All-new Hungry Shark World chomps into action [Hot Game!]

Hungry Shark World dropped into Android and iOS app stores on May 7, amassing over 10 million downloads in less than a week. Developed by Ubisoft Entertainment, it has quickly risen to the top of the free app charts — and for good reason!

The game is incredibly fun to dive into. You play a free-roaming shark with an insatiable appetite in an colorful, cartoony ocean full of delectable fish, swimmers, deep-sea divers, and other goodies. The goal is to eat as much as you can while surviving for as long as you can, which means avoiding bigger, meaner sharks when you're just starting out and learning which things are good to eat and which will hurt you. Here's a quick tip for rookies: avoid jellyfish, floating garbage, and especially naval mines.

The controls are pretty simple: swipe with one thumb to use the floating digital d-pad and tap with your other thumb to use boost. You're able to switch the controls between thumbs on the fly as needed.

There's a plethora of challenges available to you, including daily chests, golden fish, and letters. Spell out H-U-N-G-R-Y and go on an absolute feeding frenzy. Explore shipwrecks and underground volcanos and sneak into swimming pools and much more as you eat your way to the top of the food chain.

You start out as a Black-Tipped Reef Shark, the smallest shark in the game. As you progress, you'll be able to upgrade your shark's speed, bite, and boost, as well as buy and equip all sorts of funky accessories to personalize your shark. There are 15 sharks to unlock — with the Great White being the granddaddy of them all — and a total of three ocean worlds to unlock and explore.

As mentioned above, this game is free to download and play, with a bunch of in-app purchases available for gold and gems (if you're the type who likes to pay their way to the top). You also have the option to sync the game with your Facebook account, which gives you free gems for every friend who starts playing and allows you to save your game data to the cloud.

We're set to dive right in! If you've been one of the millions of early adopters, tell us how far you've progressed in the comments below and share some tips! They might appear in a future Hungry Shark World game guide.

Marc Lagace

Marc Lagace was an Apps and Games Editor at Android Central between 2016 and 2020. You can reach out to him on Twitter [@spacelagace.