Switchit review - "Arcade puzzler that's a bit of a turn-off"

We've all played those arcade score chasers where you play a besieged gun-toter, blasting away incoming enemies/asteroids as they flood you from all angles.

Switchit takes that premise and adds a couple of layers of abstraction.

While the intent is obviously to add a dash of freshness to a well worn approach, however, it just serves to suck a good portion of the immediacy and the fun out of things.

The game positions your block in the middle of a circle, smack bang at the centre of the screen. Your square fires a permanent beam of destructive light out of one side.

As opposing blocks come at your from all sides, you must tap the bottom left and right sides of the screen to rotate your defensive laser and take them out.

Straight away there's an issue in that the action is slow and frustrating. The rotation controls are painfully sluggish, with no degree of acceleration.

At a base level, Switchit is a deeply unsatisfying arcade game. The attempt to add a puzzler edge only exacerbates the issue.

In their defult grey state, those opposing blocks are impossible to break down with your laser. It's only when your laser is aligned with their specific colour that you can wipe them out.

You flick through these colour settings by tapping the top left and right of the screen. You'll know you've got the right colour to wreak maximum damage when your target's true colour is revealed to you.

The trouble is, everything from the control system to those aforementioned sluggish controls seems to stand in the way of building up any momentum. Even when you get the right colour, it takes a second of sustained fire to take out those blocks.

Add in a punishing difficulty level and some brutally sparse graphics, and you have a game that isn't half as fun at a basic level as it really should be.