Download Games Roundup

Monster Dash

• iPhone / £0.59

There was a time when it was enough just to jump (jump!) for our love. A running man. A single frantic, obsessive task. One giant leap for handheld gaming accessibility. But enough about Canabalt.

Or perhaps not.

Halfbrick has come to the - not unreasonable - conclusion that there's a little bit more you can do with AdamAtomic's absurdly addictive microgame.

For a start, you can throw in monsters and give the player something else to avoid. And then you can give the player the ability to take down those monsters with guns. Finally, you can give the player health, so they can live to fight another day.

As you'd expect from the makers of the ludicrously successful Fruit Ninja, you know what to do the second you pick the game up. Whether you can force yourself to put the damned thing down is another matter. It's that kind of game.

Once again, the ultimate aim is to run for as long as possible, and to spice things up you get whisked into a different time zone every 1000 metres, giving you the chance to shoot and stomp vampires, mummies, zombies and demons for no other reason than they deserve it.

It's stupid. It's simple. You probably won't want to bother playing something so absurdly shallow. And, hours later, you might just be able to convince yourself that you've got something better to do.

8/10

The Incident

• iPhone & iPad (universal binary) / £0.59

Jumping may not quite qualify as a noble art, but it sure is a popular source of demented platform inspiration this week.

This time we don't merely have to focus our leaping on the horizontal plane, but the vertical too, as Big Bucket takes improbable glee from raining incessant death upon our person from above.

You might imagine cats and dogs - or even fish - falling from the sky, but you'd be comprehensively incorrect. In The Incident, we must guide a man - let's call him Barry - to safety by nimbly avoiding cars, tubas and comfortable office chairs as they cascade from above.

What's going on above remains to be seen, and it's your job to continually scale the ever-growing pile of junk until you reach the source of The Incident. It's like Lost, the platform game, without The Dharma Initiative or stupid bloody polar bears.

Set over seven beautiful retro-style levels, half the fun of The Incident is in seeing what craziness can be thrown your way next while humming along to the giddy chiptune. Tutankhamen you say? How kind. A rusty spanner and a New York taxi? You shouldn't have.

Perhaps it's God and Brucey up there having a barney on The Generation Game's conveyor belt. You should probably find out.

8/10