AshWorld review - A rough, chaotic open world game

There aren't many open world games on mobile, for obvious reasons. Wandering around a large environment doesn't particularly tally with short sharp bursts of play.

Seemingly inspired by the brutal Mad Max universe, AshWorld seeks to give us a post-apocalyptic open world opus for our mobiles.

If only the core elements of gameplay had been nailed down a little tighter, it might have pulled it off

AshWorld is actually a mash-up of various game types. There's the overworld map navigation, in which your grumpy loner stalks from one hellish 'shelter' to the next.

This is a hostile desert environment roamed by psychotic ravagers during the day and zombie skeletons by night. Combat is heavily automated, from button-mashing fisticuffs to auto-aiming firearms (with very limited bullets).

It's best to grab yourself a car if you're travelling far. Zipping around AshWorld's map in a vehicle is good fun, with weighty handling and beat-up cars that are perpetually on the brink of running out of fuel or blowing up.

All in all it reminds me a little of the original GTA - at least until you enter a building. Here, the action reverts to a more traditional OrangePixel action platformer.

As well as shops, these are the game's procedurally generated dungeons, which you can raid and loot to your heart's content.

Part of the trouble with AshWorld is that these disparate elements don't seem to stitch together particularly well. I was constantly thinking about which virtual button I needed to press - and then not getting the desired response - while the menus are both clunky and lacking in sufficient detail.

The controls are fiddly and unreliable, and I had particular difficulty playing the game on my iPhone X. After tinkering with the size and positioning of the buttons for a while I eventually gave up and took up the game on my iPad. It helped, but only a little.

Everything just feels too manic and haphazard within the game world, too. You're constantly rammed into by goons and forced to fight for your life with scant ammunition. It becomes wearisome pretty quickly.

The game also has a day/night cycle, a rudimentary crafting system, and a requirement to constantly eat and rest. But these states come around far too quickly, giving the game a gratingly stop-start rhythm. You never really feel like you're properly getting your teeth into the game.

I've been quite critical of AshWorld up to this point, but that's because there's so much potential here. There are individual elements that can be admired in isolation, from the driving to the randomised layouts and the sheer variety of items and weapons.

But it just doesn't hang together as a cohesive whole. There are too many rough edges, glitches, difficulty spikes, control malfunctions and vague directions (I got stuck without a clue what to do on one of the earliest missions).

I wouldn't be surprised if version 2 or 3 of AshWorld turned out to be a very good game indeed. But right now this open world feels like it needs to be closed for essential maintenance works.