game. The higher in rank you are, the more points you have to give to enter a match. If you're bronze you don't have to give up any points.

You can play Apex Legends by downloading it from the Origin client.

3. Destiny 2

I'll be honest, I haven't played this game recently. It used to be a paid game and I got it for free when Blizzard gave it away to players after a while. I can't remember how many players got it for free. Since then, Destiny 2 has split from Blizzard and is now on Steam. Back then, I played through the main story and I genuinely had a lot of fun. I only played a tiny bit of PvP so I can't really comment on that. That main story is now part of the legacy content which you can play. The game is more focused on the open world multiplayer looter shooter aspect as far as I realize. While the game is free to play, there is additional story content that you have to pay to play.

The only gripe that I have for this game right now is that it's kind of hard to livestream. It has some sort of way of preventing apps like OBS from capturing the game for whatever reason so most likely you will have to use window capture which might cause performance issues.

You can download Destiny 2 from Steam.

4. Krunker.io

Krunker is a browser, free to play, FPS game with a blocky, minecraft-y style. If you want, you can download the client but I personally prefer playing it in the browser. Though if you are using Chrome make sure to turn on hardware acceleration cause otherwise the game will lag a lot. Some might be thrown off by the simplistic style but it actually feels surprisingly good. The gunplay feels nice and it is fairly fast paced. You can have a lot of fun running and jumping around while facing off against other people in multiple game modes and maps. You can play the game without an account as a guest but if you sign up, you will earn KR by playing, and you can use KR to buy cosmetic items.

There is one huge problem that keeps me from playing the game more than I do. And that is cheaters. Krunker is rampant with cheaters and it seems like every match has at least one. The report system seems to do nothing except give you an error message when you try to use it. If you try to call out cheating you'll most likely be told to chill cause "it's just Krunker" and you don't need to take it so seriously. But no matter if it's a simple blocky game or a full on triple A title with unbelievable graphics, cheaters will be the ruin of it. And it's a shame that a fun little game like this is ruined by cheaters. Another problem i have is that some weapons are OP, specifically the sniper rifle. Since it's so easy to hit shots in a game like this, it seems unfair to give the sniper rifle one shot insta-kill damage. Now, combine a sniper rifle with a cheater/aimbotter and voila! Your experience is ruined.

I really hope the cheater issue will be addressed. Yo can play Krunker at Krunker.io

5. Dauntless

Can't get Monster Hunter: World? Dauntless! There you go. Not a lot I can say as of now cause I need to spend more time with it. But so far I feel it's worth a try. You start by creating your slayer and entering a little town where you find bounties, craft weapons, armor and potions and then you go out and slay big monsters. You then use their remains to create new armor and weapons. The game has a cartoony look but I'm impressed with the monsters themselves and the battles are challenging and immersive.

You can squad up or go on a solo hunt. I personally played only solo since none of my friends play it as far as I know. I'm yet to explore more and craft more weapons, but I suggest you try it yourself. Nothing to lose, cause free to play, remember?

You can download Dauntless from the Epic Games store.

This concludes my first article on free to play games. I look forward to sharing more free to play stuff in the future, cause everybody deserves to have some fun at no expense.