Raccoon Rising

If you're a gamer of a certain age, then you were likely brought up on a diet of spry, anthropomorphic creatures hopping from platform to platform collecting things.

That trend has continued into smartphone gaming, although it's been added to, built upon, and twisted around in a variety of fantastic, confusing, and downright impressive ways.

The latest in a long line of platforming revisions is Raccoon Rising, a kung fu-style leap-'em-up that casts you as the titular furry mammal, and tasks you with scaling some dizzying heights to save your forest.

The only control you have in Raccoon Rising is to tap the screen to jump.

As the game progresses you'll gain the ability to switch direction mid-jump, as well as a charge move that lets you smash through certain stubborn obstacles.

These obstacles become more and more ingenious as you progress. Spikes become spinning blades, bouncy pads become moving bouncy pads, falling logs become more falling logs. It adds a quick-thinking, puzzling feel to proceedings, and makes for a deeper experience.

Checkpoints, which take the form of gates, are frequent, and chop each vertical level into manageable chunks. The game remembers the last checkpoint you reached, so there's no backtracking if you have to cut your session short.

As well as breaking up the game, each piece of a level has a three-star rating, and to get the best scores you'll need to destroy everything you can, as well as collecting all of the glittery gold sim-cards that hover in between obstacles.

There are four worlds to make your way through, and more than 60 gates in total, each with a unique feel and visual style.

Raccoon Rising is a seamlessly well-constructed game, and that extends to its user interface.

The 'pause' button, for example, requires you to slide your finger across the screen, so you're never going to tap it accidentally when you're trying to jump to a far-away ledge.

This is a level of common sense that you don't always see in mobile games.

Raccoon Rising is tough in all the right ways, easing you into its acrobatic mechanic before testing your aptitude with ever more difficult leaps and bounds. You rarely feel cheated when you've missed a leap - just disappointed that your tap wasn't accurate enough.

The game does occasionally get repetitive, but only for a gate or two before it throws something new at you.

For the most part, Raccoon Rising is a deep and accessible vertical platformer that refines the Doodle Jump formula beautifully. This is platforming for a new generation, and it's bloody good.

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