Here Be Monsters HD

By rights Here Be Monsters HD should be dreadful. And it is a bit.

But unlike the hordes of other aimless free-to-play tapathons out there it at least has some meat on its bones. And it's a sweet meat - the sort that keeps you coming back for more.

It doesn't capture the elements that makes its inspirations to enjoyable. The whimsy and charm of Animal Crossing and the one-more-capture drive of Pokémon are starkly absent from this mashing together, but there's still something likeable about it.

It might stem from the fact it's set in real places. So you're popping from London to Nottingham and, eventually, all around the world, capturing beasts, completing quests, and roasting squash.

There's nothing challenging about the game, and if you scrape away the veneer of quests and rewards it's just an exercise in screen-poking. It just happens to be pretty good at it.

You play a young trapper who bobs around the world, capturing monsters, filling up an almanac, and completing starkly simple quests.

You might have to collect some apples from a bunch of apple trees right next to you, or catch a specific butterfly for a useless Frenchman.

There's a jumble of currencies and energy meters and all manner of other UI elements wrapped around the screen, but the cute cartoony graphics are pleasant enough, and tapping through the world is simple and easy on the fingers.

NPC characters jabber a lot of nonsense, dragons swoop from the sky and make odd remarks, and the Lake District doesn't have any hills in it, but the world feels thick and, while not exactly full of interesting things to do, just about alive.

You've got a little homestead where you make stuff and grow crops, and quests usually see you shooting from A to B using your never clearly defined teleportation power.

While the aim might have been Nintendo's greatest hits, more often than not Here Be Monsters HD feels like a squishing together of a litany of casual classics, with a thin smear of game squelched around the resulting blob.

It's perfectly good at what it does, even though what it does amounts to little more than tapping on a bunch of things and then waiting for a while to tap on another bunch of things.

Some people would probably balk at calling it a game, but others will be happy to be whisked away in its shiny tale of magic, monsters, and tapping.