Circus Balloon

Circus Balloon can't be faulted for a lack of imagination. How many games have you played recently where you play a clown determined to set up a flea circus against the wishes of his boss and who then tries to smuggle his fleas into the circus hidden in a balloon?

Immediately though, you wonder if the idea to hide them inside a balloon is a winning one. Surely it'd be easier to hide them on a manky dog, or even just in a matchbox? They are quite compact things, after all.

It's a question that's answered quite quickly once you start playing the game. No, it turns out, it's not a good idea to put them in a balloon. Because your balloon keeps getting popped on a variety of spiky obstacles scattered around each level and your boss Zampo gets annoyed and takes away one of your lives. Carrying what feels like a kamikaze brightly coloured balloon that sways about in the wind and gets popped quite often is incredibly annoying, too. Circus Balloon might be original, but it's tough to describe a game as fun through gritted teeth.

The problem lies in the perspective from which Circus Balloon is viewed. It's a 3D game but with no ability to move the camera, it's difficult to judge exactly what your balloon is going to hit and what it's not.

As you walk, your floating fiend sways from side to side and, in theory, the trick is to time the sway to get you in between tight gaps and past deadly spiky rocks and fences. But there's really little skill to this – it's very much the case that sometimes you can leg it past everything and your balloon stays intact and other times you'll stand and try to judge gauntlet runs only to have it popped by something you can hardly see.

The annoyance this brings is only intensified by the fact that losing all your lives returns you right to the start of the stage. With stages composed of ten levels, that can mean a lot of replaying the same fury-inducing paths, the sound of balloon-pops ringing in your ears.

Clearly, not everything about Circus Balloon is bad. In fact, there's quite a lot that makes it a reasonable game on paper. You can wander off the beaten track to collect special items and point-scoring objects, with items granting abilities like the handy super-speed, or not-so-handy reversing of controls.

There are lots of obstacles to tackle that aren't of the spiky variety as well, such as hypnotised circus animals. As an incentive to tackle the levels as quickly as possible, your points constantly count down on the screen. For an even trickier challenge – and you'd have to be of a suitably Zen-like disposition to tackle it – there's a Time Attack mode that gives you really very tight temporal limits to beat in each level you've played.

When you reach obstacles that are too close together to walk past in the normal way, the game goes into 'flea mode', giving you a close up view of the balloon and giving you control of the fleas inside it to make it swing left and right. This is at least a neat little diversion and there's a sort of 'survival' mode that lets you tackle races just using this viewpoint, seeing how long you can last without popping the balloon.

Still, despite its colourful kid-winning visuals and cute clowns, Circus Balloon is impossible to recommend on game merit. The idea might be good, but its execution just doesn't work. Very precise controls and camera work is needed for such careful navigation, and sadly the game has neither.

Really, there's only so many times you can watch a balloon pop due to apparently no fault of your own before you either gently sigh and turn the game off forever or proceed to grind your mobile into the ground with the heel of your shoe. Zippo the clown is basically a sadist under that silly smiley face.