Watchmen

Ah, beat-'em-ups. There’s never been a more misunderstood gaming genre.

Lots of gamers consign the balls-out brawler to the mental ward of the games industry, and ignore it at parties when it inevitably gets drunk, puts its trousers on its head and starts a fight with four people at once.

Others (like me) love this behaviour. But it takes dedication, a profound understanding of recklessness, and more than a little experience to really make this lifestyle work, and this latest fighting game from Glu is an amateur at best.

As straightforward and unrefined as a beat-‘em-up can be to play, it takes a mountain of intricate design to tally fists and feet with two thumbs.

This mobile adaptation of the new Watchmen movie exhibits an old game design fallacy - add a flashy fighting combo to a button mashing mechanic, throw in a special move or two, have the enemies drop the occasional knife, and brawler fans will lap it up.

This is semi-true, but beat-‘em-up jockeys have the fastest thumbs of all breeds of player, and if the game can’t keep up, or ties those thumbs in knots, it’ll be cast aside like a well pummelled enemy drone.

Watchmen’s first sticking point is the controls. It really boils down to button mashing, which wouldn’t be so bad if the movement controls were more responsive.

A flurry of bashes on button '5' with an attempt to change position in between goes unanswered, and the enemies spend their time circling a superhero who looks like he’s acting out Saturday Night Fever on the street.

You can grab the enemies, which involves a peculiar second press of the direction button, but double tapping the direction button also makes you run. Inevitably, this leads to confusion and button mashing.

There are also extra weapons, in the shape of a boomerang-type knife or a flying kick, and these require you to use '1' and '3' to wield them in the corresponding directions. Unfortunately, the consequence of this layout is that you can't move diagonally.

Watchmen undeniably looks great, with all the gothic comic-book splendour the awesome graphic novel deserves, though the animation and game speed tends to crawl when two or three enemies come on screen at once.

What slickness the game does have is gone once you've a couple of adversaries to pummel at once, and this is another fatal flaw in the amateurish beat-'em-up design.

With the likes of Chuck Norris - Bring on the Pain sharing virtual shelf space with Watchmen, the lacklustre quality of this breathless beat-'em-up is thrown into stark relief.

The mobile platform is more than capable of running some superb fighting games, so there’s no real excuse for cobbling together a half-interested brawler on the assumption that fans of the genre are generally too punchy to know the difference.

Neither does it add anything to the Watchmen canon or the movie-based storm that's brewing around the forthcoming film, making Watchmen a typical license tie-in, which is a harsh thing to say about any game.