Celestial Safari

As the name might suggest, Celestial Safari has something of an astrological twist to it.

Each world in this competitive 3D action game corresponds to a different Chinese constellation, with levels laid out as a collection of stars that form the outlines of dragons and tigers. And each of the game’s bulky vehicles relates to a constellation too.

This idea is unfortunately unique in name-only. A dragon constellation shows itself as a random, flat green blob on the battlefield, and I'm not sure what the White Tiger and a bouncy-wheeled moon buggy have in common.

Celestial Safari looks and sounds like a smart, Armoured Core-style mech-fighter. Get on the battlefield, though, and you find a slow game with a remarkably hands-off approach to combat.

A crazy backstory involving meteorites, aliens, and a black hole lead you into intergalactic war where you're the pilot of constellation-themed spacecraft. Sadly, the gameplay mechanics are as obtuse as the plot.

The game handles firing and aiming, leaving you with all the boring stuff like lethargically positioning your vehicle around enemies, monitoring its speed and occasionally triggering a big blue shield to deflect bullets.

The self-firing AI isn’t the most proficient mech warrior in the world, often letting you down in the heat of battle. Your machine guns refuse to fire, your rockets veer off at random angles and a suicidal priority system arbitrarily targets enemies in the distance, while ignoring a nearby foe who’s currently turning you into scrap metal with a meaty chain gun.

With aiming, targeting and firing out of hand, the lack of control makes every defeat crushingly unfair. Why didn't my mech target the right enemy, or fire the right gun, or aim straight? Only having control over movement and shields is maddeningly restrictive and leaves your fate to unreliable systems or, worse still, lady luck.

Before each battle, you're free to choose weapons to affix to your craft, mixing and matching guns based on size, placement and stats. A cannon might pack a major wallop, for example, but it's slow to reload. On the other hand, a machine gun peppers the opposing mechs without tiring, but only works when up close and in the line of fire.

Yet because you're not actually firing these things, it's tough to see what real difference these choices make. Your mech spits out a random assortment of nukes, lasers, missiles and bullets, and it's tough to know which projectile relates to which weapon. When you inevitably die and gear up for your next attempt, it’s almost impossible to know what to alter to improve your chances in the next battle.

As a result of these flaws, the game's ferociously steep learning curve is made worse. Add to it super-powered enemies that can fire laser beams from half way across the map, making you zig-zag through a barrage of hot plasma before you can even start to attack, and it's nothing short of exasperating.

It’s no big shame, though. Celestial Safari is ugly and charmless, with unoriginal robots duking it out in random plots of land, unmotivated by a brief, poorly translated story.

Forget the frequent crashes and often unintelligible instructions because even if it was the prettiest, stablest game on Earth, you'd still be left with one boring, disjointed experience.