Temple of Arkadoom

If someone charged you with investigating a series of dungeons to track down a pack of ghouls and beasties out for your blood, chances are you might ask them for a bit of help.

Temple of Arkadoom is keen to please in that respect, keeping things simple so this potentially terrifying trek into the unknown is as painless and perhaps predictable as possible. It's a role-playing game that harks back to dungeon battlers of old, playing like a tutorial for the genre but failing to do anything new or especially exciting in itself.

Sent to investigate strange, monstrous happenings on the outskirts of your village, you play as Laren, a lad who comes complete with both the might of the sword and the gift of magic.

Before your quest begins, you're able to assign the balance of your skills towards one or the other, with each level giving you further experience points that you can assign as you feel fit.

Serving up its dungeons on a step by step basis, Temple of Arkadoom lets you use a virtual D-pad to walk, one step at a time. Graphically, this movement is handled rather smoothly, the threadbare 3D dungeons composed mainly of corridors and simple open spaces.

The actual process of plodding through the levels is often easier said than done, however. The game's fiddly buttons cause many a fudged move as your fingers mistakenly hit the wrong key time after time.

Attacking is far more foolproof: merely tapping the screen results in a swipe of your sword or the casting of a magic spell. Magic naturally offers more immediate success at the start (upgraded weapons coming into their own as you upgrade), but such power uses up the mana that controls it and, like your health, this is only replenished by the passing of time.

This essentially means you spend many a level standing around waiting for both your mana and health to top themselves back up again. It has the effect of regularly putting the brakes on an already crawling adventure.

To its credit, those who want to jump straight into the dungeons will be pleased to know the game features an option to randomly generate dungeons. This actually changes very little, however, with play itself remaining identical from one mode to another.

There will be those who find Temple of Arkadoom a perfectly acceptable trip back to treasures past, and Vlad Stamate's adventure could hardly be more blatant in its attempt to ape the likes of Dungeon Master and Eye of the Beholder.

But while its old skool overtones give it character, role-playing has moved on while Laren has been scouting around in the dark, leaving Temple of Arkadoom as a dry, barren and slightly self-indulgent look back to simpler times.