Brothers in Arms: Art of War

If you need to be told what the Brothers in Arms series is all about then frankly you'd have been no use in World War II because you just wouldn't have been paying attention while those mortars were flying past your head.

The franchise has been going for a while now and, while on the home consoles it offers a much more strategic WWII shooter than Medal of Honor or Call of Duty games, on mobile it's very much a simple run and gun affair. Being only too happy to flatten Nazis from a vantage point behind a huge bazooka, though, we're not complaining about that at all.

The game starts off impressively with your soldier parachuting into the opening Netherlands campaign, desperately dodging explosions on his way. It then descends into completing objectives – most of which involve blowing up something or someone – by following onscreen red arrows and killing anything that moves around each corner. Or even in bushes at times.

Those pesky enemy soldiers come at you in a range of ways so there's no risk of getting complacent throughout the game's 13 missions. They duck behind sand bags, lunge out of windows with machine guns firing, and come at you gunning from the safety of big tanks.

Fortunately, not only do you have a squadron of AI soldiers by your side for support, but there's also plenty of added firepower to pick up along the way. Such as grenades, which you can also throw back at the enemy if they cheekily lob one in your direction, and bazookas that, when lined up properly, are more than capable of setting alight whole groups of adversaries.

The action might be mindless – targeting when on foot is largely automatic, although you do need to be facing in the right direction if you don't want to pump lead into the nearest fence post – but there's enough variety to ensure it does require a little strategy. There's no point running up to a man behind a machine gun until you've searched nearby buildings for a meatier rifle, while booby traps and landmines are always a hazard if you're not paying attention.

You're not always at a disadvantage, though. Various tank levels enable you to mow down soldiers and go up against other tanks, while nifty mortar-dropping sections have you covering your fellow soldiers by shelling the enemies ahead of them.

The game is viewed slightly from above with a few first-person moments, all of which works very well, and the controls are perfectly streamlined so as not to impede you when it comes to shooting everything in sight. There is a bit of slowdown when things really kick off – which is fairly frequently – but in practice it's not something that causes too many problems.

Compared to the previous Brothers in Arms mobile game, Earned in Blood, this is more of the same but with almost twice as many missions – 13 to the previous game's seven, a much more generous number. Granted, the first half of the game is pretty gentle, with short levels, frequent checkpoints, and big arrows to keep you from getting lost. But later game sections will need repeated play.

This can be a bit frustrating when your death is caused by being surrounded by tanks and not being able to diagonally line-up your turret fast enough. Generally, though, a bit of trial-and-error or just running and hiding gets you through.

Art of War can't really be credited with doing anything particularly new and exciting, but it is a very polished game. Its levels are full of detail (even potted plants can be destroyed by gunfire, for instance) and there are plenty of little touches that stand this out above the many similar mobile games. Just don't expect to be solving quandaries more complex than whether to first flatten soldier A or soldier B with your big tank, because you won't be finding them here. In the chaos of war, there's no time for such trivialities.