How do you define a shooting game? One would make the assumption that you either control a craft with mounted guns and have to blow up everything you see - or you take your fight into your own hands by carrying your weapon arsenal on foot. Whichever it is, you certainly don't expect to be completely harmless. iDodge: Space Ninja completely blows that theory out of the water. And so you must weave your way through minefields of bullets hoping, nay praying that your ship doesn't sustain a single injury. So you'd better have some good tricks up your sleeve.

The short answer to that is that well, you do. Flying through the path of destruction is handled by the accelerometer, and it works superbly well. Actually, we didn't think it would work as perfectly as it does here - and it's surprisingly easy to adjust to the controls. Even if the angle is bad for you, the calibration option should suit pretty much any position you want to play the game in.

But your real weapon against the bullet storm is the unlimited bullet time ability. Holding one finger on the screen activates this, slowing the entire game down, making it easy to avoid obstacles. But don't think that this game is easy, in fact it's extremely hard - thankfully you have another weapon in the form of items that you collect. Some push bullets away, some freeze them altogether - the real challenge is knowing when to use them.

And you'll achieve medals for not using bullet time or items, or both. You'll also grab bonuses for completing levels in a row, and the game records your statistics so you can track your progress, and see how many times you failed on that one particular level. Featuring 40 main mission runs, a handful of challenges and some special 'ski' levels (basically the same game but you're going downwards as a skiing ninja), there's plenty to do - and that's not even including the multiplayer mode, which is played using control wheels with up to four players. This also works well, and it's fun to race someone else whilst also trying to skillfully maneuver through the level.

The game looks and sounds great, and that's mostly because of the superlative musical composition that drives the energy and flow of the game into something special. Stars fly by, and you'll be zooming past constellations and all kinds of space paraphernalia, which looks spectacular indeed. We didn't see any slowdown which is impressive given the insane amount of bullets that can be onscreen at once. And for posterity, you can record your most masterful runs to show off to your mates. It's general presentation is superb, although some of the buttons are very small with text to match - it's pretty, but not as usable as it should be.

Be that as it may, Space Ninja is a well thought out game that is great fun, offers plenty of depth and challenge for even the most hardened of players. It's absolutely worth every penny of it's paltry sale price, and even the regular price of £1.79 is a great value.

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