Soul Grinder

A minority of people seem to think that hard games are intrinsically fun games. Just look at Spelunky, Super Hexagon, and Super Meat Boy.

Hard games can be fun, but their fun-ness doesn't derive from their hardness.

Difficulty is to video games what chilli sauce is to a burrito - an optional addition that improves the experience for some and ruins it for others.

Now I'm hungry. While I go and make myself a sandwich, you stay here and read about why Soul Grinder is both very hard and not very good.

You're a dude, you can fly, you can shoot, you can die. You'll do a lot of the last one, unless you master the second, the third, and implement a hitherto unspecified fifth skill that only you can bring to the game: the ability to memorise level layouts.

Each level is built to kill you as quickly as possible. Laser cannons are timed to fire just as you pass by them at your regular speed; enemies appear just as you're meant to be flying past obstacles; tunnels close up so that you get crushed against the doors; and so on.

To avoid meeting your maker you tap and hold on the screen and move up and down the left-hand side of the play area. If you want to do something other than ascend and descend then you'll have to tap and hold on the right-hand side of the screen, which boosts you forward.

And your memory is your greatest asset. To stand a chance of surviving you have to remember where enemies appear, how long you have to get through a given section, and so on. Dexterity and reflexes are secondary requirements.

You'll get part of the way through a level, die because you didn't know a spider beastie would appear and shoot at you at that specific point, commit that event to memory, restart, and get past it.

Some levels are so dense with these instadeath moments that your progress is reduced to a crawl. It's infuriating, and no amount of skill will alleviate the pain.

To make things easier, you can purchase power-ups that only last for one level. They're too expensive, don't help all that much, and you're not awarded the best scores if you use them.

The controls work okay, allowing you to get around the screen with precision - but your fingers block the screen, which gives you less time to react to dangers.

You fire your gun when you have your finger pressed on the left of the screen, and with the number of enemies thrown at you you'll need to be firing constantly. The inherent problem is that you can't see the warning symbol that appears to your rear when enemies are about to strike from behind, leading to more deaths.

The visual style is chunky and bright, but features some middle-of-the-road animation quality. There are new faces to purchase for your little hero, all based on pop culture references. Which brings us to the tone.

It tries ever-so-hard to be funny, but it's all geek gags you've heard before. You can buy new Hats for your character, loosely based on those from popular franchises. When you die, you're given a piece of sarcastic advice. It's boring, it's been done before, and it's been done way better - just like the gameplay.

As implied in its name, Soul Grinder is a crushingly hard memory test, but more importantly it's not actually that entertaining to play. Shmup fans might be tempted in, but there's nothing here that comes close to approaching the strongest examples of the genre.