The classic Frogger has spawned a number of imitators and spin-offs over the years, not least the recent 'retro 8-bit' Crossy Road - Bring Me home is in the same vein but crazily fun and crazily different at the same time. With the land disappearing behind your 'hovercraft' character, with traffic non-sotp, with train lines to traverse, with bottomless pits to avoid, Bring Me Home is a heap of casual fun.

From the Store description:

In a world set in the retro future, hovercrafts fly and the roads go on forever. A sentient hovercraft set its sight towards home to start an epic journey that may just take forever.

Inspired by the classic video game Frogger, Bring Me Home is a casual arcade endless runner game for Windows Phone where you go against the flow avoiding traffic, evading trees and onwards to where you belong. Every time you die, you possess another craft in another strange land and onward you go again. 

Entirely supported by ads, which cost £1.50 to remove in the UK, here's the game in action:

Nicely and smoothly animated, you move by swiping in each direction and it all becomes second nature very quickly. Get it wrong and you're road kill in a maelstrom of spare parts and mangled plastic and metal... Get it right and you accrue a new high score and a few chips besides...

Unusual features, for this genre, are railtracks (some shown at the top and bottom, above left), weather and the sheer fact that the land you've crossed falls away behind you on a regular basis, lending a real urgency to the whole 'crossing' thing; (right) there is an in-game currency, but it's not linked to real world money at all, it's just a way to accrue funds to buy new hovercraft. And, in an unusual take on the 'wait for delivery' freemium mechanic, you can set your own desired chip amounts - the idea is to get you coming back later on. And you will!

So, aside from the adrenaline thrill of crossing, jumping and dying, there's the possibility of 'awesome' new hovercraft and with a variety of innovative ways of getting more chips, including this one armed bandit (right)!

With a jaunty soundtrack, fun and quick gameplay, and no tiresome swingeing in-game purchases (other than removing the ads), Bring Me Home is almost a perfect title to entertain the kids on a long journey - or indeed yourself in bored moments. It's fun and it's fast, while the way it starts with a whole new random set/sequence of obstacles every single time means that the gameplay has that rare factor - longevity.

You can download this for free in the Store here.