Hands-on with PopCap's Popcorn Dragon on iOS

It’s cute, it’s slick, and its instantly accessible thanks to its charm and tight-but-simple controls. Yes, it’s another PopCap game, albeit one the company is keen to stress isn’t a ‘big’ game in the way that Plants vs Zombies is.

Instead, it’s more of a light snack. A bit like popcorn, if I were to draw a blindingly obvious simile from my vocabulary bag.

You control a little dragon by dragging him around the touchscreen, tapping to set fire to corn kernels that promptly turn into delicious sweet or savoury treats.

Stopping you is a series of film-based foes - from spooky ghosts to huge, lumbering titans - each unique to the stage you're playing in.

For the prison level, for instance, you're chased by a spotlight that can freeze you on the spot for a few precious seconds, while raptors in the dinosaur flick fling themselves at your tail and require furious shaking to throw off.

Because your tail grows longer with each mouthful of the good stuff, it slowly becomes harder to avoid the pesky enemies (one per level) as you near the top score of five stars.

There's also a bunch of cinema tickets that float into play over the course of each go, allowing you to upgrade your dragon or add special items such as caramel bombs that increase the effects of your chomping.

I can’t see Popcorn Dragon lasting very long - I managed to five or four star a good portion of the levels on my first go - but it looks like it’ll be a fun and extremely polished little game nonetheless.