Sherlock Holmes: The Official Movie Game

Those expecting a pleasant murder mystery with a side helping of deduction skills are warned. This latest offering from Gameloft is the mobile version of Guy Ritchie’s new, all-action Holmes film, which means you’ll be tapping heads together rather than tapping pipe tobacco.

As with the film, Holmes and his trusty companion Dr Watson are on the trail of an evil cult hell-bent on kidnapping and apparently sacrificing innocents for their dastardly experiments.

Play takes place mainly as Holmes, running around the streets and buildings of Victorian London, punching, kicking and throwing thugs to the ground. The famous magnifying glass and detective work do make an appearance at points, but don’t be fooled - this is first and foremost an action game.

The controls are slick and easy with most actions assigned to the '5' key and throws handled by pressing close to an enemy. Holmes seems unable to attack on the vertical plane, but thankfully Watson and his revolver are more than capable.

It’s a shame Watson doesn’t get more game time, though, as his sections are great fun. This is mainly due to the excellent Zombie Infection aiming system that displays a rapidly shrinking crosshair and requires you to pick your shots carefully.

Shooting, punching and solving basic puzzles aren’t the only activities on offer. This being a movie tie-in, a number of other mini-games help break up the flow and prevent things from growing stale.

Over the course of the game’s ten chapters play occasionally switches to carriage chases, bare-knuckle boxing, slightly rubbish stealth sections and Quick Time Events (quickly press the displayed button combination).

Of these, the carriage chases are the best, resembling a top-down shoot-'em-up game (without the shooting) in which you kick hijackers off the carriage, dodge bombers and lock wheel-to-wheel with opponents.

All the mini-games are very short, but are welcome diversions to the standard punching and kicking. The boxing is easily the weakest of the lot due to useless block controls, but the excellent graphics and animations more than make up for this shortcoming.

In fact, the overall presentation of Sherlock Holmes is easily some of the best you can find on mobile systems. From the slick, DS quality animation to the fantastic explosion effects that literally rock your screen, there’s never a dull moment to be had.

However, all this action does come at a price. Despite the huge installation size the game won’t take seasoned pocket gamers much longer than 40 to 50 minutes to play through. There’s also very little reason to play through the levels again as the ranks given for each are not saved and there are no difficulty modes to choose from.

While it lasts, though, Sherlock Holmes offers a very good action-adventure with enough variety to keep even the most bloodthirsty 19th century detective happy.