Last Minute Hero

Tokyo has been invaded by giant spiders, and it’s up to you – a young girl tooled up to the teeth with firearms – to blast as many as possible in order to delay the explosion of a bomb.

It sounds like a plot lifted straight from a mid-‘90s console game.

Which is appropriate, since Last Minute Hero looks and plays like an outdated mid-‘90s console game.

Last Minute Hero reminds me of the kind of games that were released early in the life-cycle of the first 3D-capable consoles: brash, ugly, and clunky.

The models lack detail and some of the clipping issues, which frequently send our heroine half-disappearing into walls, hark back to the days of developers rendering 3D graphics for 3D’s sake.

As you leg it around a boxy arena crudely representing a sealed-off Shibuya Crossing, the first thing you notice is the ugly lead character, who appears to have been lifted directly from Final Fantasy VII. I don’t mean that in a positive way - I mean it in a this-3D-tech-looks-like-it’s-from-1997 kind of way.

The mutant spiders you face are slightly more accomplished, ranging in size from shin-high to house-high and scuttling around reasonably convincingly. Of course, their largely-black colour makes them all but indistinguishable when massed together.

That’s the thrust of gameplay: dealing with masses of spiders. Having selected your weapon, each of which is unlocked as you survive for certain lengths of time, you step into the arena for a spot of arachnid blasting.

Combat is a dreadfully simplistic case of tapping on an enemy to lock-on, then holding the virtual attack button to unleash a painfully sluggish stream of bullets/rockets until they keel over. Each kill pushes back the 60-second countdown.

You can also dodge by pressing an 'evade' button in conjunction with the virtual analogue stick, although as this means taking your finger off the 'shoot' button it’s more of a necessary inconvenience than a pleasurable manoeuvre.

All this clunky, ugly, painfully simplistic gameplay caused my second-generation iPod touch to cough and splutter as soon as things got moderately busy, making the whole thing even less bearable.

With unappealing graphics, sloppy combat, and wafer-thin gameplay, Last Minute Hero feels rather like a last minute job.