Shadowalker

It's the season of the scare, when those a little green around the gills will experience their first plunge into the sludge of some of film's more murky genres. Halloween isn't all about sweets and dressing up. It's also about gore, splatter, and an appreciation of the horror classics. You might even call it an enriching cultural event.

Shadowalker can't quite lay claim to any of these lofty ideals, but it's certainly more than a cheap Halloween cash-in. Besides, it has a basic plot with a rather cinematic element about it: the galleons of the dead are coming, terrorising and capturing the villagers from your land; you are the Shadowalker, a powerful warrior maligned by the very people you've come to protect because of your unnatural upbringing.

Shadowalker's side-scrolling platform levels take you back and forwards via a nicely drawn map. Although the levels themselves are the fairly traditional blend of platform jumping, fighting and light puzzling, the structure and the various story interludes help to imbue Shadowalker with a sense of narrative coherence that's uncommon in mobile games.

This sense certainly isn't harmed either by the gothic-tinged visuals. There's not a massive variety of locations on show – you make your way through villages, 'castle' style environments and ghost ships, and some of those tend to look much like each other.

However, what there is looks great in an eerie, sparse sort of way and you shouldn't begin to suffer from a sense of déja vu until way into the game. Furthermore, this doesn't apply to your actions – you do get to sink ghost ships single-handedly by blowing holes in their hulls with dynamite, after all, so it's hardly the sort of thing you'll have encountered elsewhere.

Things are kept fairly fluid by a surprisingly dynamic difficulty curve. At first, the game seems very easy, and the mechanic of being able to upgrade your gun, sword and armour using money collected in the levels seems an almost unnecessary feature. Save those pennies, though, because the difficult ramps up after the halfway mark, evolving from a breezy platformer to a real challenge that demands far more attention.

At least your combat skills aren't poor. Shadowalker enables you to both wield a gun and a sword, so you can shoot enemies from a reasonable distance and deal damage close-up. A target appears over your enemies when they are within your gun's range and the weapon selection happens automatically each time you attack, so the whole process remains completely painless.

Added to the action is the RPG-style element of the item upgrade system, which just manages to be more than just a formality. In the outdoors levels, you can climb up high into the trees to collect extra money, or creep around the eaves of houses looking for cash. With a bit of exploration, that's made enjoyable thanks to the game's fluid controls, you'll have enough money to buy all the available upgrades, so while it remains a somewhat shallow feature, it's still a welcome one.

Shadowalker, then, is an impressively polished title. It looks great, and while the difficulty takes a little while to kick in, it at least contributes towards a continually changing gameplay experience. There could be a bit more visual diversity, true, and if the weapons upgrade system had been improved (forcing you to really trade off the power of your guns for your sword or vice-versa) an additional level of depth would have been achieved.

As is, Shadowalker is a satisfying and good-looking side-scroller. This is one horror franchise that actually deserves a sequel.