Endless Boss Fight

Like shell suits, Leeds United football club, and Macauley Culkin, boss fights aren't viewed with quite as much affection as they were in the '90s.

Formerly seen as some kind of perverse reward for clearing the worlds of every shooter and platformer, they're now seen as cheap and artificial ways to raise the stakes and mix things up a bit.

Sure enough, while Endless Boss Fight shoots for a nostalgic view of bosses, it ends up feeling a little tired to modern eyes.

You play as a scrappy little robot with considerable pugilistic skills. Faced with an ever-evolving juggernaut of a boss, you must keep pummelling away, improving your skills, and lasting a little longer into the bout each time.

The way you do this is by dodging its attacks and nipping in for a quick button-mashing combo, before withdrawing to a safe distance to resume the evasive manoeuvres.

You can also take on the boss's missiles head-on, with timed punches either detonating or deflecting attacks. Indeed, this is how you score combos, with successive parries resulting in a windfall of coins and special items.

Endless Boss Fight aims for tight arcade thrills, but it never quite feels responsive enough to satisfy in this way. The virtual controls just feel a little too woolly, making it tough to dodge and punch in quick succession.

Eventually, you find that the key to survival - and thus success - as the rounds tick on is to stay out of the way until an attack opening presents itself.

But ultimately, it's Endless Boss Fight's inherent repetitiveness and shallowness that does for it. It looks great, and there is a certain joy to nipping in and out of range against a titanic boss character. But after a short period it just feels like a bit of a grind. Indeed, with a familiar 'optional' IAP system, it's clearly designed as such.

Endless Boss Fight certain nails its subject matter, then. It's impressive on the surface, but repeated retries reveal a repetitive and somewhat tiresome core.