Icy Tower

You wait for games like Icy Tower. It's not particularly special - the graphics are more functional than impressive, the gameplay is limited and there's little in the way of options or much longevity.

Yet it's a pleasant surprise. This won't come as quite the same epiphany to the 10 million people who've apparently downloaded the original web version, of course. Icy Tower has become something of a cult hit phenomenon on the net, but with squillions of gamers already bounding up the slippery barbican on PC, it remains to be seen how many will be inclined to go through it all again on their mobiles.

But that's for Hands On to worry about – we'll stick to deliberating on the odd gameplay.

It begins as a sorely limited and downright disappointing affair that requires little more effort than holding the '2' button down. After a few minutes, however, Icy Tower suddenly comes to life, and what was perplexingly ridiculous suddenly clicks into place.

The sole objective is to climb, and keep climbing, without falling off the ledges that lead to the, well, top I suppose. There's no inane justification for why you're climbing the endless tower, other than 'it's there'.

Choosing one of three characters (a purely aesthetic choice) you begin at the bottom of a lofty campanile (only without a bell, as far as we can tell). The only way to the top is a series of platforms that build a winding staircase you're required to ascend in leaps and bounds.

The horizontal limits of the play area are the sides of the screen, so most of the action here is vertical in nature. A single jump is just about enough to make it to the next ledge, so your initial strategy will likely be to hold down the jump button and scale the tower one platform at a time.

Essentially this works, but does you no favours in terms of points or thrills. Running sideways and jumping is a different matter. If you can keep running and make two or three consecutive jumps, your wee climber will fairly catapult himself through the air, and hoofing it up the towers suddenly becomes an incredibly fast-paced exercise.

The screen scrolls upwards at pretty much its own pace, so if you're ascending at a lick, the difficulty increases as you spend much of your time at the top of the screen and don't get as much warning as to where the jump is taking you.

Miss a platform and fall off the bottom of the screen and it's back to the bottom. While incredibly simple and rather dull in explanation, in play it's quite something different, and a genuine feeling of vertiginous danger begins to tingle in your fingertips as the gap between you and the ground grows.

There are only two settings – easy and hard - with no other variations on the gameplay. Quite what these variations could be it's hard to say (I'm no game designer), but the realisation that, regardless of how invigorating and addictive it is, there's nothing else to Icy Tower takes the edge of that initially stimulating surprise.

This lets the overall score down due to a lack of interest on the developer's side, but doesn't change the fact that what little there is exhibits unique and engrossing escapism.