Deflecticon

3D Pong. It might not sound like the makings of a great game, but bear in mind that some ideas stick around because, done well, they make for fundamentally solid entertainment.

Meteor Pixel's Deflecticon does 3D Pong very well indeed. It takes the basic concept of two opponents smacking a little ball back and forth and dresses it up in some appealing retro aesthetics. It's part Tron, part Dreamcast cult-classic Cosmic Smash.

Then it marries these production values to an absolutely blistering game of future-tennis, where the mechanics behind whacking that ball around have the kind of old skool purity that makes every victory feel like some hard-won epic struggle.

The difficulty curve can get a little rocky, and the feature set is a little slim, but this is a fantastic hidden gem.

There are two modes in Deflecticon. (Meteor Pixel is working on multiplayer, but at the time of writing it remains unfinished.) Normal sees you facing off against successively harder AI.

Getting the ball past your opponent knocks a slice off his health, and vice versa if he does the same to you. First one to run out of health loses.

Normal mode also gives you a choice of power-ups, which you can launch once you've charged up your special gauge by putting sufficient spin on your shots. While this is a solid attraction in its own right, the jump in difficulty from one opponent to the next feels way too pronounced, and you might feel the power-ups throw the balance of play off a little too much.

Push mode is where the real longevity is.

In Push mode every opponent has a wall behind him. Smashing a hole in that wall then working a shot through the hole moves you on to the next opponent in line. You have no wall, however, and a single shot not only chips away at your health (which doesn't refuel in this mode) but pushes you back to the previous AI.

This is a compelling setup. You can plough through six or seven opponents in a row, firing off bank shots like you were born to show these uppity subroutines who's boss, whereupon a single mistake can prove so demoralising that you plunge all the way back down again.

Then you fight back to where you were with barely any health left, only to let that final smash through just short of beating the AI who got you in the first place. One more go and you'll get that little bit further, you tell yourself.

It's occasionally difficult to tell where the ball is headed. Meteor Pixel have added depth indicators but they're not that easy to read.

Adding spin to your returns can feel trickier than it ought to be, particularly when the ball reaches top speed, which in Deflecticon is almost dizzyingly fast.

But this is still a brilliant game that ought to be racking up the downloads.

Winning a drawn-out rally and marching on the next opponent while the soundtrack (from chiptune artist FantomenK) pounds away in the background is the kind of invigorating rush far too few mobile games manage to provide.