Ricky

Most gamers have had the experience of begging a parent for a particular game for a birthday or Christmas present, only to receive the wrong title upon opening the gift.

Well, if that situation could exist with iPhone, you might find yourself encumbered with Ricky after having asked for Super Mario World.

Set over four worlds tenuously strung together with some utterly terrible story cutscenes, Ricky has you seeking out Ricky's brother. We won't spend any more time dwelling on it, since the developers evidently spend much of theirs.

The visuals are equally half-hearted. The pipes and blocks stolen from Mario sit uneasily next to the game's characters, which are drawn in rather a different, cruder style.

You're probably starting to get the idea that Ricky isn't a great game, and you're right. In some ways it's a shameless, amateurish rip-off. There's not much to the gameplay either: no decent collectibles or power-ups and no interesting enemies. It's not all bad, though.

Firstly, the controls actually work quite well. Left and right movement is handled with the left thumb, while your right thumb makes Ricky jump. The combination of responsive and simple works in the game's favour.

Then there are more than 70 levels. The first 20 or so are painfully simple, yet some slightly interesting ideas appear later in the game. We'd go as far as to say that Ricky's level design is occasionally half decent.

Unfortunately, poor design makes it tough to stick around long enough to reach the so-so levels. There are no checkpoints in the game, so if you make a misstep you have to restart the level from scratch.

This wouldn't be such a problem if Ricky was altogether a higher quality game, but this title is only really much fun when you're just breezing through the levels carelessly.

One of many quirks stands out as particularly bad. If there's a movable block between you and an enemy, instead of causing the enemy to about-face the block will just be pushed up into the air, leaving the enemy to attack Ricky. This feels plain wrong, hooking into that amateurish sensibility that never fails to linger over the game's more competent features.

Ricky flagrantly taps into a gimmick to gain attention it doesn't really deserve. It may have a mushroom as its launch icon, but this game has nothing to do with Mario.