Pyro Jump Rescue (Free) is interestingly named. It insinuates that the game is about leaping around to save a pyromaniac. That’d be an interesting idea for a mobile game, but it’s not what Pyro Jump Rescue is about. Instead, this action / adventure title works off the barrel-blasting mechanics popularized by 1994’s classic Donkey Kong Country for the Super Nintendo.

Pyro Jump Rescue stars a little flame dude who’s on a quest to save his pals from captivity. Though the levels connect seamlessly, you start a new one every time you save a friend.

The world of Pyro Jump Rescue is made up of wheels that constantly turn. Some of these wheels help you get from place-to-place, whereas others are deadly to the touch. When you stick to a benign wheel, you simply need to tap the screen in order to launch yourself to your next point. If, however, you hit a spiked wheel (or otherwise fall victim to a trapped wheel), you lose.

The spiked wheels are frowning, by the way. That’s how you know they’re the bad guys.

It’s surprisingly tricky to get a grip on Pyro Jump Rescue, at least until you realize the game is supposed to be Donkey Kong Country, not Super Mario Galaxy. In other words, momentum and gravity don’t work the way you might expect from a game that flings you around a bunch of spheres.

If you want to survive, you need to think in straight lines. You tap the screen when you’re directly across from the area you want to reach. That’s all there is to it. To make things easier, trails of coins guide you where you need to go.

Coins are also necessary for unlocking checkpoints, unless you’re really in love with the idea of re-starting at the first jumping-off point for every (long, long) level whenever you throw yourself face-first into a spiked wheel. There are also power-ups you can purchase with said coins, though every red-hot cent you pick up should be horded for checkpoints.

Pyro Jump Rescue is a free-to-play game, so unsurprisingly, checkpoints gradually become spaced further apart, and more expensive to unlock. Coins are quite plentiful, however, and you can also watch a video once every hour to earn 120 coins.

These small graces lessen the sting of the sting of Pyro Jump Rescue‘s free-to-play trappings a bit, as does the option to watch a video for another life whenever you bung things up (though you can only do this once with each turn).

But in between watching videos for coins, watching videos for more lives, and watching the vanilla ads that pop up every so often, it feels like you spend more time watching ads in Pyro Jump Rescue than actually playing the game. If nothing else, players should receive an extra ad-free turn whenever they  make a mistake. Later levels of the game get pretty brutal.

Despite its widely-spaced checkpoints and ad deluge, Pyro Jump Rescue is an engaging little action game that’s guaranteed to make you say “Aw, one more time" when you screw up. Just try not to let yourself get distracted by all the shiny pitches for slot machine apps.