Tiny Whale!

One-touch gaming is one of the biggest contributions mobile has delivered - the mobile's lack of buttons has forced game designers to be more creative in how you control sprites. Tiny Whale! is another one-finger arcade game, but sluggish and repetitive gameplay sink the title.

The starring Tiny Whale! has to avoid bigger enemies while eating as many clouds of plankton as it can handle. The more it eats, the more powerful it gets – and the higher the score.

Whales actually breathe oxygen, so the energy bar here represents your remaining breath. Running into a feisty shark or an aggressive swordfish won’t automatically end your game, but it will zap a significant portion of your oxygen. If you survive, you can go up to the surface and take in some air, which you have to do regularly anyway.

You also have three slowly recharging skills: rush, grow, and shrink. Rush lets you ram any enemies in the way. Grow makes you twice as big – and hungry enough to eat all enemies. Shrink turns you a tiny tiny whale to quickly evade obstacles.

Simple mechanisms and basic gameplay have made some of the biggest mobile hits, but simplicity requires doing everything right. Tiny Whale! falters on a couple of levels.

The controls are fine, but they never quite feel natural and, worse, the game slows to a crawl whenever you earn an achievement. Not good for a fast action game.

The gameplay itself gets boring quickly. By the time we got to the second water area, we were ready to put the phone down.