One More Line logoOne More Line might very well be the best cigarette break game on the market right now.

Taking on a neon art-deco Atari-esque aesthetic, One More Line gives you a small dome-shape to control and sets you the task of travelling as far as you can without crashing into discs strewn in your path or the walls to either side of you.

The reason that this makes for such an excellent cigarette-break game lies in its extraordinarily simple controls. Easily controlled one-handed, pressing your thumb onto the screen locks your little ship (we’ll call it a ship for lack of a better word) on to a nearby disc and spins you in an arc around it. Releasing your thumb makes your ship let go and beetle off in the direction it is now facing, mostly like directly into the path of a wall or another disc.

One More Line is surprisingly difficult to master. A single run takes a matter of seconds and how long you play will probably depend on how long you’ve got. There is admittedly a bit of a compulsion to keep playing when you first pick the game up, but once you’ve got used to it it’s very easy to put down again and get on with your life.

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Dungeon Keeper Mobile upset a lot of fans of the original series. Once the dust had settled a little, I wrote a piece defending it for Den of Geek.

Some will tell you this heralds the end of gaming as we know it.

Some will tell you this heralds the end of gaming as we know it.

really wanted to write a piece actually defending it as a game outright as opposed to what I went with in the end. Tempting as it is to play devil’s advocate and fight for a position you don’t really hold, I just couldn’t produce anything approximating a positive review of this thing.

My distaste for the non-game pay-and-wait model is overwhelming and my suspicion of micro-transactional features runs deep enough that it actually threatens to stop me enjoying perfectly excellent games like Hearthstone which carry similar strands in its DNA.

At the same time, I do like change and I do welcome companies trying new ways to make money out of an industry that seems to lose far more of it than anyone expects. With yesterday’s news that Irrational was being wound up, it shows that even large well established studios can be hit with the financial failure stick, so if a few shoddy games can provide the data points needed to explore new revenue avenues, then it’s realistically a small price to pay.