FlickPig

When game ideas begin to lose their freshness, developers will often smash two or more together to create something new.

Take FlickPig. We've had plenty of endless runners on iOS, and Sonic has been zipping through tunnels to collect rings since outing number two. Both concepts are tried, tested, well-worn concepts. FlickPig is new entity made out of bits of both of them.

The story goes that three pigs – well, three piggy banks if we're getting technical – have had their coins stolen by wolves and they want them back.

To retrieve them, they run in a completely straight line along three paths, dodging obstacles, grabbing money, and chomping on fruit.

It's an easily graspable premise, allowing you to master the basic gameplay tools so that when FlickPig starts throwing twists at you later on you're equipped to deal with them.

Your only real input is through flicking: you place a finger above the swine you want to move and then gesture in the direction of the channel you want it to run in.

If the lane is already occupied then the pigs will stack up. You can't move all of them at once - flicking the bottom pig with two on top of it will cause one to jump off rather than all of them to shift together.

Since the focus of the game is this single action – it's in the title, for bacon's sake – you'd think it'd be playtested to perfection. You'd be wrong. The engine handles gestures fine 90-95 per cent of the time, but those occasions when the game misreads a swipe are infuriating.

There's the option to change controls to a tapping motion, but it's underdeveloped and confusing to use.

When FlickPig is working as it should (which, to be fair, is most of the time) the gameplay is fast and ever more complex.

Getting to the end of a run is your primary goal, at which point you're awarded a star. Collect enough coins and keep all three pigs alive and a second or even third star is yours to keep, unlocking EX Levels for each of the five worlds.

The first play-throughs of a section are very much twitch-based affairs, as you struggle to deal with what's being thrown at you - including wolves to dodge, brick walls to avoid, and chasms to leap across.

It's all very hectic, and the pigs sometimes obscure the action, meaning that replaying stages for better scores is down to memorising them and figuring out the optimal way through.

You can exchange the coins you collect for adorable little costumes or single use power-ups that remove objects from play, with more coins available through in-app purchases.

Presentation is top notch throughout - a combination of LittleBigPlanet's stickers and cardboard aesthetic and squidgy, cel-shaded 3D characters. Squeaky oinks accompany the countdown, while cartoony thwacks, whams, and smacks make failure a little more endearing.

Getting a flawless run through a particularly challenging level is tense and satisfying, and the title as a whole is wonderfully charming to behold. It's a hodge-podge of old ideas - some of them invented by the creative lead behind this game, Sonic creator Yuji Naja - but they work well together, creating a game that's both familiar and new.

The controls need some tweaking before FlickPig can earn an unequivocal recommendation, but it's still well worth a look in its current state.