Hill Billy

You can take the girl out of the country, but you can't take the country out of the girl. It's the same with Hill Billy: here's a backwater adventure that has the looks of a slick shooter, but it's nothing more than a country bumpkin.

Carrots are your livelihood, and when an army of cybernetic creatures warps in from another dimension to eat them up you take up arms to blast them back.

Hill Billy equips you with a handful of guns and gadgets. In each of the five levels, your objective lies in killing enemies before they have the chance to grab carrots situated throughout the environment.

The game's first level starts at your carrot farm, the orange roots nestled on easily defended plots. Enemies warp to your farm in waves, the level ending when you're successfully defended against every wave. Each level plays out in a similar fashion from farm to greenhouse and beyond, stages concluding when you've cleared every wave or room of extraterrestrial foes.

Other than the farm setting, there's nothing that connects one level to the next. Hill Billy fails to motivate play in any meaningful way – no story, no explanations, no nothing. Playing a shooter for the sake of tapping your fingers on a polished screen is pointless. Hill Billy may look good, but that's the only thing going for this backwater game.

Poorly conceived controls play an enormous role in this disappointment. Rather than taking advantage of the touchscreen, the game utilises the accelerometer for movement. It's the wrong choice.

Tilting the handset left and right moves your view accordingly, but it's having to tip up and down for movement that really destroys the experience. Given the ability to customise the sensitivity and neutral point, it may have worked. However, Hill Billy doesn't give you any control over the sensitivity and the option for setting the neutral point is dysfunctional.

Unsurprisingly, this complicates the action. Targeting enemies is problematic because you don't have precise controls as a means for aiming.

At least the act of firing a gun is simple: a tap of the screen. Some variety is had in the handful of guns collected through the course of the game's five levels, the distinction between shotgun and electric fork significant enough to justify swapping firearms to deal with specific enemies.

You're unlikely to do so much, though, because of the game's brevity and the even greater brevity of your interest in it. While it pains us to knock what looked like a promising iPhone shooter, Hill Billy is about as much fun as tipping cows.