Romeo and Juliet

It's something we've all experienced. Sat in class as a teenager, textbook in hand; staring wistfully out at the playing fields whilst our cardigan-wearing English teacher tells us what a privilege it is to be studying the great bard. How he's the best thing since ye olde sliced bread.

Now if you're anything like us, you'll have only developed a (cursory) appreciation of old Bill Shakespeare since your compulsory education came to an end. And even now you wouldn't find The Complete Works of Shakespeare at the top of our all-time favourites list.

So it's a little odd that Ojom's latest takes none other than Romeo and Juliet as its source material. Just who among the hip young mobile gaming demographic is it aiming this at? Even more mystifyingly, it's taken the classic story of love-against-prejudice and turned it into a 2D action platformer.

Brave, but the mind boggles.

Play is viewed from a side-on perspective as you take on the role of Romeo himself. We can't for the life of us remember the part of the story where our hero takes up arms against an armoured axe-wielding guard, or where he has to dash under a falling chandelier. Nonetheless, you find yourself tasked with moving through each stage, traversing gaps and avoiding traps like a 16th century Prince of Persia.

Movement through the gameworld is more than a little clunky, with some iffy collision detection leading to numerous frustrating 'but it was nowhere near me!' encounters with the game's various traps. The necessity to line up certain manoeuvres to the nearest pixel in order to carry them out successfully also grates very quickly. It's vital for mobile action-platformers to be fluid and forgiving due to the limits placed on them by the format's control method and the size of the screen. It's a fundamental rule that Romeo and Juliet simply fails to follow.

Anyone familiar with the Romeo and Juliet storyline will know that it's hardly the most action packed of yarns, fatal stabbings aside. So the developer has taken it upon itself to play free and easy with the script, filling in the gaps with its own convoluted yarn. The term 'Shakespeare it ain't' has never been so apt, as this resembles a rip-roaring 1950s Errol Flynn film more than a finely nuanced 16th century play.

It's not all bad, though. Some of the character animation – such as Romeo himself – is decent, imbuing some of the protagonists with a certain degree of style. The power-up system is neat, too, leaving the timing of their activation up to the player. Obtain the self-explanatory Stop Time power-up, for example, and you can temporarily freeze all objects and enemies, enabling you to circumvent that troublesome collapsing platform section or stop a patrolling guard in his tracks. It's well considered and affords the player that little bit of creative latitude so lacking in many similar titles.

Despite the few nice ideas, though, the basic framework of Romeo and Juliet is all wrong. From the questionable choice of source material to its slap-dash implementation and the frustrating play mechanics, it's apparent that it shares one unfortunate thing with its namesake characters: it was doomed from the start.