Dead Effect

If you've paid attention to console gaming over the past five years, you can probably work out what Dead Effect is about just from its name.

There are zombies. They are in space. You should probably go and kill them.

What follows is a reasonably proficient FPS with a few neat ideas. Its developer never strays too far away from its comfort zone here, but still provides a few hours of engaging zombie slaughter for anyone who hasn't killed some undead monsters in the last 24 hours.

Zombie space

At the start of the game, you wake up in a ship overrun with the undead. It's up to you to figure out how the ship turned into a mess of blood and body parts. You also need to fathom whether there are any other survivors, and how in the blazes you're going to get out of there alive.

You control your character via the now-standard mobile on-screen sticks and buttons. There aren't any fancy new control mechanics here, no. Still, you are reasonably sure your slides and taps are going to result in the actions they're supposed to.

After murdering a few scuttling creatures, you'll discover that the difficulty gets ramped up and you are now shooting down hordes of flesh munchers. You're almost always outnumbered, but the weapons you find are strong enough - and the ammo plentiful enough - to very rarely leave you outgunned.

There are some interesting ideas on offer here, including an intriguing section of levels where you're infected with the virus that causes the zombification. More often than not, though, you're treading ground here you've wandered a hundred times before.

The graphics in Dead Effect are polished, though there are a few glitches here and there. Furthermore, the menus are pretty painful on the eyes.

But there is a chunkiness and reliability to the violence. And while the deep space setting has been done to death, there's still a creepy atmosphere among the metallic corridors and lonely glowing buttons.

There may not be much in the way of subtlety in Dead Effect, then, and it might not rank among the most innovative games on the App Store, but there's a lot of gory, mindless fun here. And sometimes that's all you really want from a game.