Towers Runner - Toppling over

Towers Runner is the most archetypal "modern mobile video game" I've played in a long time.

It's also dreck.

From BulkyPix and StormJoy, this fun-free free to play autorunner puts you in the shoes of a heroic handyman or firefighting dude, and takes place over a few levels, each featuring a tower to climb.

Every tower is infested with - get this! - ravenous zombies that you must avoid, all the while picking up - OMG! - coins which are a soft currency to unlock later stages.

You can save - everyday sexism ahoy! - helpless ladies along the way too, and the controls are entirely - any guesses? - a one tap affair.

Towers Runner's visuals are - hoo boy! - pixel art retro styled, and there's a - wholly original! - chiptune-esque theme.

The entire thing is designed to serve you ads far more often than is humanly tolerable, and these ads are fiddly to dismiss, often resulting in you accidentally tapping through to a purchase screen.

This is a game that serves an ad before you've even started playing, and each tower is designed with multiple death-dealing choke points so you'll watch, you've guessed it, even more ads.

You can make a purchase with real money to turn these ads off, but doing so isn't suddenly going to make the game good, it just makes it slightly less awful.

The difference between the foreground and background isn't particularly clear, so I often found myself thwacking my head on signs I didn't think were on the same plane, resulting in another unfair death.

There's a slight delay in tapping the screen and your character changing direction, and since the game's asking you to do some pretty challenging stuff here, it's easy to feel let down by the controls.

When you get to the top of a tower, there's no sense of victory or elation, just the nagging feeling that there are more unfair challenges ahead, and that the mind-numbing gameplay of tapping the screen to change the direction of your constantly walking character isn't going to improve.

Behind the thin veneer of indie gaming credibility offered by the presentation lies a cynical money-grab, engineered in conjunction with reptilian ads network folk.

The same folk doing their best to burst the user acquisition bubble they themselves created that is currently plaguing F2P action games like a particularly virulent strain of herpes.