Game Reviews

Icarush

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iOS
| Icarush
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Icarush
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iOS
| Icarush

Icarush bounces by in happy ignorance of the grey truth of so-called hardcore gaming.

It's little more than a series of taps on brightly coloured blobs, with the occasional swipe around the screen when you've got enough power.

But in its overt simplicity there's a neat addictive rhythm that it's pretty difficult to resist. It might become a little drab with extended play, but on a moment to moment basis it's a fine concoction of repetitive play.

This is the smartphone gaming equivalent of trash TV - brain dead entertainment that lets your eyes gloss over and your fingers do the work.

Solar flare

The game is all about leading Icarus towards the sun. You do that by tapping on feathers dotted around the screen.

Different coloured feathers have different properties. The green ones let you hold on and shoot up the screen for a while, whereas the blacky purple ones pop in and out of existence as you grab on to them.

Combine enough feathers and you'll enter Rush mode, which hurls you up the screen at breakneck speeds. Grabbing diamonds ups your score and increases the time you spend in flight.

And that's pretty much all there is to the game. You tap your way up until you get a chance to fly, then start tapping again.

Everything feels solid and reliable, and there are always high scores to chase and blinking white lines marking your best height to surpass.

Aim high

Yes, after a while you're going to find your attention drifting elsewhere, but Icarush is a reminder that sometimes games don't have to be rich with polygons or challenges to make them interesting.

You won't be swept away by this little distillation of a game, but you might get tangled up in it for a while. And when you're forking out less than a pound for a game, that's fine.

Icarush is a blast from the moment you pick it up to a couple of minutes before you get bored of it.

And while that shift is inevitable, when it does comes you'll have sucked enough fun out of the game that you won't mind.

Icarush

A decent little arcade game, as you long as you don't expect too much from Icarush you won't be disappointed
Score
Harry Slater
Harry Slater
Harry used to be really good at Snake on the Nokia 5110. Apparently though, digital snake wrangling isn't a proper job, so now he writes words about games instead.