Muscle Run Review (iPhone)

If you can tolerate Muscle Run for long enough, it does hold some entertainment value – just not in the way that you might expect. For a game that’s about speed and precision, you’ll find yourself unable to achieve either most of the time. It's only once you discover the comical physics of the racer when you’ll breathe a sigh of relief that your money didn’t all go to waste.

Story mode is where you’ll be spending the majority of your time. Split into various stages, each level constitutes a series of challenges as bland as unbuttered bread. Clearing all of these will ‘reward’ you with a final race that, erm, isn’t actually a race but instead an additional list of objectives for you to trudge through in your American muscle car.

Controlling your ride comes down to tilting the device left and right whilst it does the accelerating for you. Holding your finger on the screen will put the car into reverse – important knowledge to have, considering you’ll be using it when you collide with almost every vehicle that comes your way.

If you don’t eventually submit to the awful responsiveness of the controls and ride the hard shoulder, the alternative is to enjoy the unintentional but hilarious sight of giant trucks and saloon cars flying into the air as you swerve into them. Collision detection doesn't fare much better either, being as reliable as National Rail in the middle of winter.

Upgrading the various cars on offer with money earned through races or in-app purchases (which aren't needed) is something you’ll want to do early on to make handling more bearable. The price-to-content ratio is excellent, but that means nothing considering you’ll get bored long before you reach the end of the road.

Version Tested: iOS 5

The Drowning Review (iPhone)

The Drowning’s like buying a Lamborghini to drive around London. Sure, it looks great, but you’ve still gotta’ stop at the lights like everyone else. When you’re moving, you might as well be on a pushbike.

The game’s opening is like a budget Call of Duty: in first-person, you’re beached on a wooden boat. You’re surrounded by impressive environments in a closed environment with ugly character models waiting to be shot. It's all very accessible really - the arcade-style missions, the unintentionally hilarious upgrade screen, the star ratings - but the narrative is oddly po-faced, which doesn’t match the rest of the game’s tone. The end of the world is pretty cheery... but not.

FPS games don’t work very well without a traditional controller, and this is no exception. If the questions is 'how do you solve a problem like virtual thumbsticks?', what The Drowning has come up with isn’t the answer. Navigation is handled by tapping your intended location, and you swipe to look around. Your character weaves around obstacles well enough, but it just feels... wrong. You shoot by tapping the screen with two fingers, the middle point between them being the place the bullet will strike.

Often, you’ll tap two fingers at the screen and one finger will land first, sending you to the opposite end of the arena. I say ‘arena’ because that’s really all there is. There’s no campaign in a traditional sense, just tight maps where you either attack or defend against waves of enemies, collecting points... It’s Angry Birds: Shoot-Gun Edition.

Mostly you’ll be firing bullets into people's heads, running around like a moron and then repeating and it feels like a grind a long time before it needs to. You'll need to grind too, as the later enemies can only be killed with specific, unlockable guns. It’s free, but for a game about water zombies, it’s dry.

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Lightning Fighter 2 Review (iPhone)

If Lightning Fighter 2 is indicative of what aerial combat will be like in the future, you’ll want to get a pair of shades. The game throws seizure-inducing lasers at you at a pace the title suggests. Assuming your eyes are still intact then your experience will be an enjoyable, if slightly shallow, one.

You won’t have to do anything too taxing at first: destroy a few jets here and a few tanks there, avoid any shots that come your way, collect the currency and weapon upgrades, tick all the usual shmup boxes. It's your first face-off with one of the end-of-stage bosses however that will give you a taste of the real intensity the game can possess. You’ll need to be as alert as a cat fuelled with caffeine as you progress.

Your ship is controlled with one finger, shadowing your every move while shooting automatically. If you’ve been cursed with (medically-inaccurate term ahoy) sausage-finger syndrome you’ll be lucky to see half of the fluorescent projectiles that come flying at you, but responsiveness is reliable enough to help you out of tight spots – even the narrowest of gaps can be squeezed through if you time your movement correctly.

Once you’re past the bronze stages, you’ll have seen everything there is to see, as silver and gold are just amped-up versions of the 'one ship versus the world' premise. Don’t be too disheartened if you decide to persevere though. There are ships to unlock, which come with their own snazzy weaponry, although you can of course, use IAP. All the unlocks are achievable without them, but buying overpriced gems allows you to bypass the grind by quite a large margin, and certain buffs are also exclusive to this as well.

A good time-waster, then, but the appeal will probably fizzle out after a couple of hours.

Version Tested: iOS

Played for 3 hours.

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