Hyper Blaster review - An arena shooter lacking in flair

What usually happens when you give a monkey a gun is someone on the internet takes a picture, yells "random!" at the top of their lungs, and everyone has a good old laugh.

Not so in Hyper Blaster, where you are the monkey with a gun, and it's your job to kill a bunch of slimes slowly creeping up on you from around an arena.

Or it would be, if it weren't more about wrestling with controls and trying to work out what the hell is actually going on half the time.

You have two actions in Hyper Blaster; move, which is done by tapping on the spot you want to move to and watching the monkey glide over there; and shoot, which you do by holding your finger on the screen and rotating in a circle, turret style.

In fairness, these controls are pretty responsive, and once you get used to them, you'll be zipping around the arena easily.

The problem is that once you've chosen your destination with a quick tap, you can't cancel out of the move at all, and just have to wait until you reach the end of your path.

This means that, should an enemy suddenly appear in your path, you can't dive out of its way. With one-hit-kills in play for your character, you'll regularly lose because you just happened to get unlucky with enemy placement.

Shooting the enemies feels off, too. Your bullets don't actually do anything visible to the enemies, instead flying off in a random direction, leaving you to think you're not actually doing any damage.

Eventually you'll realise that you are hurting them, despite a lack of obvious feedback, but even so, it's odd that there's no indication of hits landing beyond vanishing bullets and a dead enemy.

Hyper Blaster is also, to be honest, just not that much fun. It's got a tiny arena with no variation on show, a meagre selection of power-ups that aren't as good as the first one, and a cast of largely identical characters to unlock.

But you won't want to, because the requirements to unlock anything in the game require a real slog, whether you're attempting to reach a high score or just rack up overall points.

It could be a fun game. There's a good basis here for Hyper Blaster to be a hyperactive, insane game that takes up a few minutes of your time during the day.

But what you get instead is a slightly clunky experience, with poor movement, a lack of visual flair, and a reward system that feels more like a chore than a fun thing to work on.

It might be worth a look if you're super bored and need a brief distraction, but ultimately you won't be sticking around with Hyper Blaster for long.