There's a worrying presence gaining traction at the budget end of the Google Play gaming market, one that threatens to destroy the sanity of less patient players (and reviewers): the impossible final stage.
It's most noticeable in titles with a flat difficulty curve, like Cheezia: Gears of Fur, where you amble through 90 per cent of the levels without breaking a sweat before hitting a - normally, literal - spike that halts your progress like a boulder to the face.
Rippleware's Dr Rocket Pro is one of the worst offenders. This so-so arcade flyer, with a smattering of physics-based bouncing, is a doddle right up until its stupidly hard climax that took longer to finish than the rest of the game combined. Plus, I haven't actually finished it.
Blast off?The Doctor has, for reasons that are never explained, got rocket boots attached to his feet that make him fly off into the sky - and eventually orbit.
Without your steering his boots - either by using Doodle Jump-style tilt controls or tapping the sides of the screen - he'll career into floating platforms, meteors, planes, and slow-moving meteors. And despite his not wearing a helmet, he'll survive a few cracks to the noggin before conking out and plummeting to earth.
About halfway through Dr Rocket Pro's 20 brief stages, Rippleware decides to up the ante by covering lots of the obstacles with spikes. These sit there just patiently waiting to impale the good doctor and send you hurtling back to the restart screen.
Doctor death
Avoiding crashes is only half the battle, mind, as you're supposed to be collecting gold coins as you fly. The lines of shiny currency also provide handy tracks for you to follow, with the riskiest line rewarding you with the most coins. Beware, though: on plenty of occasions, they'll lead you straight into a spiked wall, too.
Learning Dr Rocket Pro's level design helps, but the boost system - which the game encourages you to use by flashing "Boost Now" icons up on-screen and by slowing the action down - will almost always mean instadeath.
It's a frustrating design quirk that, allied to the game's rudimentary graphics and somewhat grating sound (flat-sounding notes are played in an ascending scale when you pick up coins), will mean you'll only want a brief appointment with this particular doctor.
Dr Rocket Pro
Turns out donning a pair of rocket boots isn't as much fun as it sounds in this straightforward arcade flyer, which lacks the design polish to really take off
Paul Devlin
A newspaper reporter turned games journo, Paul's first ever console was an original white Game Boy (still in working order, albeit with a yellowing tinge and 30 second battery life). Now he writes about Android with a style positively dripping in Honeycomb, stuffed with Gingerbread and coated with Froyo