Gold Diggers

Most free-to-play games are obsessed with gold, or some variation on the precious metal, and Gold Diggers - as you might expect from the name - is no exception.

But this is freemium handled well, with an unobtrusive IAP system that never waves its arms in your face and forces you to stop or buy.

The game is a twitchy arcade blast that you control with a single finger, dodging through caverns to grab as many chunky nuggets as you can. It's fun, it's fast, and it has that elusive one-more-go quality that sets apart the best App Store games.

You play as a gold miner who's piloting a steampunk-style tram down through the earth. The aim of the game is to get as far as possible while collecting as many chunks of gold as you can.

The machine ploughs down automatically and the only control you have is weaving the drill-fronted craft left to right with a slider at the bottom of the screen.

Things start off quite slowly, and it's easy to swerve through the array of flaming obstacles and hungry, Tremors-style worms that munch their way up the scenery towards you. But once you're a thousand metres down the speed ratchets up and you find yourself courting danger with each turn.

Sometimes you can grab a gun power-up that attaches an automatic blaster to the front of your tram for a while, but other than that it's just you and your reactions standing between victory and catastrophic death.

The tram is made up of three carriages, and these represent your lives. Take three thwacks from anything and it's Game Over - unless you buy some of the repair power-ups that let you start a run from where you died.

The simplicity of Gold Diggers creates a compulsive urge. When you fail it's almost always your own fault, so you start again to right that wrong and get that little bit further. A mission system means there's always something else to do or see too.

It might get repetitive in the long run, but if you're on the lookout for an instant twitchy fix, you could do a lot worse than checking Gold Diggers out.