Download Games Roundup

City of Secrets

• Mac App Store - £2.99. Free Lite version available.
• Also available on iPad - £2.99 and iPhone - £0.59.

If nothing else, doing these roundups every week will improve your knowledge of the nether regions of the adventure scene. And look! Here's one about a mole on a quest to save a dog!

Like all those wistfully remembered adventures down the decades, City Of Secrets looks like it has all the ingredients you want: a nice line in a nonsensical storyline, crackpot characters, decent animation, lovingly crafted locations, an intuitive interface and wry dialogue a-plenty.

Unfortunately, it also features some of the things that remind us why adventure games fell out of the mainstream, with tedious fetch quests, aggravating scenarios and a spirit-crushing trash-sorting mini-game conspiring to gradually strip the joy out of it all.

On a good day, Aidem Media gets a high five for an often entertaining slice of comic-book fun. On a bad day like today, though, it gets a bunch of fives for conspiring to ruin something so promising.

5/10

Go Series: Tower Of Deus

• DSiWare - 200 DSiWare Points (£1.80)

We've already endured the chaos of 10 Second Run this year. I'm not sure it's strictly healthy for Game Bridge to keeping coaxing the rage gland like this.

If you actively enjoy heart-attack platforming at its most stressful, then be my guest. There are 40 levels of anger mismanagement to overcome in Tower of Deus, where the only goal is to get to the end before you keel over and die – that's you and the anonymous-looking dude you're controlling.

Your ascent to the top of each tower starts off fairly innocuously, of course. It's like a My First Platformer, where the game even considerately points out the perils of slippery floors and crumbling footholds. Bless.

But after luring you into its mildly engaging trap, it proceeds to kerb-stomp you time and time again like an incandescent Jack Bauer after a parking violation.

With every level come more time-sapping hazards and vicious geometry, and a perverse determination to not give in to a game that looks so horribly amateurish. What keeps me going? Creeping insanity? Nothing better to do? The masturbating lead character? Who knows.

5/10