Powerpuff Girls: Mojo Madness

It's good when getting through a game results in some sort of noble outcome. After hours of slogging away through perilous platforming sections or skulking through Nazi-ridden woodland, you want the satisfaction of having saved the princess/hostage/world at the very least.

Powerpuff Girls: Mojo Madness however has you trying to stop something which, on the surface, doesn't seem like such a bad thing at all. That is, Mojo Jojo turning everyone on earth into monkeys.

If there's a downside to growing a furry coat and it becoming socially acceptable to spend your days hanging from tree branches and throwing your own excrement at other people/monkeys, I can't see it.

Anyway, agree with the ultimate goal or not, Powerpuff Girls has you taking control of the cartoon girl trio and fighting back against hoards of Mojo's henchmen in order to destroy four 'monkey beacons'.

Since, as the game explains at the beginning, "Fuzzy Lumpkins has been experimenting with his sausage splitter", these enemies are largely made up of sausage soldiers although there's a variety of other projectiles and boss characters out to get you as well.

The three Powerpuff Girls - Blossom, Bubbles and Buttercup - each star in slightly different kinds of levels, although all 16 of them follow a similar theme, which is jetpacking either left to right or down to up on the screen while shooting or punching down a constant stream of enemies.

Basically, it's a side-scrolling shooter, but one that looks more like a cartoon platformer on the surface.

The rules of the game are quite simple: get to the end of each level (and through a final boss fight) without losing all of your lives. Your health bar ticks down on the left of the screen every time you're hit with a rogue rocket or something that similarly smarts, and every time it reaches empty you lose one of your three lives.

Of course, there are health pick-ups along the way as well as other temporary upgrades to your powers, which include a shield and a sonic blast capable of simultaneously flattening pretty much everything on screen.

These are useful, but equally useful if you're not too bothered about getting a high score is dodging the incoming enemies instead of risking losing health by confronting them.

There are points in each level where you have to clear the screen to continue, but you don't have to obliterate everything on the level in order to pass it. As you might have guessed based on the game's licence, this isn't the most challenging shooter you'll find on mobile phone.

It is a very colourful one though, with a visual style young fans of the Powerpuff Girls cartoon series are bound to love. Its presentation is slick and even the music is good, although completely repetitive after about five minutes play.

Its 16 levels also offer a fair bit of gameplay and can be revisited at any point if you care about getting a higher score than you got previously. This might not be one for those old enough that they've never actually heard of The Gangreen Gang and co. Or maybe for those who think monkeys inheriting earth would be the best thing ever.

But that still leaves a lot of younger gamers who will find this an enjoyable cartoon shooter to get stuck into, even if it doesn't offer anything particularly ground-shatteringly original.