Dandara review - An amazing game of movement and action, but is it worth the price?

Dandara might be out for a number of platforms right now, but I don't think I'm being too hyperbolic when I say that the mobile version is the cream of the crop.

Thanks to familiar touchscreen controls, the game buzzes along with an intensity and an intelligence that makes sense on mobile.

Sure, it's expensive, but this is a premium experience that works spectacularly well on your pocket gaming device. And if you're a fan of retro-styled arcade experiences you're going to love every second of it.

Dan-dare you

To put the game in some sort of context, it sort of feels like a grown up Nitrome joint. Where Nitrome usually stops after dismantling a genre to its core elements, here the dissection is the foundation upon which everything else is built.

You control the heroine of the piece by twanging her from sticky surface to sticky surface. Drag on the right of the screen and she'll fly off in that direction when you lift your finger. Drag on the left of the screen and you'll blast out a shower of spiky death.

Rather than being a randomly generated experience though, Dandara is a metroidvania. The world is open, but you need to unlock new skills in order to get past some parts of it.

There's a brilliant story here too that pushes everything along. While you sometimes get a little bit of the metroidvania backtracking fatigue, the simple joy of movement the game offers up keeps you in the moment.

When you realise the speed with which you can move from place to place, and the almost balletic bouts of violence you can unleash with the simple control system, you realise that Dandara really is something special.

Throw in some of the nicest pixel art graphics we've seen for a while, and you're left with a SNES-era platformer that's dripping with the very best modern sensibilities.

Dandara-ask?

Yes, some people are going to find that steep price point a little off-putting, but this is a superb mobile game that's releasing at the same time on the App Store as it is on other platforms.

But even if it wasn't, there'd still be a case to be made that Dandara was worth it. If you're a fan of superbly designed action games, then you owe it to yourself, and to the devs, to give this one a try.