Ice Climber, meet Tetris. Tetris, Ice Climber. I found myself saying that when I was playing one of the better games I’ve seen on the iPhone, titled Flood. Flood combines the gameplay from both retro classics to create well, something that works really well, and an addictive on at that.

Presented in 2D, gamers control a kid running around a level collecting seeds that coming falling down from the top of the screen. These seeds can be than sowed, and they cause bricks to sprout out of the ground, either vertically, or horizontally, allowing the kid to jump up higher ground in order to escape the flood that is coming up from the bottom of the screen.

flood

To confound things a little bit are enemies coming down along with the seeds, and you’ve got like three ways to deal with them (actually it’s more than enough): jump on ’em, throw seeds at ’em or block ’em off with bricks.

There are also other obstacles, like cannon fire, which can be conveniently blocked off with bricks. But the ones that I hate most are overhanging brick structures, which require you to lay your bricks properly so that you can jump through the small, non-enemy infested openings. One mis-lay and you’ll almost certainly be trapped.

Plenty of strategy for such a cute game, Flood has that ability to keep you occupied but I hope that you have a data plan, since it constantly gets on the Internet once you hit the game over screen in order to place your score on a global leaderboard (it even tells you what placing you got).

Flood is still available for free on the App Store; click here to get the game.