The Revenants – Corridor of Souls

Isn’t it annoying when a company takes a simple idea that already exists, polishes it until it shines, then releases it to even more money and acclaim (hello, Angry Birds and Bejeweled).

Alas, in this complicated world we live in, there are no constants. So while The Revenants is about as simple and as polished a game as you can get, it’s not going to be one that ends up winning many plaudits.

The idea behind the touch-based title is to draw a circle (or polygon, if you want to be really specific) around groups of flittering souls, while insuring they don’t accidentally touch your glowing spirit.

Once drawn, these circles create mini-black holes for a few seconds that suck in any nearby souls into their inky depths – the more dragged in, the higher the combo.

Movement across the screen is relative to the initial position of your finger, so sweeping up from the bottom moves the spirit up wherever it’s sitting at that time.

It’s a strangely annoying system that never quite fits with the gameplay, especially when the game insists on spawning you in an un-selectable place on the screen that just so happens to be hemmed in by souls (which ends up being most of the time.)

The souls themselves come in a variety of forms and possess differing characteristics.

There are the rat-forms that run directly towards your character, butterflies that jerk about randomly, and spiders – the most annoying for reasons that will become clear – that hide in the corners of the screen before dashing across the middle.

While it seems at first that the idea is to draw rings around the creatures, it soon becomes apparent that drawing rings wherever and hoping they walk into them is far more effective.

It doesn’t help of course that your drawings fade so quickly, and require such precision to join up, that half the time anything more ambitious than a circle ends up not connecting.

Then there’s the game-breaking and obvious exploit that some of you should have already guessed by now.

Should you have the nerve to draw a circle around the entire screen, you’ll suck in everything at once, scoring huge numbers – far higher than with ‘normal’ play anyway.

The spiders have obviously been designed to prevent this, but as long as you’re quick off the bat (and it doesn’t require much more speed than a normal circle, to be honest) you’ll be picking up millions of points within a game or two.

There are some pretty graphics and lighting effects, and the design itself – a soul stalking a blood trail around what looks to be an old temple – is genuinely interesting and innovative.

However, while it has the polish, the idea for the gameplay behind The Revenants is a too shallow to stand up to any extended scrutiny.