8. Hold On
Platform: iOS
Price: 69p
The past few years have seen smartphones completely transform the gaming industry, with some notable titans helping to blow the medium wide open.
Angry Birds defined mobile gaming from the off. Infinity Blade showed us that smartphone games could go toe-to-toe with consoles. Monument Valley proved they could be thoughtful and beautiful. Hold On, which costs 69p, shows us that the app store really needs to sort itself out.
Here's the premise: hold the button for as long as you can. If you let go, the game is over. Then try to beat your previous record. When will the fun end!?
"Develop your perseverance and improve your concentration skills to make you more productive!" reads the app store description. We'll cast some doubt on that. This app is more likely to aggravate any underlying anger issues when you realise you wasted ACTUAL MONEY on it. But perhaps we're too quick to judge, so let's take a closer look.
We've covered the central tenet more extensively than it deserves, but there's plenty more to do. Say, for example, you want to submit your high score, just tap 'submit' and enter your name like it tells you to. What's that? Oh, you can't actually enter your name because there's no working keyboard. Just tap OK then, we guess.
Now that you've anonymously entered your score to the global rankings, better go see how you're faring. Oh look, that just brings up a load of code. This is paying for itself already.
But wait, we forgot the biggest feature of all: you can connect to a friend via Bluetooth and enjoy the shoddiness together! Of course we haven't been able to test this feature because we couldn't persuade anyone to spend their money on it.
