Great Elude

You are being attacked by your enemies! That's the premise of Great Elude, as summed up by the first line of the instructions. You don't really need to know much more than that since being attacked and attacking back is all you actually do in this game, although there is some semblance of a plot involving a fighter pilot called Max Wagner and a fictional war between the countries of Cruxia and Utamo.

Whatever, though. All that's really important is that pressing up speeds up your plane, down slows it down, and left and right enable you to dodge enemy fire from a variety of places, including other planes and helicopters in the sky and towers and tanks on the ground. Meanwhile, '5' unleashes a spray of bullets and '*' fires homing missiles if you've picked some up. Other collectables are limited to arrows that give you fuel so you don't run out and crash, and stars that add bonus points to your score, should you be concerned with getting a high score.

Essentially, Great Elude is a very generic shooter in terms of how it plays. The hook, it seems, is its realistic polygon-crafted visuals that should stand out among a hundred mobile shooters viewed top-down or in 2D. However, for reasons I'll go into in a second, this hook has lowered its final score by at least one point.

These visuals can be admired across five different levels, each of which take place in a unique environment. You begin shooting aircraft in a capital city, then move onto war in the desert (taking out tanks and other land-based enemies), an island, a cold battle among icy landscapes and, finally, a level played belting over luscious green countryside.

I say admired because Great Elude's visuals are definitely its strongest point. Much stronger than the thumping but repetitive music that needs turning down after about 20 seconds, for instance, and the gameplay which involves a lot of weaving left and right to avoid flurries of bullets and repeatedly pressing fire to get in a few hits of your own. They're not brilliant visuals, though, because despite having depth and detail, the polygon buildings and cliff faces do look a bit wonky and lacking the right perspective at times.

We can forgive wonky, of course. What we can't forgive is the game's final level: Sky Commander. In the stage select screen, a small section of Sky Commander is previewed and it looks lovely. Suspiciously lovely in fact; a bit like you're soaring over a pixellated satellite image of the New Forest at proper fighter jet speeds.

How this one particularly picturesque level has been achieved on a mobile phone then becomes apparent when you reach that level and the frame rate suddenly drops by at least half. Suddenly the game is moving at an unplayable pace, resulting in hits you can't see and bullet attacks you can't time. For that reason, I couldn't even complete Great Elude. The first four levels took about 20 minutes to whiz through while the final one is about as futile as trying to run Far Cry 2 on an Atari 400.

So there you have it. Great Elude wouldn't have been that great even with a playable final level. It's a neat enough shooter, yet too short and lacking in replayability. But, unfortunately, that final stage really crashes and burns the whole thing.