Ever wonder what would happen if you built a wobbling tower of ice cream to the Moon and beyond? Moreover, on a single cone wouldn't you collapse before you reached a dozen scoops? What about the cost? In this developer's book, 59p (sale price, £1.19 regular). Not stratospheric then, by any means - it's cheaper than a regular cone and just as sweet.

Scoops pits you against the solar system in a bid to create the ultimate ice cream cone. We never quite figured out how people were going to eat the darned thing, but that's another story. Be that as it may, you'll rack up points and go submit to online leader boards in your quest to construct your tower of frozen dessert higher than anyone else. On the way, you'll find pudding wrecking nasties such as garlic and onions, which will cost a life (you have three). You'll also encounter special scoops that award extra lives or change their colour to give you more points.

Controlling your wobbling pile of ice cream is as simple as tilting your iPhone to the left and right. That's it. All of the produce, good or bad, drops from the top of the screen and you must stack it onto your cone. Things start off easy enough, but the game picks up it's pace pretty quickly - dodging scoops will cost you points, and stacking similar colours in a row will net you more multiplier bonus. Otherwise, this increases or decreases by one for every scoop that's dropped. Therefore it's best to try and get as much of it as you can onto your cone whilst avoiding tomatoes and garlic.

Scoops has the added bonus of smart difficulty - gameplay gets steadily faster until you lose a life, at which point it all slows down again, resetting your combo multiplier in the process. This makes the game more addictive than frustrating, and also helps you to propel your ice cream towards Jupiter - by which time your ice cream will be noticeably more jelly like and teetering over all the more often. Fortunately then, that the game cleverly auto balances the mountain of scoops - putting the focus squarely on stacking.

Presentation is clean, set in pastel colours, and you'll feel that this is one game everyone can play - there's enough challenge here for a quick pick up distraction, but there's no autosave feature, which might annoy you if you're called in the middle of a 100k+ score (this was added in a following update, mimicking Sky Burger). Sound is minimal, but Scoops is compatible with playing your own, which is always a good thing. It may be a one trick pony, but Scoops has a lot going for it - including an innovative scoring system and fun filled gameplay - pick it up and you'll be playing it for a while to come yet.

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More by this developer

Dizzypad, C

Review by Ben Briggs, February 24, 2010

Fishtropolis, C

Review by Ben Briggs, January 05, 2010

Moon Drop, B

Review by Ben Briggs, July 20, 2009

Bluebird, D

Review by Ben Briggs, June 13, 2009

Sky Burger, A

Review by Ben Briggs, April 21, 2009

Textropolis, B

Review by Ben Briggs, March 11, 2009

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