The Great Giana Sisters is a Super Mario Bros. ripoff. THERE I SAID IT. Course, this is not some startling new revelation: The original game came out in 1987, and lasted all of five minutes before Nintendo swarmed upon it like a pack of angry wildebeest. 20-something years later, the game returned in a new form on the DS and iPhone, somehow managing to avoid Nintendo’s wandering eye despite once again leaping into their kitchen, eating all their food, and probably pooping in the fireplace.

The storyline, as with all platform games, is of entirely no consequence, and frankly I can’t even remember it. You play Giana, as you run from one end of a level to the other, grabbing diamonds, throwing fireballs and stomping on not-Goombas. There’s clearly nothing groundbreaking about this, but it’s quite fun and has a decent amount of personality, with enemies shooting a glare at the camera as you jump over them and C64-style music setting the retro tone.

The thing that makes or breaks classic-style games on iOS devices is the controls, and Giana fares very well here – the lack of a run button means you can focus on precision jumping and shooting, and it’s honestly the most comfortable platforming control scheme I’ve felt on the device yet. This is a good thing, because the later levels were clearly made with the DS in mind, with lots of precision jumping and generally bastardly enemy placement, so every bit of dexterity allowed by the controls counts.

Not everything is great, though – the graphics, aside from Giana, are all poorly upsized from the DS version using a scaling filter, robbing them of some of their pixel-art beauty. Perhaps more crucially a problem, though, every boss is the fucking same. I don’t mean that in that you use the same trick on different bosses, I mean it’s the exact same boss, only slightly harder and needing an extra hit before he dies! Oh, and the room tileset is different. This might have been okay in 1987, but considering the polish on the rest of the game, it feels especially lazy, and marrs the experience.

Overall, the game is fantastically polished with the exception of a few grubby stains, diabolically hard in the later stages, and has a wonderful retro feeling. I give it six out of seven filter-resized sprites.