Gish Mobile

Gish will feel familiar to a lot of gamers as soon as they start playing - and not just the ones who already played the game back when it was released on PC in 2005.

Due to your character being a shapeless, squishy blob, the game bears an instant resemblance to SolaRola and LocoRoco.

However, the familiarity ends there because Gish is very much the black sheep of the blob family. Literally, since he's a black blob of tar.

Whereas games like LocoRoco give you lots of primary colours and palm trees, Gish gives you temperamental tar and spiky hazards to avoid falling onto. The influences may be clear, but Gish is very much its own game.

Gish has a number of skills at his disposal alongside simply oozing and squishing along platforms and through gaps. Pressing the '#' key, for instance, changes Gish's consistency into a more liquid one, allowing him to pass through tight gaps.

The '*' button enables stickiness, meanwhile, which means Gish can stick to most surfaces, and even roll along the ceiling. The '5' button deals with attacking, which can be used to both break through less tough walls and blocks and knock out enemies and bosses that stand between you and the level exit. The 'jump' button lets you reach higher platforms when you need to.

Just the range of skills available to you is impressive. Gish might be a fairly straightforward A to B platformer in structure, but getting to that B isn't easy at all.

Most levels introduce a new little puzzle to solve. Like switches to flip to trigger moving platforms, and blocks to move to either hold down pressure switches or jump onto to reach a particularly high platform.

Even jumping is given a layer of complexity, since flattening Gish by holding 'down' then making him jump enables a higher jump.

The reason Gish really puts the majority of mobile games to shame, though, is that it doesn't stop at just being a well-designed platformer with neat puzzles and a pleasurable-to-control blob of tar.

Each level also contains a number of coins to collect, and also secret areas to find. Just like LocoRoco, these areas are hidden through fake walls and hidden tunnels, so you have to explore a level closely to find them.

At the end of a level, you're given a rundown of your statistics. If you didn't get a perfect run, that's your incentive to come back at a later time to try it again.

On top of this, Gish is a massive game. It comes with over 100 levels, which take place in a variety of environments - like sewers, some fire-based flamefest and Egypt - each with unique enemies and hazards.

It also has 45 Bluetooth multiplayer levels, which we didn't get the opportunity to try out, but which are playable co-operatively or in a deathmatch or race. There's Zeemote compatibility too, for those who own the Bluetooth JS1 mobile game joystick.

Finally, there's a Playground mode, where you can simply explore new levels packed with the fun physics stuff of the single player game and just destroy stuff and wobble your way about.

Combined, Gish has the sort of content you'd expect to find in a handheld console game, not necessarily in a mobile one. And - as final praise - it feels like a game that's been especially designed for play on mobile phone. Aside from the occasional fiddly platform jumping section, it's the perfect fit.

You might not have thought a blob of tar could be so appealing, but allow Gish to prove you wrong.