HeroBot

Short burst arcade games are great for mobiles. Top-down arena shooters make for great arcade games.

Surely HeroBot, a top-down, arcade arena shooter for Android in the vein of Robotron 2084 is an automatic download for any self respecting Android owner?

Unfortunately not.

Based over 27 levels and a handful of lives that keep sending you back to stage one, HeroBot gives you control of a charmingly drawn little robot and tasks you with destroying enemies while keeping his equally charming robot girlfriend out of the crossfire.

It’s a fairly well trodden formula, but the touchscreen controls combined with a complete lack of instruction immediately cause confusion.

There’s a miniature arcade stick in the bottom-left of the screen, but you actually control the robot anywhere on screen.

Trying to use the dinky arcade stick will send your robot frustratingly trundling in that direction and to a certain death.

Once you figure this out, things don’t get much better.

The robot is always firing and moves around in one of eight directions, meaning that shots often miss enemies.

This means that rather than darting around craftily as in PewPew, HeroBot will often force you wait awkwardly for the enemies to walk into the little robot's path, before darting off to a safe spot to repeat the process all over again.

You often find yourself covering the enemies - or worse, yourself - with your controlling finger.

There’s nothing wrong with repetitive gameplay in arcade games like this one, but the mechanics are so stop-start that it doesn’t flow the way a good arcade game should.

It may seem a bit mean to kick in a game for being deliberately retro, but if that was the intention the touchscreen really doesn’t treat it kindly.

There are other options available to owners of more feature-rich handsets including wiimote play and cursors, but many gamers will find their options limited.

Presentation-wise, it’s generally excellent, with charming graphics, satisfying explosions, and a robot-voiced congratulatory message at the end of each level, where a robotic voice says something that sounds eerily like, “Thanks very much my dear”.

There’s a good game buried in here somewhere, but the retro fittings combined with an imperfect control system makes this ultimately one to avoid.