Swingline

Swingline is a free one-button swinging game in the Stickman Hook family, played Spider-Man style over a bright 3D city in daylight: the camera rides at your back, a power line runs down the middle of a street canyon, pastel towers, glass windows and sidewalk trees stream past on both sides, and the swing itself lives on the line. Hold the button and a line shoots out to the nearest ring ahead; you swing under it like a pendulum, and the moment you let go you fly. That is the whole control: one button, hold and release. What the other games in the genre do not do is what happens while you hold. In Swingline the line keeps winding in for as long as you keep the button down, so the swing gets tighter and faster - and the line heats up. Hold too long and it burns through and drops you. Every grab is a small bet: more speed against a longer fall.

The second rule is the timing. Let go just past the bottom of the arc, as you start to swing up - in your first runs a yellow ring on the arc marks the spot - and the release is a PERFECT: three coins and the farthest launch you can get. Release at the very bottom and you fly flat and drop; release late and you climb but lose ground. The number on screen is metres, and everything - the rings, the wind, the ground that ends the run the moment you touch it - is there to make that number bigger. There is nothing to install and no account.

The rings change as you go, each one asking the same hold-and-release for a different reason. Static rings first, then moving rings that bob up and down so the grab has a moment, brittle rings that snap after one second on the line, wind bands that push you forwards or back, ground bumpers you tap over to launch upwards, ghost rings that flicker in and out, a stretch of the line with no rings at all where you have to fall onto a bumper, drifting rings that slide sideways, and finally the storm line where everything is mixed and the gaps are wide. Along the way five one-time events hit each run once: lightning, rain that slows the winding, a power surge that doubles it, a storm that darkens the sky so only your own glow shows the rings, and a sagging line where the ring you hold sinks.

Coins come from distance, PERFECT releases and bumpers, and every run - races included - ends with three cards; coins buy one of them: Reel winds the line faster, Grip lets you grab from farther away, Line takes longer to burn through, Net adds a safety net that catches one fall (there is none until you buy it), and Launch starts the run faster and higher. Eight levels each. The first runs end early; the cards are what carry you into the later rings, and a realistic-player model puts the whole ladder of rings at under half an hour for an average player and the full set of cards at about an hour. The line itself never ends: past the storm the rings keep coming, and the start screen and the end of every run show your next goal - the next kind of ring and where it starts, then a new mark every 500 metres - on a heated line that fills as your best distance grows. A daily map gives everyone the same rings for the day, and the online race puts four players on the same 900 metres of line at once - empty seats are filled by local rivals, so the race always starts. Touching the ground in a race is not the end: you respawn hanging from the last ring you passed, with a short time penalty, and swing on.

Everything works with one finger on a phone - hold anywhere on the screen, let go to fly - and on a desktop with any key you like (Space and J included), with P to pause. Nothing is ever bought with real money, and your best distance, coins and cards are stored on your own device. If you like Stickman Hook, Learn to Fly or any hold-and-release runner, this is the one where holding longer is a choice, not a habit.