Karnak Attack

When the Egyptians mummified their dead, they did so to preserve the people they revered. Yet no matter how carefully a body is prepared there's no way of saving the personality, intelligence, and creativity that once filled it with life – it’s just a soulless husk.

Karnak Attack feels very much like the husk of the rich nineties first-person shooter scene: ostensibly familiar, but missing the vital soul that made those games special.

This is especially disappointing considering its ancient Egyptian setting, a backdrop relatively unexplored in gaming history that holds great potential. The excellent Exhumed (Power Slave, to our US readers) demonstrated what could be done with the theme over a decade ago, and N.O.V.A., whilst focused on more clichéd sci-fi tropes, is an exemplar of the shooter's potential on iPhone.

So with these two high watermarks in mind, what can Karnak Attack offer? Not much.

As a marine somehow stationed in ancient Karnak, your goal is to collect as much gold as possible in three surprisingly empty levels. Zombies emerge from the sand infrequently and are easily dispatched with the machine gun, shotgun, or 'super-weapon.'

Bizarrely, the undead only advance if you are looking straight at them. Remember believing as a child that if you couldn’t see somebody, they couldn’t see you? Well, here it actually works, making it possible to move through the game unscathed as long as you keep your back to your enemies.

The only exception is boss battles, where a giant Anubis hurls rocks at you. Hilariously, you're sure to see the rocks before the beast itself due to the horribly short graphical draw distance.

All of this is a great shame because the game conjures up a genuinely creepy atmosphere. The visuals are somewhat pleasing, too, if it weren't for the poor draw distance.

But just when you start to think you can make the best out of it, the bugs start crawling out.

The game crashed more than a dozen times over an afternoon of play and the lack of save points means that each crash results in a return to the start of the game. And the Anubis bosses can only be killed using the super-weapon which randomly locks up, preventing you from taking them down.

On the rare occasion that the poor design and buggy code don’t conspire to prevent you from reaching the end of the game, you're treated to a score based on your kills, gold, and distance travelled. You can’t share this score online or access it from the menu: it's perhaps the clearest example of the game’s failure to motivate or reward.

It’s all very well exploring the past, but some things really should remain dead and buried. No amount of bandages can heal the damage done to the shooters of old by Karnak Attack and its buggy, ill-conceived gameplay.