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Metal Gear Solid Touch

Itsy trigger finger.

That's about it, although Kojima Productions has thrown in a handful of twists. There are a few friendly hostages that will deplete your health if you shoot them. If the enemy's at long range, you'll need to zoom in with a two-fingered pinch (just as you would on a webpage in Safari) which switches to Snake's wavering sniper rifle sights. Shooting certain pickups grants you health, "stealth" (actually temporary invincibility), or a rocket launcher to help take down a Gekko mech, a chopper or a boss. (The bosses are the imposing Beauty and the Beast squad of psychotic cyber-ladies, more or less exactly as you found them in MGS4.)

All of it works to unfussy, fine-tuned perfection. Working your way through harder levels - there's a not unwelcome but rather sudden difficulty hike halfway through - is a pleasing mix of reaction-test, rhythm-play and spatial awareness, as you watch the timers for a window to re-sight the crosshair to the other side of the screen, zoom in on a distant pickup, or pick off a group of enemies. The patterns vary on replays too, just to keep you on your toes.

Unlike a light-gun game, aiming takes appreciable time and must be planned for, but the touch interface means it still feels believable and tactile, and less alienating than manipulating a cursor with a stick. It's just a little like what we imagine being in an actual gunfight to be like. The more basic pattern-recognition of the boss fights is less successful, though.

Laughing Octopus and the other bosses are the game's cruder moments.

It's also beautifully presented, as you'd expect from Kojima Productions. Everything's been done in 2D sprites and flat backgrounds with a loose, hand-painted look. Some gentle depth-of-field blur and impressively gritty screen overlays, and a reverential care for translating Guns of the Patriots' moody palette, make this one of the best-looking iPhone games. It sounds great too, with wholesale lifts from the PS3 game's terrific score. Doling out the plot in chunks of plain text over a bit of art seems a bit lazy though, and it's 100 per cent spoiler for anyone who hasn't played MGS4.

Metal Gear Solid Touch is a slight offering, although it's none too pricey. Completing the twelve levels unlocks a Survival mode - your health and timer last from level to level - while improving your ranking on levels in the main mode earns Drebin points, which can be exchanged with the black marketeer for pin-ups of the sexpot cast. But as slick and punchy as the game is, it just doesn't have the mechanical depth to give it reply value as a score-attack game. You won't feel that compelled to return to it after an hour or two, and there are better-value propositions all over the App Store.

Metal Gear Solid Touch is a miniature, a digest; a microscopic burst of Snake action that's over almost before you've started to notice that it's good. It's throwaway, but it's an unusually considered and craftsmanlike kind of throwaway, with novel and satisfying controls. If this is the face of the mobile gaming spin-off in 2009, then things are looking up.

6 / 10