In Wingsuit Stickman, the latest in a series of games featuring Stickmen in a variety of action-orientated scenarios from developer Robert Szeleney, you don a wingsuit and then basejump into a variety of spectacularly inadvisable locations - caves, mainly, but also volcanoes.
Your task is to reach a finish flag that lies behind a series of obstacles while collecting stars that are placed around the map. Touch the walls, or any of the many and varied hazards, and you're instantly killed.
Control is performed either via an on-screen slider that adjusts your angle - which is unresponsive and fiddly - or by tilting your iOS device itself. Neither method offers especially fine control, and when you're in a game that requires millimetre-level precision, fine control matters.
On the whole, Wingsuit Stickman feels cheap - hell, it is cheap - but the endless guitar riff over the menu screen, the charmless graphics, and the clicky-clacky button-press sounds underline the bargain-bin nature of the thing.
It feels like it could have done with some more testing, too - on a fairly early level, I sailed right off the map after missing a turn.
Shell out
There's little sense of achievement on completing a level, because stages are short and call more for good short term memory than for fine motor skills.
And quite often you'll need to play a stage again to earn enough stars to unlock the next one. Victory feels like a slog rather than a cycle of having your skills tested and being rewarded for doing well.
Alternatively, instead of faffing about with stars you can pay £2.49 - four times the price of the initial download - to unlock every level at once. That's the final nail in the coffin - the poison that turns Wingsuit Stickman turned from a fun diversion into a waiting game.
As fun as it occasionally is to steer through a difficult obstacle course, looking on with a certain sense of visceral satisfaction as your stickman crunches into a messy pile when you accidentally clip a wall, by making you replay stages Wingsuit Stickman ends up feeling like a waste of time.
In a marketplace dominated by freemium casual games, that's some achievement.
Wingsuit Stickman
Wingsuit Stickman is fun at first, but its insistence that you replay levels or pay an additional fee quickly becomes tiresome
Grant Howitt
Grant Howitt likes game mechanics. It's kind of a thing with him. Born in the UK and currently living in Sydney, Australia, Grant spends most of his waking hours playing or designing games. He is unusually tall, has daft-coloured hair, and drinks more coffee than you