Satellina

Satellina is a game of swirling colours and one-touch, twitch-lite play. It's bright and bold, and at its centre sits an interesting idea.

There's an arcade minimalism to proceedings, and a clock-ticking heartbeat that piles on the pressure from time to time.

It's not perfect, and you'll see pretty much everything it has to offer within an hour, but that'll be an hour you won't regret having wasted.

Spinning bird tap

The game is all about clearing coloured dots from a screen. They're flowing and bouncing around in a pattern, and you need to poke and prod your white cursor over them in order to get rid of them.

The twist is you can only clear dots in a certain order. There are green, yellow, and red shapes bobbing around. Touching anything but a green blob will kill you. Get rid of all the green ones and the yellow dots will shift hue to green, the red to yellow.

Dying doesn't reset the level, but it does cost you some precious time. There are five stages to each level. Finish them in under two and a half minutes to unlock two new stages, or under five to unlock just the one.

When you've polished off all of the challenges, you get to play through them all in one go in a colour-shifted rehash. All in all you'll have finished everything pretty quickly.

Pattern recognition

But what's here is impressive stuff. The single-finger controls are sharp enough that you rarely feel cheated, and you can eke some more entertainment out of the game by trying to shave seconds off your times.

Satellina is a neat game wrapped around a sharp idea that will fluster and frustrate you in the very best ways. It might leave you wanting more, but that's far better than outstaying its welcome.