Gatling Gears

The boss battles are definitely some of the game's most impressive moments. These massive, gear-driven automatons cycle through different attack patterns and defensive phases, making sure that you keep moving and forcing you to try different strategies and approaches. They're a rare burst of creativity and ingenuity amongst a drab cast of drone-like foes.

Everything is more fun in co-op, of course, and you can play through the entire campaign with a buddy over the web or on the same machine. Once you've finished the storyline, you can also try out some wave-based survival challenges, which work best with a pal.

But when it comes to the main storyline, there's nothing to break up the brain-crushing monotony, and Gatling Gears offers little to keep you playing for more than a couple of levels in a single sitting. There are only so many times you can weave through a curtain of bullets and lay into a tank before your trigger finger gets restless. The new worlds you'll unlock don't offer much more than some different environmental hassles, and the new enemies rarely bring anything to the battlefield other than some extra hit-points.

There are plenty of niggling annoyances, too, that further drag down the fun. Outside of the bullets, bombs, explosions and enemies, your view is also obscured by snow flakes or rain, hulking great helicopters, ally fire, pillars of smoke and the organic backdrops. It's easy to get completely lost amongst the haywire jumble that obscures your view, and enemies often hide under scenery or off camera.

Plus, who thought it was a good idea to make the tank-propelled shells and skittering foot soldiers the exact same colour? And the camera! How can you get a camera wrong in a top-down shooter? It constantly lingers behind if you try to push on, meaning you've either got to wait for it to catch up or trot on without any idea of what enemies lie ahead.

Gatling Gears certainly has a startling aesthetic. If you're not bored of steam-punk yet, the creative vehicles and set pieces have a charming, toy-like look. Its tiny tanks look like painted miniatures, and the rolling hills resemble those felt landscapes that train-set nerds drape over their paper-maché mountains.

The dynamic backdrops and changing scenery constantly surprise too, with mammoth dropships casting imposing shadows, or a cargo train rocketing past on an overhead bridge. On one level, as the industrialist buggers bore into the snowy mountain tops, huge chunks of landscape topple into the abyss.

But it's just smart set-dressing for an otherwise mindless game. The cute visuals quickly go away to let you get on with the main event: churning through enemies and dodging bullets. Gatling Gears' reliable controls and punchy feel offer up a very satisfying way to do that, but it's a brainless brand of enjoyment that can only last for so long.

By bringing nothing particularly new to either genre that it borrows from, Gatling Gears fails to justify its inflated price of 1200 Microsoft Points, and is far from an essential purchase. If you fancy a bullet hell shmup or a twin stick shooter, Xbox Live Arcade and other such digital storefronts are hardly running low on stock.