Save the Planet review - An epic premise with a boring execution

Protecting the Earth from deadly meteorites that are on a crash course with the planet should be an epic and exciting quest that fills you with an epic sense of self worth.

Well not so in Save the Planet, in which case the process is a slow, bumbling ordeal that you'll quickly want to forget about.

The set-up is this: there's a spaceship flying around the Earth in an endless circle, and you need to strategically drop shields around it to stop the impending doom from falling meteors.

When you start releasing a shield, your ship slows to a total crawl. Leaving you wide open to attack from meteors approaching the other side of the planet.

The strategy then is to plan ahead. To start dropping shields well in advance, and to hope and pray that you don't miss any of the number of tiny meteors. But you probably will no matter how hard you try.

The problem is, with your attention stuck on trying to place a shield just in time, you'll often miss another meteor hurtling towards the planet and be totally unable to do anything in time.

There's a secondary shield that acts as a safety net, but one more hit through the same space and it's game over.

One of the main problems is that drawing a shield is actually quite fiddly, which is moderately impressive given that it only involves holding the screen.

But it's unclear where the shield starts drawing from. A trail appears from behind the ship, but the line seems to start at the middle.

By the time you've drawn enough of a shield for it to matter, a meteor has sailed past it, only a few pixels away from the very edge of the protective layer, and crashed into the planet.

And then you'll watch as two more meteors come sailing in on opposite sides of the screen, with no chance to stop one, if not both of them.

Adding to the frustration is an unlock system which lets you buy new ships using stars you earn while playing. But there's no indication of what each ship does differently.

So the first ship you buy may well end up actually being worse than the starter ship. And you can't refund it, so you've just wasted a ton of cash you'll have to spend ages earning back.

There's a good game lurking in Save the Planet somewhere - the premise and gameplay is so simple that it seems impossible for it to fail.

But fail it does. On numerous levels. Leaving you confused and annoyed in equal measure as you watch in vain while the world you love is utterly destroyed.

With clearer upgrades and faster gameplay, Save the Planet might have saved itself. But ultimately its doomed to die just like everyone on the planet you're so desperately trying to protect.