Futuridium EP

Futuridium EP is a game about fine lines. On one hand there's the tiny margins of error between a successful run and a catastrophic failure, and between weaving through the game's slab-like architecture and crashing into it.

And then there's the tiny gap between agonising frustration and glorious victory that the game trades on. Part excruciating pain, part delicious triumph, it's here that the game just gets its balance slightly wrong.

The aim of the game is to pilot a spaceship over a series of levels. Scattered around these levels are some blue boxes that you need to destroy. Once you've shot them all a final node appears. Shoot that and you move on to the next level.

To begin with things are reasonably simple, but it doesn't take long before you're weaving through turret fire and dipping between various levels to make sure you blow up all of the blue boxes as quickly as possible.

The twist is that your energy bar is constantly depleting, and once it hits zero it's Game Over. Destroying the blue nodes and the core is the only way to fill it up, so you need to clear levels as quickly as possible. Easier said than done when the difficulty gradually slides up from Hard to Oh, Come On!

The controls take a little bit of getting used to. Sliding a finger around on the left of the screen moves your ship left to right and up and down. A box in the bottom right fires your weapon, and tapping outside of the box performs a full reverse, flipping your ship around to fly back the way it came.

You can swipe on the screen to change the current song and to change the position of the camera from third- to first-person and vice versa. When it works the system is great, but it doesn't take much of a slip to flip you around when you wanted to fire.

And it's here that the game falls down. It's fine to be challenging, but to mess up because of a couple of pixels' worth of finger-slip is almost a frustration too far. You'll push on, but there'll be black ice in your heart where there should be joy.

Futuridium EP is fun, and it's a polished piece of work, but it's another iOS game let down by its controls. Chasing the high scores is fun, but bear in mind you're going to be constantly irked by a control system that's not quite up to the task.