Hammer Wars

Let’s be clear about this: a hammer is a brilliant thing, an elegant marriage of maths, physics, and brutality that is both highly effective and consistent in its behaviour.

The only way to streamline such a simple tool would be to remove the handle, effectively turning it back into the rocks our ancestors first hit other rocks with.

Hammer Wars attempts a similar streamlining of the twin stick shooter – stripping it of one of those sticks – but in the process renders it inaccurate, unsatisfying and disappointing. The real tragedy, though, is that there was clearly a brilliant game buried under all of the mistakes.

For a start, the game is visually luxurious, and not just for a mini. Hammer Wars’s aesthetic is a heady mix of Amiga era Psygnosis, for those who remember it (think steampunk and Greek legend), which is somehow refreshingly unique.

The music, too, is suitably grandiloquent, creating, in combination with the dramatic lighting, a fantastic atmosphere. The story is nothing original, but it's told with histrionic panache to rival that found in video gaming's finest examples.

And then there are the vehicles – diminutive helicopter airships fashioned from wood and steel, orbited by proud looking hammers, axes, and swords, themselves attached by a hefty chain and ready to deal damage to all who oppose you. Fantastic stuff.

But that’s where this initial promise starts to unravel at an alarming pace. The aforementioned removal of the second stick (and lack of any option to map an equivalent to the face buttons) means that both control of your craft and the weapon are on the analogue nub.

In order to swing your weapon, you must fly in a circle and rely on the physics engine to spin it round. As a result, you end up constantly looping – like a confused, angry bee.

You can hurl your weapon with a tap of Square (and spawn a new one with Circle), but as this also relies on the object's momentum, accuracy is poor.

Worse still, any successful impacts you do make feel insubstantial, and the need for your weapon and enemy to meet at the same point leaves you constantly exposed to the blunt edge of their retort.

A selection of spears doesn’t do enough to prevent the frustration setting in.

And that frustration is further compounded by bugs (a nearly downed enemy will lie stricken just off screen; your ship will be absent when a level loads; etc) and amateurish balancing.

The second level features a huge difficulty spike, but every subsequent one falls easily as you’ll have collected enough coins (generated from every strike) by that point to buy all of the best weaponry and armour.

This game could have been genuinely brilliant, but it fails on nearly every level. I wanted to love it – I really did – but playing this game left me stuck between a rock and a hard place.