Lock's Quest

The ARPG combat is a disappointment, though. When you're asked to take the fight to the enemy, on your own, you just dash in amongst them, do windmills until you're nearly out of health, and then go round a corner until your hitpoints have recharged. Enemies - when they're not waves crashing against your defences, or on looping patrol - will always leave you alone once you retreat a certain distance, and are generally slow enough that it's possible to simply run around in the middle of them without incurring any damage. For the most part these sections are the wrong kind of repetitive slog.

The limitations of the AI also extend back to the core of the game. It's fine that the clockwork attack patterns are predictable, because it gives you visual cues to where you'll need to repair in the next few seconds and gives you ideas for the next level's strategy. But when the clockwork forces manage to bust a platoon-shaped hole in your wall, they show no interest in marching through it - they just pound an adjacent bit of wall. Eventually they go through, and try and claim your source well, but even halfway through the game's many hours of campaign you're never left hanging on as the timer runs down, because the enemy just doesn't bother to act on its success.

Multiplayer might make up for that. Ostensibly the same as the single-player build-and-battle levels, the difference is that you spend some of your resources buying up an army of clockwork warriors to send off to fight the enemy. Alas though, Lock's Quest is offline-only and requires two copies of the game to play, and we've only got one, so we can't tell you if it does or doesn't atone for problems elsewhere.

Fortunately, it doesn't really matter in the long run, because despite its flaws - and a few niggles with the controls and camera - the core build and repair gameplay is very compelling. Most of the game is a pushover, but the frantic routine of building a defensive wall, laying out traps, and then dashing around ratcheting repairs on multiple fronts as red blips on the mini-map march towards your defences from different angles, is bafflingly compelling. Each build-and-battle level takes up a day of in-game time, and you often face increasingly hefty armies on the same battlefield several times over before you move on, but it's all too easy to tell yourself you'll do another five days before bed and end up doing the next 20 instead.