Princess Fury: Arcade Adventure

It might not be obvious to foreigners, but there’s always been a slight friction in the UK when it comes to the role of the monarchy.

On the surface they’re the lovable historical nobility that gets everyone excited whenever anything happens to them, but dig down a bit into society and you find a large number of people wondering why their money is being spent on a relic of the past.

Princess Fury: Arcade Adventure possesses that same regal quality. It’s an attractive descendant from a long line of side-scrolling beat-'em-ups, yet it also inherits the genre’s shallowness as well.

Like true royalty, the game's guise is inspiring. The graphics are lively and drawn with vibrant colours, making for an attractive anime-like presentation. Even better, it runs at proper iPad resolution, rather than a lazy upscale that defines too many games on the device.

It's how Princess Fury plays and not how it looks that defines this experience, though.

The basic idea is to move from left to right, hacking at a variety of enemy units by hammering the fire button or tapping adjacent buttons that trigger special abilities and attack powers.

The virtual analogue stick in the bottom-left is too small for my liking, but in general the controls are quick and satisfying to use, especially when hundreds of enemies march onto screen.

Aiding this slaughter is a range of allies that slowly join over the course of 23 stages and do their utmost to protect the princess.

Varying between warriors, clerics, and archers, these companions have individual names and levels, but don’t really act any differently to the generic units that serve as the bulk of your armed forces.

You're limited as to the range of commands that can be lodged with your subordinates: either stay near the princess or free them to do as they please. The latter is particularly useful as it lets you get on with the satisfying act of casting stupidly powerful special moves that carve through tens of creatures at a time.

What is disappointing though is the game's length. Clocking in at under an hour - even accounting for a few deaths - Princess Fury is absurdly short. Worse still, there are absolutely no incentives to encourage replay.

Levelling up units via battle could be a sufficient motivation to sink extra time into replaying levels, but it's so underdeveloped it might as well not exist. Not that it's even feasible given that the stage select screen from the original iPhone and iPod touch version (along with decisions as to which special powers to pick for the next level) is conspicuous by its absence.

While Princess Fury: Arcade Adventure is attractive and has some of the instinctively enjoyable gameplay of her predecessors, her shallowness and short playing time make it hard to justify diverting your tax money to keep her on the throne.