As anyone who has read Dune can tell you, Shai-Hulud are serious business. With the appropriately-titled Death Worm, you can step into the skin of one of these giant sandworms and terrorize humanity in deserts, cities and even jungles.

When playing Death Worm, your goals are profoundly simple: Kill and destroy everything you can. The game plays out like a type of underground Rampage, as you send your worm burrowing through the earth, breaking the surface to devour people, cars and even aircraft. Destroying larger targets and chaining explosions together sends your score skyrocketing and can even help score power-ups for your worm.

Each of the game's settings have a series of objectives for you to complete, which usually boil down to "Kill X people," or in some cases "Kill X people without taking any damage." Death Worm is not a thinking-man's game, but the screeching guitars, wanton disregard for human life, and the opportunity to play as a ravenous monster more than make up for a lack of sophistication.

While playing through the game's stages, you'll be frequently given the opportunity to upgrade your worm, which can include toughening up its skin, making your monster bigger, or even increasing the power of your special abilities. These abilities include a fireball that can be shot in any direction or a nitro boost that makes your worm move faster, and shoot higher out of the ground for a period of time. While the special abilities can be fun diversions, the real draw of the game is sending your worm tearing through crowds of pixilated civilians.

Death Worm is a fun game, perfect for playing on the go or when you only have a few minutes to spare. Its graphics are clear and easy to see, and it's a simple enough game to drop and pick back up later. Unfortunately, the gameplay suffers from a common problem with games on the iPhone: Bad controls.

Like many game makers, the developers of Death Worm have opted for on-screen buttons to control your worm. The game's directional pad and special ability buttons are conveniently located and rarely cover up anything important. However, the directional pad feels particularly unresponsive, a problem exacerbated by the fact that you can't feel whether you're pushing in the right place or not. Too often during gameplay, your worm will come to a complete stop because your thumb slipped off the virtual direction pad.

Like too many games on the iPhone, Death Worm ignores the system's specific capabilities. Instead of finding an innovative way to incorporate the iPhone's accelerometer or multi-touch capabilities into the game, Death Worm uses an approximation of a nearly three decade old control scheme, better suited for a NES controller in 1986 than an iPhone in 2010.

While the controls aren't as precise as they should be, and they certainly don't take proper advantage of the iPhone's features, they also don't prevent Death Worm from being a fun way to kill a few minutes (and a few pesky humans). Death Worm is a great purchase and a steal at only $0.99.

Final Score: B+