Bloody Harry

I'm a bearded chef riding a skateboard down a corridor in a restaurant, waving a meat cleaver and a shotgun, and hacking apart mutated vegetable zombies that are intent on snacking on my fleshy bits. And yet I'm still a bit bored.

That's the problem with Bloody Harry. For all of its zaniness you can never quite shake the feeling that you've seen it all before.

A sedate opening and button-mashing combat do nothing to alleviate that sense of over-familiarity either. It has its moments, but more often than not they make you long for other, better games.

You play the titular chef, who's out to kill as many crawling vegetable beasts as he can. A floating stick on the bottom-left lets you move through the side-scrolling levels, and a collection of buttons in the bottom-right lets you hit, shoot, and swap weapons.

Various power-ups and boosts float through the levels as you blast and mangle through the diseased tubers. One gives you an enormous tenderising mallet that smashes the brains out of your assailants, another lets you clamber into a cannon and fly, fist extended, for a little while.

Carnage is the aim of the game, and for the most part it's satisfying carnage. Your melee attack pushes foes back, letting you riddle them with bullets before they get a chance to attack again. You can upgrade your tools and buy new, ever more deadly weapons as well.

An experience system lets you pick perks when you level-up, letting you customise your character to some degree. You can spend some of the coins you earn on getting single-use weapon boosts as well.

There's nothing broken about Bloody Harry, and on the occasions it manages to find a sweet spot it is actually quite fun. It's just that things get repetitive pretty quickly, and the game doesn't do anything to try to correct that.

There are boss battles and new weapons, but none of them changes the essential rhythm at the heart of the game. And once you've worked that rhythm out there's not much else to discover.

For all of the conceptual madness Bloody Harry throws at you, it relies far too heavily on simple, familiar gameplay.