Dead Run brings together several very popular things right now: zombies, endless runners, pixel graphics and games that can be played with just one tap at a time.

The premise is very simple: rescue humans and kill zombies. The trick is to tell which is which as you run along, and not to kill humans or get eaten by zombies, both of which end your game.

The aim is to rescue as many humans as you can and rack up a nice big score, which can be compared to others via an online leaderboard that the game tracks.

You start with a baseball bat that must be swung with a tap before reaching the zombies, or not swung with a pause as you pass by humans. Rescued humans run along behind you, and should you rescue a lot of them, they’ll form a large crowd that will start edging you towards the right side of the screen.

That reduces the amount of reaction time you have to decide if the upcoming silhouette is human- or zombie-shaped, and even a millisecond’s hesitation will cost you.

Killing humans, while tragic and game-ending, is still kind of cool as the each one has a name, and for fun the devs threw in a bunch of celebrity names so you could well end up killing Megan Fox or William Shatner.

Along the way you’ll also collect shells for your secondary weapon, a shotgun, which are needed to take out fat zombies. Should you unlock a handful of special achievements, you’ll be given access to hats that give you special powers. Flash’s hat, for instance, makes you run really fast, which ramps up the difficulty of an already-tough game.

As with many great games, Dead Run executes a simple concept that’s very hard to master. I found myself constantly wanting to better my last score, and once I got “in the zone” my scores improved nearly every time I played. There’s just something so satisfying getting your timing right, and knowing your perceptions are improving with every game.

This isn’t a game to get if you want to spend hours at a time playing because you won’t (it does get repetitive after a while), but it’s a brilliant diversion for your commute or any other task that requires you to do nothing while it finishes.

In the end Dead Run is great fun, very cheap at just R25.99 on iTunes and a great way to support local game developer – Twoplus Games.

If you’d like to try the game out before buying, head on over to playdeadrun.com where you can play the web version in your browser. All it’s missing is hats. When you’re convinced, click here to get it on iTunes.