Flip Riders

Two games involving bikes, hazards, and stunts in one week? As developers flock to the App Store, this kind of coincidence is bound to happen.

Flip Riders is a little different from Bike Baron, though. Agimat’s game focuses more on stunts and has a cartoonish look that nods towards Disney kids' series Kick Buttowski. Jumping the shark

The levels are very different, too – ramps and loops are present, but diving great whites, helicopters, trucks, spikes, and bombs are par for the course.

Sadly, it suffers by comparison to its racing rival. Like Bike Baron, it’s hard, but whereas that seemed tough but fair Flip Riders seems deliberately designed to make you fail. It’s a crucial difference.

In one of the worst design decisions I’ve seen for a long, long time, the first level is arguably tougher than the nine that follow. Having such a sharp difficulty spike on the first stage is frustrating and will have many giving up almost immediately. Hard to handlebars

The controls aren’t nearly as responsive as in Bike Baron, either. You can choose from tilt or slider control, but neither seems to be particularly effective.

There’s a degree of inertia on your biker that means it’s difficult to correct your orientation in time for a safe landing. Tilt a little bit and your avatar barely seems to move.

Then you’ll start to overcompensate and suddenly your biker starts flipping wildly. There’s no happy medium at all. Granted, you might earn points for somersaulting several times over, but what’s the point when the inevitable crash-landing forces a restart? Funny hop

At no point does it feels natural. The 'jump' button seems to function only when it feels like it, though you could be forgiven for wondering whether it’s a feature that hasn’t been unlocked yet – all the buttons are semi-translucent, giving the appearance of abilities that can’t be used.

The camera is often positioned too closely to your avatar, leaving you little time to react to incoming hazards. That’s before you get to stages where land moves underneath to slow you down, meaning you don’t have enough momentum to clear certain obstacles.

You can slow down time over big jumps for an extra opportunity to earn stunt points for flips and tricks. But the game is so unforgiving that you’ll want to simply run through a stage in as straightforward a way as possible simply to see if you can finish it. A new beginning

There are no checkpoints, meaning every crash requires you to start all over again. With some tracks extending to over a minute long – with hazards occurring roughly every half-a-second – that’s a lot of distance to cover again.

It’s a shame, as the presentation is extremely solid, with an attractive cel-shaded look and several new riders to unlock. But it’s not enough to make you persevere. By the time you reach third set of stages your patience will likely have run out.