Gun Bros.

Brothers can be a nuisance. You’re not really allowed to say that – because your mother will clip the back of your head – but it’s true.

When they aren’t following you about (younger), or trying to stick your head down the toilet (older), they just sort of get in the way.

Glu Mobile's freemium twin-stick shooter Gun Bros is at least faithful to real life in this regard - although in real life you and your brother probably aren’t firing bullets at everything that comes within ten feet of you.

That’s what Gun Bros. is all about. You fend off waves of enemies using the usual control scheme – one on-screen stick to move and the other to rotate and fire.

A separate button switches between your two equipped weapons, and although it’s small and can be unresponsive, you won’t really need it that often because it’s so easy to find a favourite weapon and stick to it for the entire session.

Another tiny button brings up your Smartillery menu. This allows you to use items and power-ups bought between sessions.

And boy is there a lot to buy: after all, this is a free game that hopes to make its money via in-app purchases.

There are airstrikes that wipe all enemies off the screen at once, health grenades to revive you, and power-ups that put you into a rage, increasing all your stats.

Smartillery isn’t the only thing your gold coin goes on, however. With the money you earn from collecting and refining Explodium (you convert it to gold coins at various rates depending on your refinery), you can get new guns and armour or unlock new worlds to fight on.

There's also a secondary currency called War Bucks. These are harder to earn for free but you can get them by downloading other apps. They're pretty much a real money proportion though and are required for some of the better weapons and items.

Each enemy downed earns you XP as well, increasing your character's Speed, Attack, and Defence stats as you level-up.

All the time you're fighting off wave after wave of enemies you're accompanied by a Bro. This can be a human player, selected by registering a multiplayer account (the game supports Game Center and OpenFeint).

Or you can select the Bro of a real but offline friend. His movements are controlled by the game's AI, but you get the benefit of his level, guns, etc, so it's worth having a lot of friends who are more advanced than you in the game.

Of course, the better experience is to play with a real friend: the AI tends to have a fatal habit of running along your exact path one second after you, meaning they run into every bullet or enemy you’ve just dodged.

Once your Bro's dead, he won't revive until the next wave starts.

The good news is that for a twin-stick shooter Gun Bros. looks very polished. The enemies are varied enough to be interesting and the menus, while sometimes sluggish, are often adorned with the game’s cartoon sci-fi art style.

The bad news is that it's extremely slow going. Both your characters and your enemies plod around the battlefield at a Skoda’s pace.

Similar titles such as PewPew give you a sense of urgency and panic - something Gun Bros can't muster until the final waves of each Revolution or stage. And each contains 50 waves. At least you get a lot of game.

The experience might be more enjoyable if it wasn’t necessary to play for ages to earn the coins to unlock better weapons, making what could have been a tense and attractive twin-stick shooter into more like a grind.

As tends to happen with these games, after a certain point, unless you're willing to stump up cash to buy in-game currency or mindlessly grind out results for hours and hours, you're likely to hit a plateau in terms of progression.

For many players, Gun Bros. will be an attractive and playable but ultimately short-lived experience.