Mobile gaming is getting better, but touch controls, a small screen, and limited battery life can make mobile gaming uncomfortable. Luckily, learning how to play Android games on PC is pretty easy. This way you can play with a bigger screen, better controls, and unlimited battery life.
To play Android games on PC, you need an emulator and take some steps to get your games ready for the controls to work properly. But don’t worry, we’ll tell you everything you need to know.
How to play Android games on PC with an Emulator
First, you need to install an Android emulator so that you can run Android games on your PC. The emulator will mimic the Android operating system, so you can use the Play store, install apps, and access content exclusively for Android.
We suggest using Bluestacks and we will base our guide on that. We think Bluestacks is a great option for gaming thanks to the majority of control presets for popular games. However, if you want to try something else, there are many other great alternatives to the Android emulator.
Once you’ve downloaded and installed Bluestacks, it’s time to figure out how it works and how you can start playing games on it.
First you need to sign in to your Google account to access the Play Store. It’s up to you to decide whether you are using your primary account or a recording device account, but setting up a new Gmail account in seconds is easy.
– /
Once signed in, you can access the Google Play store just like on your phone or tablet. Find any game you want to download and install it as usual.
How to set up computer controls for Android Emulators
In particular, one of the great things about Bluestacks is that it already has custom controls for most popular games. When you open a popular game for the first time, you will even get a guide explaining how to play the game.
In this case, you can leave immediately. Just examine the controls on the screen as described and get started.
Unfortunately, since there are so many games in the Google Play store, Bluestacks is unable to customize the controls and guides for every single game. In this case, you will need to create your own controls.
In this guide, we’ll download a game called Infinity Ops, but you can follow these steps for any game.
After opening the game, you will be able to tap on the screen by default and this will simulate touching the screen at that location. But for most games this won’t work. You can only tap one place at a time, but you can tap multiple places with your fingers on the touchscreen.
To fix this, we need a control editor. To the left of the main game screen, you will see several controls. Click the keyboard icon or press Ctrl + Shift + A on your keyboard.
You will now have a number of options for creating custom controls that can be placed anywhere on the Bluestacks screen. Getting the right types of buttons in the right place takes a bit of trial and error.
You have to click and drag different types of controls onto the onscreen controls. In most games, you need to use the touch point switch. With it, you can simulate touching that specific spot on the screen.
Start by clicking and dragging the touch point anywhere on the screen. After that, you can press a key on your keyboard to assign a control to it. From now on, when you press this button on the keyboard, it will touch this area of ??the screen.
Sometimes you will need to use other types of controls. For example, to play with a joystick, you need a D-pad. That being said, you can set four keys, usually W, A, S and D, to control your movement forward, left, right and backward.
This may require some tweaking to get it to its ideal position, so move back and forth in the settings until the keyboard movement is as natural as possible.
The hardest control is the aiming, panning and shooting controls. This is required for any games that use swipe to control the game camera. You have to click and drag this option to the right side of the screen to set it. Next you will need to set the sensitivity and the X / Y axis. The default settings are often good enough, but you can adjust the sensitivity a little.
The sensitivity will determine how much mouse movement you need to simulate the movement of your finger across the screen, and the best setting will depend on personal preference.
After a while, several buttons should appear on your screen to control the game. You may need to adjust it over time because you may be introduced to new controls or menus that require different control settings in Bluestacks
It definitely takes a lot more effort to play Android games on PC using Bluestacks, but once set up, it’s much better than playing on a touchscreen phone. I hope this tutorial was helpful, but if you need more help why not leave a comment?
–