Rise Up

While this physics-based arcade game can amuse in quick bursts, it's also the same thing over and over, which becomes extremely tedious. In Rise Up, you use the touchscreen to move a circle in just the right place to prevent things shooting from the side or falling from the top of the screen from popping a balloon. This all happens with the assistance of gravity and physics on each object. While this is rather clever, and there are a lot of different geometric shapes that can kill your balloon -- including blocks, circles, lines, and so on -- the action is the same every time. Which is why this gets redundant rather quickly. Sure, it has a "challenge" section where things get really hard, but even this mode doesn't have enough variety to keep the game from being repetitive. It also doesn't help that the game is silent — no music, no sound effects, no nothing — but the video ads, which pop up randomly, have both, and are thus more glaring by contrast. All of which is why that balloon is doomed, and Rise Up is a game you won't play very long.