Water Polo

Translating the back and forth of competitive sport onto mobile devices has always been a challenging prospect for mobile developers.

Like the athletes who participate in the competition itself, Fugumobile's Water Polo has to fight against the resistance of its environment in the hope of achieving success.

Instead of wading through water, however, the sports sim must battle the restrictive nature of a numeric keypad.

Unfortunately, it's a tussle that Water Polo never really wins, making the game near impossible to recommend.

So, about those controls. To manoeuvre your team members around the pool, you use the standard '2', '4', '6', '8' configuration.

This means your athletes feel less like swimmers slicing gracefully through the water and more like the eponymous protagonist from the right-angle obsessed Snake.

It's near impossible to intercept the ball from the opposition, but near impossible not to gain possession when the ball drops at the beginning of each play.

Because of this, most victories play out in an identical manner: claim possession, awkwardly trace an Etch-a-Sketch line around the opposition, and fire one into the net.

Couple this limited movement with AI that's content to allow opposition characters to hold the ball in the centre of the pool and tread water for 15 seconds while the clock counts down and you have a recipe for frustration.

That's not to say that Water Polo's only issues are its controls, however.

While the animation of the swimmers is relatively decent considering the platform, the desaturated stadium bleacher backdrop looks like it's been pulled from another game entirely.

At one point, we investigated the instructions page to see if we'd missed any options or controls that might unlock Water Polo's hidden potential.

Instead, we were met with the instruction card for a completely different game, one apparently based around delivering burgers.

Unfortunately, this error speaks to the problem at the heart of Water Polo: a general air of sloppiness. It feels like a rush job, like someone took the mechanics of another game, chucked some sporty sprites over the top, and hoped no one would notice.

As such, we suspect that Water Polo's aquatic antics will disappoint even to the most ardent sports fans. Swim on, folks.