Scooby-Doo: Saving Shaggy

Shaggy and Scooby-Doo were never a very brave crime-solving duo. Scooby was always hiding under beds, while Shaggy could normally be found cradled in his hairy arms. Well, legs, technically.

Anyway, a game featuring the pair could have been fairly uneventful. Luckily, Scooby appears to have grown in courage and as such is prepared to take on all manner of ghosts and undead beings on a quest to rescue his master.

All of the Scooby-Doo games we've played over the years have been pretty straightforward platformers, so it comes as no surprise that this mobile game one follows suit. In fact, it's so straightforward it could be from the Spectrum era of gaming. Not that simplicity is a negative attribute – especially in a mobile game where often it's preferable to things being excessively fiddly – but this feels less like a focused, streamlined experienced and more like, well, cheap.

Each level is a series of floors and ladders which you need to make your way around as the eponymous canine in order to collect Scooby Snacks. Once you've grabbed the snacks on the level – the number required is shown at the bottom of the screen – you can seek out the hidden key (which is normally nabbed from one of the enemies) and rescue Shaggy from his cell to move on to the next challenge.

The next level will also be a series of floors and ladders. And so will the one after that, as well as the one that follows it. The enemies do at least change, though – they're all ghoulishly themed, but all have different attacks to use against you.

Mummies, for instance, can only walk forwards and backwards, waving their arms in front of them, while skeletons can follow you up ladders. Ghosts, true to form, are able to drift through everything, making them tricky to escape from. But as it happens, every type of enemy can be taken down with a flick of Scooby's tail (executed with the '5' button).

This isn't always easy to do, largely because Scooby's attack is quite sluggish – if you strike too early and miss, you're almost guaranteed to die because there's no time to get in a second attack.

Fiends also change direction too quickly. Platforming convention dictates adversaries should stick to a pre-determined march, or at least give some warning they've seen you and are coming. There's nothing more frustrating than shadowing one of the enemies and having them spin around unexpectedly to kill you. (And, just to add insult to these frequent injuries, getting off ladders is too tough, and was responsible for our doggy death when a mummy came effortlessly bounding into us on more than one occasion.)

It doesn't help that Scooby-Doo: Saving Shaggy is also one of those old-skool games that doesn't let you save your progress, so every new game has you re-going through the same dull levels over and over in order to reach new ground. Good for high-score chasing, obviously, but we'd argue this is the wrong genre to be doing it in. Puzzle games, for instance, are a perfect candidate but with platformers we expect to be regularly facing new challenges and scenarios, not having to play through the same ones.

Granted, an added challenge is presented in the form of a timer that counts down during each level. You won't fail the level if it runs out, but the enemies in it get quite angry – presumably because they're as bored of walking around as you are playing the game – and start moving more quickly.

Other slight positives include the game's visuals, which while adequate would have added impact were they to have a decent gaming experience to support them, and you do at least get to hear the Scooby theme tune at the start of the game (although the rest of it is mostly mute).

With so many platform games out there offering more depth and intelligence, it's hard to see why anyone would want to play this. In fact, we'd recommend running in the opposite direction if you see it coming your way, much like Shaggy when he's just seen a bloke wearing a white sheet.