Marvel Kapow!

You know those cheap toys that used to get handed out with Happy Meals when a blockbuster film hit cinemas?

The ones that were a bit flimsy and had barely any reason to exist other than licensing dollars?

Marvel Kapow! is the iOS gaming equivalent of such a toy.

The setup is fairly decent, pitting four of Marvel’s superheroes (Thor, Captain America, Wolverine, and Spider-Man) against their respective enemies, with Dr Doom turning up occasionally to annoy everyone with his metal mask.

Rather than literal representations of the characters, however, Marvel Kapow! uses their key weapons (Wolverine’s claws, Thor’s hammer) as player icons and remodels the enemies into floating, disembodied heads.

Each superhero has his own nemesis and play style. Wolverine, for instance, plays a lot like Fruit Ninja - slicing away at hanging Magneto heads - while Spider-Man fires excruciatingly slow webs towards Venom.

Bringer of Doom

Variety is always welcome in a game, but in this case it seems to have been at the expense of polish.

Every one of the four characters' modes has something about it that will annoy you: whether it's the speed of Spider-Man's shots - which are guaranteed to leave you spamming the screen in the vain hope you’ll hit one of the fast-moving Venom bonces - or poor collision detection, as with both Wolverine and Thor.

The only mode that works as it should is Captain America’s Pong-like shield deflection. Even here, though, a broken scoring system, which sees your score multiplied as long as you let a shot through before the end of a level, undermines the experience.

Sharpened claws

Despite a good cinematic intro and some comic book-styled panels for the level select screen, Marvel Kapow! otherwise makes scant use of its famous source material and could have the Advertising Standards Agency on its back if not careful.

There’s no story to the Normal mode other than a series of disconnected battles against other Marvel characters’ backdrops, while the heads themselves look more like capsule toys than representations of supervillains.

Arcade mode, on the other hand, is just the same thing again only incredibly easy, thanks to the game handing out a health pick-up a few seconds before you die, every time.

There’s plenty of scope and lore to create a enjoyable superhero game on iPhone, as Spider-Man: Total Mayhem has already proven. Marvel Kapow!, however, lacks both quality of execution and relevance to its licence, making it nothing more than a throwaway toy.