Orion's Belt

The famous British comic Eddie Izzard once quipped about the plight of caterers working on the Death Star. Serving Darth Vadar penne ala arrabiata and getting zapped with Force lightning for your trouble is an unenviable task, the skit suggests.

Still, surely it’s preferable to piloting a rocket-propelled baked bean tin headlong into a cloud of asteroids, aliens and trigger happy war ships.

Apparently not for the chef at the centre of Orion’s Belt, who after finding himself on the wrong end of a bitter intergalactic conflict decides to down spatula and escape the ship he is cooking on via the only functioning craft he can find.

Landing successfully on a nearby mothership earns him unwanted piloting kudos. Before you can say, ‘hey, I didn’t sign up for this’ he's whisked off to the heart of the battle to lend a hand in the fight, while someone else peels the spuds.

It’s a wacky premise that sits somewhat uncomfortably alongside the game’s otherwise sombre tone and dry, characterless gameplay.

You can use the touchscreen to control thrust, reserving the accelerometer for navigation, or you can tilt for thrust and tap the screen to set your direction. Unfortunately, the ship is frustratingly floaty and does nothing to make the experience of navigating asteroids and picking off targets fun.

Offensively, you can fire a basic cannon and lay mines using on-screen buttons, with certain levels tooling you with heat-seeking missiles too. The finite nature of ammunition introduces an element of tactical depth, forcing you to pick your shots carefully rather than just blindly firing in the general direction of anything that moves.

Firing blindly is not advisable, as when you run out of cannon fire you have to spend the rest of the level trying laboriously to trick the last remaining enemy ships into flying into your mines.

Joining the campaign are single player skirmishes, the point of which is unclear. Skirmish mode allows you to choose a battlefield and compete against up to eight enemies. The reward for competing within these parameters is points, which can’t even be exchanged for any upgrades or new modes. It does little to distract from the already repetitive nature of the campaign.

Presentation-wise, Orion’s Belt gets plenty right. The cut-scenes are professional, pretty and never outstay their welcome; similarly, the in-game visuals are easy on the eyes. The front-end set-up is much more slapdash with a nasty sidebar list of options that, frankly, looks unfinished.

But these petty ills would have been so much more forgivable had the core gameplay been less tiresome. For a shoot-'em-up, there’s little celebration of the strengths of the genre (i.e. blowing stuff up and blowing it up often for the benefit of incrementally increased spectacle).

Orion’s Belt is a well presented but ultimately unsuccessful experiment in the genre that simply can’t compete with its more nimble peers.