Star Rush is a neat idea; to offer customers an extremely accessible game to play while waiting for the train to arrive, while simultaneously offering a decent replayability. Although it rests quite closely to app store poster child Doodle Jump in it’s simplistic tilting gameplay, its clean aethetic would surely come as a welcome change to experienced doodle jumpers looking for variety in their lives.

Sadly, the logical idea behind the game is pretty much moot as it has a myriad of problems which prevent it from ever reaching parity with the game it draws so much inspiration from. The speed of the game means that you’ll only be collecting maybe one in five stars that flies across the screen,making it a disheartening experience despite the constant climbing of your combo meter in the corner. The game’s encouraging proclamations of “good” and “great” become somewhat patronising and while it’s not hard to make a life last for some time, you never feel that you did particularly well in contrast to Doodle Jump’s, in which frequent terrain changes make you feel as if you’ve actually achieved something. To combat my inability to react to the stars in time I found myself tilting violently to move  faster, making the game ever more frustrating as I could no longer see the screen a problem that’s unfortunate to see this far into the iPhone’s lifecycle. The omission of online leader boards is an unfortunate one as competition with friends might counteract the feelings of impunity one gets when playing the game alone.

Star Rush is hardly the first Doodle Jump clone on the app store nor will it be the last and for this reason it’s impossible to recommend.  While there might be less interesting clones out there on the app store, there’s no place in such a market place for a clone which fails to match its inspiration is such a spectacular manner.