Zip-Zap

There's one thing I love about Zip-Zap - it's a game where you'll fail and fail and fail again, and yet it's very difficult to get annoyed by it because your failures look so utterly ridiculous that you can't help but laugh at them. Your task in this game is simple - you've got a piece of Meccano to control, and a circle somewhere that you have to cover up somehow - but you can only control the game by making a joint somewhere contract or release. It's essentially a set of very basic physics puzzles, but the limited control you have over the element in play mean that you'll spend most of the game watching things flail aimlessly and helplessly off screen like a Goat Simulator highlights reel. It's amusing in a very childish way, which is one of the best ways to be amusing, I find.

The game really only lets itself down in two ways; the first is the gatekeeping of content (this is hardly unusual for a mobile game of source, but when all of the levels in a game are free anyway, surely you could allow the player to open them up a bit more easily?), and the second is the levels that involve swinging your set-up more than 180 degrees around a pivot, which requires you to get down precise timings to build up momentum and just aren't even remotely fun, in a way that's completely out of step with the rest of the game. Neither of these things would be all that bad if they didn't combine with each other, but the end result is that you have to spend ten minutes or more getting pissed off at the bad levels just to unlock more good ones that you may well solve in less than thirty seconds. It's infuriatiing, and a massive shame, because if either of those faults weren't here I'd be unequivocally recommending this as one of the most enjoyable mobile puzzle games I've come across. The fun bits really are very fun.