Ultranium 4

The iPhone has been a magnet for Breakout clones, quickly proving after the platform's launch that it was more than capable of providing a great rendition of Steve Wozniak's 30-year-old classic (that's right, trivia fans – Apple's founder designed and built the original for Atari way back in 1977). Ultranium 4 is one of the few such clones that actually attempts to evolve the concept, though it stumbles over a few too many hurdles along the way.

The App Store description is at once the perfect summary of Ultranium 4 and the origin of its ultimate disappointment. Pegged as a hybrid of Breakout and shoot-'em-up gameplay, the concept immediately forms in your mind as a clever and dynamic mutation of both genres. And in some ways Ultraninum 4 delivers on its promises, but not in as dynamic a way as you might hope.

The typical Breakout paddle is replaced by a spaceship. Unfortunately this is pretty much where the shmup styling stops and the bat-and-ball gameplay begins. You use the spaceship to deflect the ball around the block-laden screen as you would a paddle, with little in the way of expected spaceship mechanics coming into play. If it were switched back to a typical, rectangular platform for bouncing the ball against, you'd notice little change in Ultranium 4's gameplay.

So already there's a growing dissatisfaction while working through the numerous levels as the promised shoot-'em-up action fails to materialise, and instead you're left playing through a standard, slow Breakout clone. Indeed, Ultranium 4 does nothing that hasn't already been explored in countless other games. Multi-ball, a free-roaming paddle, fire ball, laser guns, a magnetic paddle – all things done in much slicker games.

Not that there isn't room for a re-engineering of this type of experience on the iPhone, but Ultranium 4 falls down in other areas; most prominently, the game speed. The ball trundles at a tediously steady lick – lethargic enough that I was able to deflect it on a particularly empty level, put the iPhone down, disconnect, remove and coil up the wire on my headphones and pick the handset back up before hitting the ball again. As the blocks are gradually extinguished to the last one or two, the snail-paced sphere can make for a depressingly boring game as you attempt to send it in the right direction, only to have it set back off on exactly the same, sluggish trajectory.

Which highlights the next problem with Ultranium 4: the physics. The ball features little in the way of believable reaction when it meets a moving paddle and features almost no momentum during play. When trying to take out that last damn block you'll often find you've worked the ball into returning to the same corner of the screen, making it nigh on impossible to send it back to the top in a different direction. Watching the ball dawdle backwards and forwards six times puts enough of a downer on the game as to make the next level feel like quite the chore before it's even begun.

Were Ultranium 4 to make more of its shoot-'em-up claims – perhaps by including swarms of choreographed enemies to hit with the ball, for instance – it could really have provided an experience worth sinking your teeth into. As is, Ultranium 4 drags its heels whilst providing a game that's difficult to hear above the white noise of other, and better, Breakout clones.