Comic Blast

Game developers can be a freaky bunch. Sometimes they go bonkers and pack their software with insane graphics that could only come from ingesting illegal substances. Perhaps it's the pressures of work, or perhaps they're just, er, expressing their 'creativity'.

The more cynical player might argue that it's a ploy to distract us from any doubts about the game's quality. Well, it so happens that we're one of those cynics, and we're not going to fall for it one little bit. Nosireebob.

Oh look! It's a giant spinning head with laser beams coming out of its nose! Coooooooool!

Dammit, suckered again.

Comic Blast is a vertical scrolling shoot-'em-up. The premise is that 'Smiley Land' has been invaded by the unspeakably evil 'Smiley Lord'. Naturally, this provides a great excuse to hop into your spacecraft and blast your way through wave upon wave of projectile-shooting beasties, racking up some big points while you're at it.

As already mentioned, the game is a bit mad. You character is a giant smiley face, for one thing. For another, the end-of-level baddies range from giant angry butterflies to robots with wrecking balls for hands. And of course, there's the matter of the spinning stone head…

But despite the goofball insanity of the window dressing, at heart this is a solidly made game that harks back to the golden age of shoot-'em-ups. The template is the same, working your way through level after level, with the pace and tempo gradually increasing to the point where you need superhuman reflexes to avoid dying.

And like classic shooters, there's a pattern of movement to pretty much everything that happens onscreen. Which means that if you play it for long enough, you'll be able to memorise every single phase of the action and react accordingly. Whether that's a good or a bad thing is a matter of personal preference.

The primary fire is automatic, which is a sensible decision considering the diminutive size of the phone keypad, with variations on type of firepower being unlocked as you progress. There's also a secondary fire which the player directly controls, and this is a teensy bit more powerful (though less easily deployed) than the primary fire.

The rest of the controls are given over to controlling the direction of your craft, which has an energy bar. This means that instead of dying after being hit once, your craft can soak up a little bit of damage before exploding into a ball of flames.

All in all, we liked our time with Comic Blast. If there are any complaints, it's that the parallax scrolling in the background has a tendency to blend with the snowballing firestorm of bombs, meteors, power-ups and laser-fire that's already coming at you. It means you have to concentrate doubly hard in order to filter out the static, and this might leave players feeling slightly frustrated.

But despite that, it's good for quick, short bursts of play when you've got time to kill. And what could be a better way of killing time than to kill a giant purple squid with a crown on its head? Nothing, that's what.