Into the Blue

Line drawing meets castle defence - Into the Blue strikes an interesting blend that's distinctly iPhone and definitely enjoyable.

A five-mission campaign has you direct the colonial blue forces in defence against encroaching pink robots.

Their target is your base, which sits in the centre of the screen amid fields of energy-rich crystals. Keeping the fuchsia fiends at bay is a matter of rotating your central defencive turret to blast them off the planet's surface.

Harvesting crystals from the surrounding fields enables you to purchase additional defences, including automatic turrets, additional harvesters, and protective shielding.

Protecting these harvesters is critical, so you're constantly issuing directions to them by drawing lines from your base to nearby crystal fields and then hastily moving back to your central turret to shoot robots inching toward your base or firing on your harvesters.

It's a matter of balancing economy and defensive action, even more so when tackling Survival mode. Not being able to do both simultaneously is a letdown, particularly given the missed opportunity to leverage multi-touch. Allowing multi-touch wouldn't diminish the game's difficulty since your base is capable of docking one harvester at any given time.

This puts a limit on how quickly you can stock crystals, though it also makes controlling your harvesters tricky. While you're able to direct harvesters between your base and crystal fields without issue, sending them anywhere else on the screen spells trouble.

Harvesters do not stay put at the end of a line: instead, they wander about. This makes them tougher to defend because you can't just have them camp near your base and wait their turn to dock. Restricting harvester movement or opening up multi-touch control would avoid this annoyance.