Invaders... From Space review - Google Earth meets nuclear annihalation

Invaders... From Space feels like the product of a weird game jam where someone messed around with Google Earth and turned it into an arcade score-chaser.

The result is a curious game of contrasts. It's simultaneously fresh and familiar, immediate and awkward, intriguing and limited.

It puts the world in your hands, but quickly runs out of things to do with it once it's there.

There's a bunch of rockets heading into Earth from outer space. You play the role of some omnipotent alien overlord who must literally drag the Earth around so that the rockets hit their intended city targets.

Swiping on the screen with one finger moves 3D model of Earth, while a double swipe alters your view in relation to the planet. Double tapping re-centres your view.

The developer attempts to pitch this as some kind of twisted geography-based game, but in practice I found that I never had the time - nor bearings - to respond to the listed targets by name. Perhaps my geography is worse than I thought.

Rather, you'll learn to swipe around to the dotted trajectory marker and quickly scan for the like-coloured targets along the way.

It's a novel approach to what is at its core a very simple, quick-fire score chaser. It's also an incredibly handsome game, with a distinctive 3D 8-bit aesthetic mixed with a deliberately hammy 1950s sci-fi tone.

While it feels fresh and controls nicely, though, Invaders... From Space doesn't quite have that endlessly compulsive, water-tight core mechanic to keep you coming back for more.

There's a sense of hit-and-miss frustration to locating your targets (or not) that never quite abates.

It's good fun swiping around an imperilled globe in Invaders... From Space, just as it is in Google Earth. But as I recall, in Google Earth there's never any threat of sustaining your third miss whilst attempting to locate Belo Horizonte.