Medieval HD

It's often said that the best form of defence is offence, but you'd never guess that by the number of castle and tower defence games available for iPhone and iPod touch.

Medieval HD is one of the few to make an aggressive attack on the conventions of the castle defence genre by balancing its defensive gameplay with offensive elements.

It’s just a shame that it doesn’t quite have the skill to pull it off.

Your main weapon of choice is a ballista (a versatile ancient Greek war machine), positioned at the top of the blue castle ramparts, which fires a range of arrows and rocks across the screen toward an evil red army.

Firing a deadly salvo is done by pulling back the bow and letting go to unleash an arrow at speed toward enemies as they march on your territory.

It’s the default control method, but it’s also incredibly tiring due to the weakness of the starting arrow and sheer number of enemies. Stick with it and you're rewarded for your masochism with a 20 per cent bonus in gold, gathered by hitting enemies in painful places, but this isn’t worth the wrist pains.

Disappointingly, switching to the far-less painful tap method brings about its own problems: everything becomes too easy.

Arrows fire quickly and accurately, making enemies a breeze to eliminate and once affordable upgrades start rolling in it gets even easier to carve through the opposition.

Enemy catapults and balloons that appear as the game progresses can be tougher to strike, if only because one moves quickly and the other tends to be partially protected by the enemy castl. However, the overpowered healing arrow tends to mitigate this extra threat.

There’s more to the game than just shooting enemies, thankfully. On the left-hand side is the red castle just waiting to either be destroyed by your ballista and catapults, or plundered by your own troops.

In theory, this should offer a bit more strategy to proceedings. In practice, troops and their respective buildings are simply too expensive and too ineffectual to make them worth purchasing. Why bother spending 2,200 gold on stables and a single, weak cavalry unit when you can purchase the more destructive, effective, and infinite fire arrows for far less?

While Medieval HD looks to offer a few new tricks to the castle defence playbook, it dissolves into a familiar, monotonous tap marathon.

It’s fine for quick bursts of play - helped by some well drawn graphics and well paced ballista upgrades - but it could have been so much more.