AMA looking to topple Jetpack Joyride with the acrobatic Panic Flight

It's safe to say that Halfbrick's achievement-heavy Jetpack Joyride was high up on our list of favourite games of 2011. This casual one-tap title managing to override our in-app purchase defences thanks to its excellent presentation and moreish, just-one-more-go gameplay.

AMA's Panic Flight, however, looks set to displace it at the top of our casual tapping list, combining a similar coin-collecting mechanic with clever power-ups and randomly generated levels.

Ready for take-off

The aim in Panic Flight is simple: get your plane from the left-hand side of the level to the right, collecting coins, avoiding clouds, and picking up medals as you go.

Control is handled via the touch-and-hold method, where you trace where you want your aircraft to bank and dive.

Hitting the Autopilot power-up, meanwhile, instantly transforms the game into a line-drawing experience, with you able to plot an accurate course through the clouds for a brief second or two.

The clouds act like less vicious versions of Jetpack Joyride's electrical traps, with your fuel gauge (health, essentially) depleting at a faster rate should you get held up in their cold, watery embrace.

Making things a little tricky are elements such as turbulence, which can buffer your craft into nearby water vapour.

Unlike Jetpack Joyride, there's a structured single-player mode in Panic Flight to land on first of all: basically, you have to safely navigate your plucky craft between major cities of the world. That, errr, exist in the clouds.

The first mission, for instance, sees you travel to a surreal London, which seems to consist entirely of Big Ben (plus a few other recognisable landmarks dotted around the side) nestled high up in the sky.

These missions seem to be there to prepare you for what is likely to be the mode of choice for most players: Survival.

Here you go for as long as your fuel tank can take, which - handily - can be quite some time if you strategically use your collected coins for a quick top-up of fuel.

Those who want to spend some money (Panic Flight will be a free download on smartphones) can also increase certain attributes of the various craft on offer, including purchasing a larger starting tank and other benefits on top of the normal package.

Beating your high score is all well and good, but it's a far better feeling outstripping your friends, isn't it.

Here Panic Flight is looking to cover all bases, for the game is integrated with the Papaya social gaming network, and is available on every mobile system under the sun - from Android and iOS right through to Windows Phone and Java.

We'll see whether it can pull off a successful landing when the game arrives on all these platforms in the spring.