Entranced

At its best Entranced is blandly inoffensive, while at its worst, which is where it spends most of its time, its just unplayable.

The visuals and music tick the necessary boxes in a kaleidoscope-plus-lounge-techno-will-probably-do sort of a way.

The game offers a selection of five themed backdrops, many of which appear to be more than merely similar, each with accompanying music. Once a stage is loaded the music starts playing and an array of shapes float onto the screen.

Each shape has a white outline with a coloured core that expands out to the edges. The point at which the colour reaches the white outline in each shape, colouring it fully, is when you're supposed to tap the shape for maximum effect. This process is, as you might expect, supposed to occur in time with the music.

Only it doesn't really work.

The system is both confusing and poorly executed. By standing back and watching you can see patterns emerging, but the quantity of different shapes and movement paths on screen simultaneously creates a garbled sense of rhythm.

There is another element in the form of tracer shapes which earn you extra points if you slide them about the screen. Despite a perfunctory loading screen explanation however, their use is a mystery and their distinction from other shapes and level of incidence, unclear.

Then there's the music itself. It's not that much should be expected of the overall quality of the music in a game of this type, but it should at least be conducive to the genre.

Someone over at Monstrous Gameplay must have thrown the metronome out of the window, as the music lacks the sort of solid rhythm or obvious melodic hooks that could be sensibly ascribed to specific sets of tap prompts. The iTunes listing which boasts about a soundtrack containing music from "some of the best DJs and musicians from around the world" seems a little hopeful.

Ultimately, Entranced commits a rhythm action cardinal sin by having a layer of disconnect between its ill-suited music and its seemingly arbitrary screen prompts. A single high score board and literally nothing else caps off the package and says all you need to know about this half-hearted effort.