Terminal5

One of the biggest disappointments growing up is realising that a huge gap exists between the fact and fiction of robotics.

A seven-year-old me would have expected to have a Johnny 5-style robot buddy by the time of his 30th birthday. Yet here I am, within sight of that milestone, and there’s no sign of a Bee Gees-singing automaton in my life.

Rather, your average affordable robot resembles a saucepan and follows the most rudimentary of programming commands.

Terminal5 plays on this very lack of sophistication to create a brain-melting new puzzler for Android. Your goal is to guide a low-tech robot through a series of hazardous obstacle runs as quickly and efficiently as possible.

This is achieved by stacking up strings of up to eight directional commands at a time. You can order your robot to move straight ahead, rotate 90 degrees left or right, or spin around 180 degrees.

Complicating each run to the level exit is a bunch of conveyor belt squares. These shift and spin your robot in the direction indicated, and can seriously mess up your travel plans if you don’t think ahead.

Unfortunately, +1 Labs doesn’t do a very good job of explaining how these conveyors work. You’d expect a string of conveyor arrows all pointing in the same direction to move you along continuously, but they don’t. Rather, they only affect you once, then wait for you to move again.

Once this is established, you can get on with the game, but it won’t take long to realise there’s a scarcity of variety and charm here. Each level is as sparse as the last, with a complete lack of background detail.

The 3D graphics are solid and functional, but lack character. Still, it’s good that the game rotates and scales according to the orientation of your handset.

Terminal5 asks a lot from you in terms of concentration and commitment (though, conversely, there aren’t many levels), but it doesn’t give enough in return to keep you coming back for more.

Puzzle nuts in search of a focused, methodical challenge will get some joy out of it, but most should look elsewhere.