Arcade Park: Volume 2

Makers of traditional board games caught on pretty quickly to the benefits of bundling a variety of games together into one package, giving birth to compendiums.

They were decent value for money and offered something for everyone. Although Pocket Gamer staff recall that as a kid you always managed to lose some of the particularly tiny pieces down the back of the settee.

Here in the 21st century, video game publishers are every bit as keen to squeeze each last penny from a title. One way of doing this, just like board games of yesteryear, is by releasing them together in a compilation.

Herocraft, for instance, has taken it upon itself to release the next edition of its mobile compilation series with Arcade Park 2. However, rather than the games being out-and-out classics, the titles here are three versions 'based' on former classics – and we'd suggest none would have stood the test of time as solo outings.

Nevertheless, let's look at what's on offer.

First up is Gold Hunter. Here you play as the title character as he attempts to regain his gold, which he lost on the stock market. The idea of this platform-style game is to avoid the guards, or sentinels, and gather up the gold, moving up ladders and climbing across wires.

To make things a little easier, Gold Hunter is armed with the BFT-5000, a blow torch that can cut through the stone floor, which is great for getting you out of scrapes – if you're cornered by the sentinels a quick blast of your torch opens the floor for you to drop down to make you escape, or serves to trap your enemies.

You need a fair level of strategy about you as you make your way around the vaults, which amounts to a reasonable challenge. But to be honest, the basic graphics and sparse sound leave Gold Hunter as an average effort at best.

Next up, Galaxy Invaders. No prizes for guessing that this is a Space Invaders clone, where your spacecraft patrols across the bottom of the screen as the alien invaders maraud from the top.

The game is all about blasting away at the invaders with well-timed shots of your plasma cannon, which can only fire one shot at a time (there's no auto-fire here). You only move on to the next level once you have destroyed every last craft from the attacking wave.

The sound is limited but features some decent explosions, while a sinister sounding title screen soundtrack sets the tone for the ensuing onslaught of the invaders. Meanwhile the alien craft are nicely detailed for their size and move across the screen in typical staggered steps, à la Space Invaders. The most impressive thing visually, though, are the well-drawn backgrounds on each level.

Overall, Galaxy Invaders is an okay if unspectacular shooter, and one based on the oldest game going at that.

Finally, Digger, a clear clone of Boulder Dash and other similar efforts, is perhaps the strongest of the trio, simply because of its playability.

As Digger, you dig your way through the ground in search of all the diamonds to progress to the next level, with the evil Hobbins hot on your tail. At first they can only travel through the tunnels you dig, but after a while they mutate and can then eat through the soil, adding a decent sense of urgency.

You have a gun that can be used to fend off the enemies, although it takes a few seconds for it to power back up after you've fired it. Elsewhere, the bags of gold scattered across the playing area can act like a weapon, as when you dig under them they can fall, knocking out a baddie if you time it right.

The control can be a little sluggish at times, but the cat-and-mouse concept behind the diamond collecting is pretty good fun.

Overall, Arcade Park 2 offers a variety of so-so games that suffer from a general lack of polish and an obvious lack of anything new. It falls a little short of the original (also rather rough-and-ready) Arcade Park both in terms of quantity of games and quality, although if you're a penny-pinching Boulder Dash fan you might give it a whirl.