Johnny Crash Stuntman does Texas

As regular readers will know, we at Pocket Gamer are huge fans of originality. We award all our games a score for their innovation and are always on the look out for fresh ideas. So you can imagine our delight when Johnny Crash literally dropped into our laps, offering a refreshingly different take on the extreme sports theme.

While most games require you to avoid dangerous obstacles in some way or another, the central principle here, as the hero's name suggests, is to actively seek them out and smash into them. Consequently, from the moment you launch our eponymous hero from his cannon, you are on a short yet satisfying quest to find and collide with as many vultures, windmills, aeroplanes, tornados, lightning clouds and washing lines as you possibly can. And all before you make your inevitable return to earth, ideally slap bang into a cactus or onto the back of a Texan oilman.

Aside from imparting a devious sasifaction, each of these collisions is greeted with a snapshot, some extra points and either a change to your direction or a boost to your energy bar, the latter enabling you to temporarily prolong your flight by changing direction in mid-air. Indeed, apart from setting the initial launch angle from the cannon, these 'boosts' (achieved by simply pressing a button) represent your only direct interaction with Johnny in what has to be one of the subtlest control systems we’ve ever experienced.

This doesn't mean that there's no skill involved, though, as there's a real art in mastering Johnny’s angle of ascent and descent as you progress through 12 themed levels requiring increasingly demanding crashes (trust us, hitting a cow's backside is considerably harder than it looks!). What’s more, there’s a surprising amount of freedom to adopt your own tactics within the skies above Texas; will you favour low-level stunts, snatching trousers from washing lines or getting a face full of oil, or aim for loftier points scores resulting from hurtling into tornadoes and hot air-balloons?

The colourful tongue-in-cheek visual style and comedy animations that accompany the collisions suit the action superbly, creating a truly unique mobile hero who’s activities we’ll hopefully be able to follow in future outings (his original adventure passed us by, but rest assured we'll be hunting that down very shortly). This isn’t to say that you’ll grow tired of this adventure too quickly, though. Even after mastering the progressively tough introductory chapters (and then returning to ensure you’ve got the requisite high score in each and thus maximise your danger-rating), there’s a single or multiplayer high score mode for you to show off your dare-devilling to friends. You can even revisit a particularly fabulous stunt-sequence using a neat video replay feature, which is as slickly implemented as the rest of the game. Indeed, everything here, from the visuals and control system to the short-bursts of play, feels tailor made for your mobile, rather than being cut-down from a home console or squeezed in, as can often feel the case with other games. All of which means this is one game you definitely won't regret running into.