First impressions of Alien Jailbreak and WowWee's Liberator Pistol peripheral

If you've recently shopped on Amazon or wandered down your local supermarket's toy aisle, you may have stumbled across AppGear's iOS and Android peripheral Alien Jailbreak.

Alien Jailbreak is a physical toy that's designed to be used with WowWee's augmented reality-infused mobile shooter Alien Jailbreak: The Great Escape.

You can download this app completely free of charge from the App Store [download] or Google Play [download], or by scanning the handy QR code on the back of the Alien Jailbreak box.

The physical Alien Jailbreak toy retails for £9.99 / $9.99 on the AppGear website, but you can pick it up from a variety of high street stores and supermarkets for around half that.

For your hard-earned money, then, you get five pieces of purple plastic that you can assemble into a strange glyph-covered cube. You also get two further pieces of glyph-laden purple plastic (AR markers), as well as two zany green aliens.

While you need the cube and the two pieces of purple plastic to unlock the augmented reality capabilities of Alien Jailbreak: The Great Escape, the two extraterrestrials are merely decorations.

It's fair to say that this toy won't be winning any awards for quality. It's far from awful, but it does feels a little cheap and even a bit flimsy.

In WowWee's free Alien Jailbreak: The Great Escape game, you jump behind the wheel (?) of a deep space patrol ship, prime a variety of otherworldly weapons, and attempt to stop waves of goofy-looking alien prisoners from escaping from their confines.

Naturally, these aliens won't go down without a fight. So, be sure to take them down quickly before they manage to unleash their powerful mind-control beams or summon giant alien robots.

To get up and running, place your Alien Jailbreak cube and the two AR markers that came with it onto a hard surface that's well lit.

Then, fire up the Alien Jailbreak: The Great Escape app and point the camera on your smartphone (or tablet) of choice at the toys you've just laid out.

Hey presto! You're good to go. Tap your device's screen to send a hail of gunfire at the on-screen escapees. It's that simple.

Unfortunately, Alien Jailbreak: The Great Escape is rather shoddy.

According to the box that the physical toy comes in, Alien Jailbreak: The Great Escape is compatible with various iPhones and iPod touches, as well as the iPad 2 and several Android devices.

Head into the App Store, though, and there isn't an iPad-specific version of the game to be found.

You can, of course, still download the iPhone app and play it on your iPad, but - like all iOS apps and games that aren't optimised for The Big A's tablets - it will look pretty horrendous when it's stretched to fit the screen of Apple's iPad.

Furthermore, Alien Jailbreak: The Great Escape hasn't been updated with iPhone 5 support, so - unless you install a Cydia tweak like FullForce - you'll have to put up with black borders on either side of your gorgeous gadget's display.

If all that doesn't put you off, you can grab Alien Jailbreak: The Great Escape from the App Store and Google Play right this second.