Eternity Warriors

Another week, another top-down, wave based, freemium action title from Glu.

This time around, in place of the burly mercenaries from Gun Bros and the burly spaceships from Star Blitz, we have burly barbarians.

Armed to the teeth with epic choppers, furry boots, and a rampant disregard for the rules of engagement, these cut-price Conans will stop at nothing in their quest to survive poor game mechanics and uninspiring level design.

But Glu hasn't rested on its laurels, because rather than using a twin-stick control method Eternity Warriors uses a single stick and buttons. It doesn't really work, but at least it's something different.

Eternity Warriors throws you head-first into a recycled fantasy setting, replete with inns, castles, buxom wenches, and an undead horde baying at the door. You play a sword-wielding heroic type, tasked with repelling the lecherous lichs before they cave your skull in and eat your delicious squishy bits.

You're joined in your adventure by a patently useless AI assistant, who can be replaced by a real-life friend if you can find anybody to play with you. You add your friends through in-app Facebook integration, and can share loot and levels as you progress through the game.

Gameplay is hacking and slashing of the very simplest order. One on-screen button performs a light attack, the second, which you have to unlock through playing, performs a heavy attack. There's the slightest semblance of a combo system, but all it encourages is button-mashing and frustration.

After slaughtering things for a while, you'll have amassed a vast swathe of soul remains, which you can melt down in the forge to create coins to spend on armour and weapons.

The system is identical to the one found in Gun Bros. and Star Blitz, right down to the different forges you can use real life money to purchase, except with fantasy window dressing instead of sci-fi.

This sort of shameless retooling would be fine and dandy if Glu's original template worked, but Eternity Warriors is a muddled clone of a muddled original that sets you meandering aimlessly through an unoriginal and uninspired world.

Then there's the engine powering the game, which chugs along whenever there are any more than three enemies on screen, and that's pretty much all the time.

So you stumble jerkily around boring battlefields where you have to spend far too much time mangling your thumbs into the screen. It doesn't take long to start wondering why you're bothering.

There are moments of respite in Eternity Warriors, when it feels like you're playing Gauntlet on your phone. Then the slowdown kicks in and you're still stuck on that same boring level, waiting to clear another wave of boring enemies.

You have to give Glu some credit for persevering with the same model, but the third time is most definitely not the charm. Eternity Warriors might have the triple-A polish that so many Android titles are missing, but it's a shallow and bland game underneath its barbarous glitter.