Dash Masters - Not exactly the most masterful masters
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iOS
| Dash Masters

Dash Masters is a pretty standard vertical endless runner. You mash the screen to jump in alternating directions, dodging spiky balls and trying to avoid the laser that's rising up behind you.

And it's all perfectly solid. Everything works in the way you'd expect it to, and the compulsion loop snaps closed just tight enough that you'll spend a couple of hours darting along the futuristic run way.

But after a while you'll realise that you've seen everything before. And while that's not exactly a bad thing, it does mean the game loses its sparkle a little quicker than it should.

You're just bouncing up a tube then?

Pretty much yeah. You play a plucky little adventurer with a robotic suit that sort of lets him fly around, chasing high scores and challenges, and generally doing your best not to explode and die.

Your suit has offensive capabilities, too. It fires out homing missiles every once in a while, and you've got a dash that works on collectible charges. There are bounce pads that let you smash enemies too.

You'll also come up against bosses. These are where most of the challenge in the game stems from. They're giant enemies and you need to dodge their bullets, collect the charge packs that drop down the screen, and try and smash their faces in.

As you play you unlock new accoutrements for your suit. These add extra shield capabilities, letting you take more hits before it's game over, or power up the extra abilities that you can collect. And it's worth pushing on to get them.

But while these extra pieces of armour, and the boss fights, do add something reasonably fresh to the mix, that core mechanic is one that we've seen time and time again.

Hmmm, so not a strong recommendation then?

Not really. I mean, there's nothing epically broken about Dash Masters. In fact, there's really nothing wrong with it at all. But at the same time there's nothing special about it either.

It's another perfectly solid game that's destined to get lost among the titles in the App Store that have just a little more spark.

Dash Masters - Not exactly the most masterful masters

Dash Masters is a solid endless runner, but that's pretty much the best and worst thing you can say about it
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Harry Slater
Harry Slater
Harry used to be really good at Snake on the Nokia 5110. Apparently though, digital snake wrangling isn't a proper job, so now he writes words about games instead.