Heavy Mach

Firstly, I would have called this game Heavy Mech, not Heavy Mach. Heavy Mach sounds like the sequel to Top Gun in which Tom Cruise has chunked up and can't fly at the speed of sound because he's unable to fit in the cockpit of his fighter jet.

It’s actually a game about a tank. A relatively small one.

The objective is to get from the starting point on the left to the finishing point on the right, leaving as much smouldering debris behind you as possible in the process.

It's pretty debris too, rendered in surprising detail. Heavy Mach is a beautiful game with the kind of entropic, rusted cyberpunk theme that all good metal, missile and brawn games need.

From the splash screens to the environments and the miniature tanks themselves, the level of detail is quite stunning.

Control of your tank is simple: tilt the handset left and right to move. The side-scrolling gameplay frees you up to really enjoy the carnage.

Tapping the screen aims and fires shells from your tank. The tank shoots in the direction of wherever you place your finger, but this also means you don’t necessarily have to obscure your view of the target by making direct contact with it.

You can touch the screen behind, or in front of, your target, so long as it sets the correct trajectory for the bullets, missiles and bombs to make a hit.

Besides the usual chain gun, your tank can be upgraded with a huge and deliciously aggressive arsenal. A rain of bombs, missiles or even a stream of lasers from an orbital satellite can be thrown down on the enemies, depending on your stock levels, of course.

Touching an onscreen button allows your vehicle to perform a (double) jump. There’s something ridiculous about a jumping tank: the small, caterpillar track-driven machine looks like the camp 80s robot hero, Johnny Five from Short Circuit.

To be fair, Number 5 kicked his share of ass, but this kind of cheesy, feel-good scenario is not likely what Heavy Mach is going for.

Nonetheless, bouncing about the place does give you a few more adventurous vantage points from which to unleash the impressive amount of weaponry, and that’s what’s really important here.

With more than two dozen levels divided among six core missions, there’s a lot to blow up and some of the big bosses take determination to down. You can expect Heavy Mach to keep you playing, even if it is occasionally blemished with repetition. It's designed to be played in small bursts, and if you do that you'll have a blast with it.