Micronytes

When it first came out, Micronytes was rightly panned for sloppy controls and uninspiring visuals. It was a game with some nice ideas, lost under a sludge of ugliness and ineptitude.

Can the game do any better on Xperia Play, or is it doomed to forever languish on the lower rungs of the Android ladder?

Micronytes is a rampantly difficult platformer that tasks you with clearing all of the virus cells from inside a patient's body. It's like Inner Space, but with podgy white antibodies instead of Dennis Quaid.

Things start off tame enough as you guide your pale Micronyte over some simple platforms with ease towards the monstrous green virus cell at the end of each stage.

After the first few levels, though, the difficulty shoots through the roof, and you'll spend a lot of time screaming unutterable curses to the darkest gods of chaos.

There are pills to pick up on every level as well if you want to aim for high scores, although trying to reach them all will make you hate yourself, the game, and anyone around you.

Developer Gibs & Gore has failed to address the aesthetic problems of Micronytes, and the difficulty curve is still steep, unforgiving, and stained with the blood of the thousand failures who went before you.

It has, however, corrected the controls. You use the D-pad to move your Micronyte around and X to jump. It's a simple system, but it makes the game playable and, unlike before, quite a lot of fun.

Micronytes still isn't for the faint-hearted, and nor is it enjoyable to look at, but at least now it's playable. There's even some fun to be squeezed from its pus-filled body.