Bang Man!

If Brothers in Arms 3: Sons of War is a prime example of the overblown, bloated nature of some mobile shooters, then Bang Man! is an expression of the genre in its simplest, most delightful form.

It meshes together a handful of eager mechanics, then leaves you to endlessly chase a high score. And it works remarkably well. It's not the best looking game out there, but every failure feels fair, and other success a minor triumph.

There's a sharp challenge here, and a compulsion loop that lets you lose hours in minute-long chunks.

You play a blue blob who can move freely along a platform made up of nine squares. Cube-shaped aliens fall onto this platform, followed by a weapon. It's up to you to grab the weapon and shoot the alien before it gets you.

Buttons on the bottom left of the screen let you move left and right, and buttons on the bottom right let you jump and fire. And that's it.

Except that isn't it. Each gun has a recoil value. Fire it, and you'll be shoved back that many squares. This turns a simple leaping blaster into something far deeper.

And then the bad guys start to speed up as they scoot along the platform, and the only way to slow them back down is by hitting one with a gun with a six recoil value.

Doing that is no easy feat when things are at normal pace – when the speed has been upped a couple of times it's nigh-on impossible.

Different-sized enemies keep you on your toes, and an instant restart means you're never more than a blink away from your next try.

There are times when you'll be a pixels breadth away from tumbling to your doom, times when you'll mistime a jump and swear to the high-heavens, times when you'll just forget what you're doing and turn a great run into a catastrophe.

It all gels together brilliantly to create a stripped back, intensely clever shooter that's far, far more than the sum of its parts.

Some will find it too unforgiving and give up, but if you relish a leaderboard challenge then you'll probably fall in love.