I'll be honest, Tales From Space: About A Blob, this game's PS3-only predecessor, completely passed me by. Pity, as I expect it was pretty good given the follow-up has turned out to be the hidden gem of Vita's launch line-up.

The developer, Canadian indie Drinkbox, may not be doing itself any commercial favours with a title as forgettably generic as Mutant Blobs Attack. But it fits the game's shtick snugly enough, spoofing as it does '50s sci-fi while gobbling up ideas and mechanics from familiar games. It's part LocoRoco, part Katamari, and yet the end result still proves coherent and distinctive: a cleverly designed, wryly amusing, just-one-more-go platform-puzzler made to measure for Sony's handheld.

You control the blob - initially as tiny as teeth - after it escapes from a lab and begins devouring everything in sight smaller than itself, its size and appetite expanding exponentially across the game's six zones, with 24 levels in total (plus optional 'Tilt-A-Blob' stages, which I'll come to).

Within each level, progress is routinely impeded by a cork in a passageway you cannot pass until you have scoffed enough stuff in that you're sufficiently proportioned to devour it. You move, you eat, you get bigger, you move and eat some more. It's as easy as that. And it's terrific fun while it lasts.

We humans are not portrayed in the best light, which is probably for the best given how the game ends.

The physics-based action is broadly divided between roll-jump-and-gobble and fly-and-gobble, the latter bestowing the gelatinous glutton with rocket power. The two styles seamlessly interchange throughout, with layers of complexity added in as you go.

Best of all are your ovoid over-eater's magnetic abilities. The left shoulder button attracts it to, and right shoulder repels it from, metallic objects. Simple enough. But the ingenuity of the design delivers some fantastically tense moments, such as when you are tasked with balancing the opposing forces of hazard-lined objects, and the physics are exploited to great effect.

Similarly, certain platforms can be moved using the touch-screen. Early on, it's just dragging something to an obvious point and moving on. But delve deeper and perfectly timed multi-touch manoeuvres are required.

Speaking of which, the game gets a big tick for resisting the temptation to force every last Vita feature down the player's throat - all too often the curse of a new console's launch range, and the occasional scourge of other early Vita titles, such as Uncharted with its oh-god-how-many-more-rubbings and oh-jesus-who-approved-these swipe-to-hack-sequences.

Touch-screen play is limited to the previously mentioned platform manipulation, worked with frequent flair into the puzzling, demanding sharp reflexes and a keen eye.

Magnetism is deployed brilliantly throughout. A quick zap will attract these blocks towards you.

It can feel a little imprecise from time to time - which may be the hardware rather than any design flaw, as I've had similar issues with Escape Plan - but it's generally used smartly enough that you won't mind the odd fluff.

Rear touch is only squeezed in as an alternative boost control - normally activated via the shoulder buttons - and can be disabled so you're not setting it off all the time with twitching digits.

Five of the six zones also feature a bonus tilt-control game - one of those top-down, roll-around things - which I ignored at first, since they begin with a dull maze navigation mini-game that feels out-of-place and gimmicky.

It was a nice surprise, then, when I returned after finishing the game to discover the retro gaming looks lavished on later rounds. The gameplay still doesn't add much, but the rounds are optional and your curiosity is more than rewarded by the consolation of nostalgia.

The game can be tricky, but never stupidly or unfairly so, and restarts are always only moments away from where you screwed up. The studio's evident creative self-assurance ensures the team avoids the trap a more insecure developer might have fallen into: arbitrarily and artificially drawing it out in the misguided belief that bigger is better. Size matters in Mutant Blobs Attack - it's the entire point - but not the size of the experience.

And anyway, given the budget price tag, there's more game here than you might imagine. Moreover, leaderboards and the urge for another quick bash add decent replay value.

Price and Availability

• PlayStation Vita: £5.49/$7.99
• PlayStation Store

It's not fat, it's big-celled.

Mutant Blobs Attack is a funny game whose humour is happy to exist quite literally in the background, hoping to catch your eye with pleasing wordplay (a fast-food chain called Facefull that serves up Zuckerburgers and so on).

Attention to detail throughout is a joy, with much to admire in the stylish environments and quirky, well-arranged soundtrack. Really, the blandest thing in the entire game, out of functional necessity I suppose, is the blob itself. But even this jelly belly has character in its greedy beady eye, forever darting in the direction of the analogue stick.

Mutant Blobs Attack is exactly the sort of game Vita needs lots of if is to survive and thrive as a platform. It's got the pick-up-and-play moreishness of the best of iOS with a level of complexity only possible on bespoke gaming hardware.

At £5.49, it sits alongside MotorStorm RC as one of the budget-priced surprises and delights of Vita's launch. As soon as I'd finished rattling through it I was hungry for more, so I sincerely hope it's supported with further courses of content.

As I've said, I'd never paid any attention to Drinkbox or its games previously. I won't be making that mistake in future.

8
/
10

Jason Shiga is a bit of a genius. As if being a Berkeley-educated maths whizz isn't enough - it's certainly enough for me, Jason - Shiga's also a wonderfully inventive comic book writer and artist. He's come up with weekly strips about finding yourself sealed in a phone booth (Fleep) and one-shot stories about the gritty world of library detectives (Bookhunter). My favourite of all his works, though, is probably Meanwhile, a colourful and rather strange sort of book with tabbed edges and glossy pages. It's interactive fiction in comic form, and it's now available on the iPhone and iPad. Hooray!

Even when bound in cardboard, Meanwhile doesn't look much like other comic books. Shiga's trademark round-headed heroes peak out from a familiar collection of panels, perhaps, but those panels are connected to each other by a dense, criss-crossing network of pipes - pipes which often race from one page, over a tab, and then onto another, before snaking back again. The pipes are how you follow your story through Meanwhile's non-linear layout. With the hardback, it can be something of a dexterity test as you run your finger around the paper. With the app, it's a far simpler matter of heading from one highlighted panel to the next. Tap tap tap. Ugh! You died. That was stupid of you.

Shiga specialises in sadsack everymen who are thrown into weird situations.

The app's greatest achievement, perhaps, is in redesigning the entire layout of Meanwhile so it now works on a single master canvas - one on which you can zoom in and out as often as your heart desires. It gives you a lovely sense of Shiga, putting his narratives together with paper and scissors and thumbtacks. The story itself starts fairly simply - you're buying an ice cream and you're given a basic choice between two different flavours - but chances are high that, if you play through the narrative more than once, you're going to find it taking some weird leftfield turns into science fiction, philosophy, and even a cute strain of nihilistic horror.

Price and Availability

• Platform: iOS
• Price: £2.99
• App Store

All of that waits for you on the page, of course, and none of it deserves spoiling here. What I can tell you is that you'll be asked to make a number of tricky decisions throughout the course of your adventure in Meanwhile, but the app's very good at letting you go back over past narratives and explore what would have happened if you'd done things differently. Shiga's books are filled with tricks and puzzles, and Meanwhile is one of his most complex works to date: expect lots of overlapping trajectories and weird little feedback loops to get stuck into. Expect plenty of surprises and codes and jokes.

Meanwhile was developed in collaboration with the interactive fiction expert Andrew Plotkin, and it's an extremely elegant piece of work. To play it is to see the garden of forking paths laid out before you. To browse through it is to risk minutes turning into hours.

App of the Day highlights interesting games we're playing on the Android, iPad, iPhone and Windows Phone 7 mobile platforms, including post-release updates. If you want to see a particular app featured, drop us a line or suggest it in the comments.

In a submerged world, the man with the oil is king. He is the one who controls the flow of a battle. In Unigine's game, making mad grabs for oil derricks is something that you absolutely have to do, and that it ties into the theme so neatly is admirable. You send out your units and they grab. Derricks, nodes, factories, helipads. It's all quite elegant. It just took me a little while to figure out why.

Most games have silly names: Chronicles of Atalur or Call of Honour. They don't really mean anything. They're about evoking an idea, setting a mood, or if you're particularly lucky, establishing a premise. That's why I think I can be forgiven for ignoring Oil Rush as a title. I figured it didn't really mean much of anything. Also, the very last thing I ever want to do is rush.

When it comes to real-time strategy games, I'm a turtle. I hunker down, hoping the outside world will just go away so that I can carry on building my walls higher and my turrets bigger. I want to create a great big blob of men with guns, and then fling my arm in the general direction of the enemy, and have my horde cut a swathe through them.

A waterpocalypse can be so beautiful.

Oil Rush is not made for turtles. It's very much in the hare school of strategy games, as most are. But here, the blitz is king more than most, and if you dawdle for a second you're punished severely. It's a game about momentum and how hard you can swing that big old metaphorical pendulum around.

Oil Rush has no base-building; the bases are already built. It doesn't have production queues or any resource management. Each base churns out a specific unit type, from jet skis to boats to planes to helicopters, and they churn them out until they reach their specific unit cap. If any of their units get killed, they churn out a fresh one. So each game starts with a mad grab, a scramble for all of the best nodes, an attempt to consolidate and expand.

It's made for speed, both in how it plays and how long you play it for. Games are quick, clocking in at just over 20 minutes, and they operate at a breakneck pace that relies on you constantly switching between defending your bases and attacking new ones.

For a game where you can only ever control the base-nodes that litter the map, it's remarkably fluid. It's about managing your troops as a resource, knowing when and where to send them, and not being indecisive for a second. But it's quick-fire in the most powerful sense, because every decision is something you're locked into; there's no bottling and pulling your men back once they've been sent. Every trigger-pull is final.

Even after the world is screwed, we still love nukes.

You can say how many of your troops you want to send, (25, 50 or 100 per cent of those at each node), but once they're gone you don't get control over them until they've arrived. Retreat really isn't an option. It's about creating little hordes and sallying forth hoping you won't get cut up in their turrets and defenders. Knowing which troops to send, too, seems essential early on, when each unit type seems to counter another, but soon enough you'll have enough of a mix in each group that it becomes redundant.

There's an extra layer of strategy in a tech tree, unlocked by earning experience from kills and capturing nodes, and it gets pretty crazy pretty quickly, with nukes, submarines, giant gunships and napalm strikes all unlocked fairly easily. But the early skills, like radars, propaganda and demoralisation, are the ones that you'll be using the most to turn the tide of fights.

And that's what the oil is for. It means that you'll always have units to send off, regardless of whether you've got a proper supply of oil going, but if you want to do the really cool stuff, if you want to reinforce and use those skills, you need a derrick or two. It necessitates aggression right from the start, and it's only because I'm stubborn and thick that I didn't realise that.

The fleets that form are so wonderfully ordered.

My thickness isn't entirely to blame, however. The campaign does a poor job of properly introducing its mechanics beyond the bare minimum, and the first few levels are so easy that turtling is a perfectly valid tactic. While admittedly they're a kind of tutorial, it meant that by the time I got onto the campaign proper, I had an entirely false impression of the game in my head.

It doesn't help, then, that it seems like the AI is cheating the instant things get tough. And it especially doesn't help that it punishes certain types of aggression even though they should work. Instead, you have to be aggressive in a very specific way that the game wants, rather than the way that feels like it makes most sense. The campaign is a bit of a misfire, despite having some really lovely environments such as sunken cities and rocky outcroppings covered in ramshackle housing.

Then there's the acting and script. All you need to know is that the hero is called Kevin and his commander is called Commander.

Price and Availability

• Windows/Mac/Linux: £12.99/$19.95
• oilrush-game.com
• Steam
• Desura

Luckily, there's fun to be had in the skirmish mode, where all the multiplayer maps are available to be played against the AI, which, it seems, isn't all that hot at the game. They rush a little, but never quite enough to put the pressure on you, and there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of difference between normal and hard. Fun, but the fleeting kind. Once you realise quite how much of a cakewalk the AI is, it's hard to keep your interest.

Everything explodes spectacularly.

Which leaves the multiplayer. Once it's working, Oil Rush is surprisingly frenetic in multiplayer. That forced commitment - where once units are sent, they're sent - becomes a game of chicken that neither party can turn away from. There is no cowardice, only those who have the bottle to decide, and those who flail and make the wrong decision out of desperation. (I'll let you have a guess which camp I find myself in, more often than not.)

The problem is that it's difficult to get a game going. It works with Steamworks, except no one seems to hang out in a lobby for all that long, and even if you do rope in a bunch of friends to play it, if your internet connection isn't dangerously fast, it's going to start juddering and stalling as it tries to keep everyone synchronised. Which kills that speed and frenetic pace dead.

So what you're left with is a game that has a great little concept, a wonky campaign, AI bots that aren't quite up to the challenge of challenging you and somewhat dodgy netcode. It's incredibly frustrating, because the core concept works, and it works well. It's just all the rest that's falling apart at the seams.

6
/
10

It's not immediately obvious to everyone, but to us beardier, strategier PC types, the ongoing lack of a decent fantasy grand strategy game makes for a painful hole in our collection. While a spellcasting setting might have suited all sorts of RTS and turn-based titles, more than a few weary wizards will point an aging finger all the way back to 1994, to Microprose's Master of Magic, when they want to cite the definitive example of fantasy empire building. Paradox is hoping to finally change that with Warlock: Master of the Arcane.

"There is always the spirit of Master of Magic wandering out there," says senior writer Pavel Kondrashov, whose own brand of magic might be necromancy. "This spirit is demanding to be brought back to life. Although we started as a developer of sci-fi games, fantasy worlds seemed to have claimed us as their servants." That would explain the towns populated by rogues, ratmen or the living dead, all of them researching new spells or constructing strange magical apparatus under the orders of their Great Mages. Outside their city walls, ogres and giant spiders roam the lands.

If it moves, then it's probably going to try to kill you.

Much as Master of Magic resembled the original Civilization, with magical research in lieu of technological and elves instead of Europeans, Warlock is clearly inspired by the latest in Firaxis' series, though from the very start the game's world of Ardania is not only prettier but also much more dangerous.

It's thick with monsters and their lairs, more than a few of which will take a sustained effort to fight past, while the Great Mages of the land cast spells as if from on high, raining fire upon each other's armies or bolstering their towns with special abilities. A little adventuring reveals portals to other planes, entirely new maps which exist in parallel and are often even more diverse in their deadliness.

While each Great Mage will have the ability to ultimately research their way toward a world-conquering spell, if thinking your way to success doesn't appeal then violence solves all kinds of problems. "You could also capture all of the Holy Grounds, the special locations where temples can be built," says Pavel, "Or you could defeat an avatar, a personification of one of Ardania's gods."

There are many neutral towns and monster-spawning lairs to be found.

Warlock is looking very polished indeed, although it remains to be seen exactly how well it will balance the finer points of its elves and economics. At the moment, it's lacking some of the depth that makes other 4X games compelling, with only rudimentary diplomacy and limited unit customisation. Its AI also remains alarmingly indifferent, though perhaps I'm just too boring a target.

But I hold out hopes for it, because it's bravely testing waters that have long been choppy, perhaps even cursed. Attempts to create either a definitive or spiritual sequel to Master of Magic have failed several times. Original developers Simtex closed after they announced Master of Magic II, while Quicksilver Software's subsequent sequel deal fell through. Then there was Stardock's recent attempt to re-imagine it with Elemental: War of Magic, a failure that cost them dearly.

Due for release this summer, Warlock is presently only a single-player experience, though Pavel adds that multiplayer support will be added after release with, of course, the potential for DLC too. Meanwhile, aging fingers are being crossed, including my own.

On paper, 2008's Prince of Persia revamp was a pointless game. Don't get me wrong, it had every reason to exist, but its story and mechanics were essentially a long, meandering path back to square one.

Critics and players alike took the game to task for a Prince who didn't so much walk the fine line between rogue-ish charm and loudmouthed dickery as he did wall-run right over it and into Nathan Drake's dirty, half-tuck-stained laundry. He never grew or changed, they said. Worse, he overshadowed the far more interesting Elika, whose grim determination to face her self-sacrificing destiny felt far more at home in POP's equal parts desolate and gorgeous world. And then there was the structure of the game itself, which - among other alleged crimes - traded Death's cold touch for an omnipresent helping hand from Elika. That's right: the Prince couldn't die.

He also, incidentally, wasn't really a prince, which resulted in a chorus of cries from the same folks who get all bent out of shape when they realise that Apple Jacks don't taste like apples.

In an era where backwards compatibility has either been completely abandoned or stripped away via revised hardware, HD remasters make for an excellent alternative: why not take the games of yesteryear, port them over to current-generation consoles and make the most of precision high-definition visuals, higher frame-rates, cleaner artwork and improved texture filtering? In titles such as the God of War and Metal Gear Solid HD remasters, we've seen how, with careful nurturing, original PS2-era artwork can shine when rendered in high definition.

There's no reason why the Silent Hill HD Collection couldn't have joined the ranks of those highly acclaimed titles, but unfortunately it's a deeply disappointing release - and the game's fanbase is not happy at all. There's actually an argument that the first game in the collection - Silent Hill 2 - has its unique atmosphere diminished in the transition to high definition. This is a game that is defined by its lo-fi visuals, where detail that isn't obscured by the thick, murky darkness is blended away to certain extent by an intentionally aggressive grain filter.

The original artists at Konami would have built their artwork around this presentation, and the net result is that the HD version is unintentionally compromised as a result - the lack of texture detail in some areas becomes over-exposed in a way that was never intended by Konami's artists, and the game has a pin-sharp, pristine look entirely at odds with the ambience generated by the original release. Elsewhere, other effects (such as water) look fundamentally broken.

Just as bad - if not worse - is the way in which the game's fog effects have been handled in both Xbox 360 and PlayStation versions of the HD Collection. Thin, wispy and insubstantial as opposed to thick and cloying, the look of the outdoor scenes is fundamentally transformed, with far-off detail that should never have been seen now painfully visible. It's almost as though complete layers of fog are now omitted from the overall presentation, meaning that the sense of real volume to the effect is now fundamentally lacking.

To illustrate the complaints levelled at the work, here's how the Xbox 360 version of the game compares up against the original PlayStation 2 version running on a PS3 via full backwards-compatibility. A PS3 mirror of the video is also available, as well as a head-to-head of the two HD remasters - not that there's actually much to tell them apart in terms of image quality.

On paper, Blast Ball sounds like it shouldn't work. It's a mish-mash of game concepts - a physics-based football game infused with arcade platforming and a high-score chasing spirit similar to Super Crate Box. But a few minutes spent playing Blast Ball is enough to alleviate any concerns about mixing together such eclectic genres. The game's sporting, arcade and action ingredients quickly blend into an enticing peanut butter and jam sandwich experience, which is to say that it shouldn't work, but it does. It's a lot of fun.

Blast Ball's action takes place across three rather rudimentary maps, also reminiscent of Super Crate Box, with that game's original Mario Bros. influence still shining through in both level design and basic controls.

Notching up points requires you trundle variously shaped balls into goals at either side of the screen, while an endless stream of enemies marches down from above. You kill them by manipulating the ball into their path, their spindly 2D bodies breaking apart at the seams, or you can simply avoid them. The majority of enemies differ only in their size and speed, with more advanced variants colour-coded and harder to avoid, in another nod to Mario Bros.

Only Spanish commentary could make this wackier.

The game keeps a tally of your kills and survival time, but the only points that matter are the number of consecutive goals you can score in a round before dying, whether by kicking, rebounding or simply barging balls into the net.

'Soccer' balls are the easiest to control, while the oval-shaped American football variety can cause a problem when you're trying to strike them in a straight line. Rubber ducks, unlocked later, pose an even greater challenge, their bright and bouncy anatine bodies often rebounding around the level. Quack.

Price and Availability

• Platform: iOS
• Price: £1.99
• App Store
• Google Play

Keeping control of your projectiles is an enjoyable and often unpredictable task, although you build up a certain skillset over time, like knowing where you can dink shots off nearby platforms, or spiking balls volleyball-like into enemies. There is a lot less precision than the finely tuned shooting of Super Crate Box, but Blast Ball is more forgiving when it comes to avoiding enemies, and perhaps a touch more tactical. Would now be a good time to score? Or should you turn around and flatten that last charge of enemies with your giant basketball? You are also granted a single-use bomb to flatten nearby enemies as a backup option should other options fail.

Goalgoalgoalgoalgoal!

Blast Ball constantly has you working towards a new challenge, scoring a certain number of goals on a specific level or rounding up a required amount of kills before dying. These are not as varied as the tasks in something like Jetpack Joyride, but still act as a powerful incentive to keep playing. A reminder of how far you are from completing your current mission appears on every Game Over screen too, inviting you to try again, with the stated incentive often a new ball type to play with or an upgrade to bomb capacity.

Blast Ball's visuals impress with a crisp nouveau-retro style. Everything from the wireframe menus to the blinking backgrounds of neon-coloured levels is a post-Bit.Trip homage to a bygone era of gaming. This graphical style epitomises Blast Ball in general: a thoroughly enjoyable mix of established game concepts, cooked up in satisfying new way.

App of the Day highlights interesting games we're playing on the Android, iPad, iPhone and Windows Phone 7 mobile platforms, including post-release updates. If you want to see a particular app featured, drop us a line or suggest it in the comments.

Poor old George Lucas. It's easy to forget that in 1997 he used computer technology in a way that arguably enhanced the original Star Wars trilogy (leaving Greedo and that dodgy bit with Han Solo walking on Jabba's tail aside). I watched those films at the legendary THX-equipped "Wycombe Six" cinema in the town of my birth, and remember loving every cleaned up frame, fade and transition.

But then, it is easy to forget that, and the reason why is because over the last 15 years Lucas has barely paused in an apparently relentless campaign of tinkering, tampering and, of course, franchising. We like to imagine Lucas sat behind a desk in an office piled high with pod racers, Trandoshans and Crystal Skulls, while a succession of increasingly unlikely marketing executives file past with licensing contracts for him to sign.

Amid all the guff about Fibble being a totally new direction for Crytek, adding a new string to its bow and whatnot, it's interesting to note that it actually shares plenty of common ground with the developer's previous work.

Sure, it's light on nanosuits and shooting guys in the face with big guns. But look at the evidence: it's a capable entry in the dominant genre on its host format, and while it has a couple of new ideas it mostly sticks to established formulae, with its most noteworthy feature being its immaculately rendered - if slightly charmless - visuals. In other words, Fibble is pretty much exactly what you'd expect if you were told the guys behind Crysis had made a kid-friendly physics puzzler for iOS.

For a debut on an unfamiliar platform it gets a lot right. Controls are simple and intuitive: you slide your finger backwards from Fibble to propel him, the speed determined by the length of the slide. The physics are pleasingly robust as you roll and bounce around a series of obstacle courses, and there are plenty of shiny things to collect on your way to the glowing exit portal.

Bonus stages give you multiple slots to place your allies, which means they're more interesting to solve than the regular levels.

It lobs in new ideas at just the right time, too. After a couple of levels of pinging Fibble about you're introduced to Byte, a three-eyed alien who can lift his rotund chum to new heights with a simple tap anywhere on the screen - as long as Fibble is within range, denoted by a bright circle. Crytek doesn't bother to patronise you with a tutorial, describing Byte's role in a few short words before letting you play around with his skill. This is basic stuff but many smartphone developers get it wrong.

Price and Availability

• Platform: iOS
• Price: £1.49
• App Store

Further friends arrive: monocled mollusk Docto can grab Fibble and fling him in a different direction; Vroom increases your speed, pushing you up steep ramps; Ragno swings and throws you across gaps. As the levels get more complex you'll need to work out where to place them, but because the only available slots are marked with a green cross it doesn't take much brainpower to find out the solution. Then it's merely a case of sending Fibble on his merry way and tapping at the right times to reach the end. You have three attempts to do it but if you mess up it's often easier to simply restart rather than starting a second roll from the middle of the course.

Each chapter contains a hidden key that unlocks a bonus level, although if you can't find it then you can pay 69p for a keyring to access all four.

There are a few rookie mistakes: having a points system, three stars on each level and medal targets feels like overkill, and the load times are just long enough to be slightly irritating. The cut-scenes, meanwhile, are both dull and unnecessary, there purely to show off a bit. "Look at the graphics!" they say, with a faintly desperate grin, hoping we won't notice that the characters look like rejected designs for a low-budget PS2-era platformer.

Perhaps that's a touch unfair: this is a solid smartphone debut for a developer trying its hand at something new, and I found it diverting enough to happily play through to the end in a couple of sittings. And it shows there's a future for Crytek beyond nanosuits and shooting guys in the face with big guns.

App of the Day highlights interesting games we're playing on the Android, iPad, iPhone and Windows Phone 7 mobile platforms, including post-release updates. If you want to see a particular app featured, drop us a line or suggest it in the comments.

A major new Infinity Blade 2 update due to go live on 12th April adds an ambitious new "ClashMob" mode to Epic's hugely successful iOS sword combat title.

As detailed by IGN, you'll be able to team up with thousands of other players to slowly chip away at huge bosses boasting a massive amount of HP. Should the enemy be toppled in a set period of time all those who've fought it will be rewarded with exclusive loot.

Developer Chair Entertainment hopes to have around three challenges ongoing at any one time, each of which will take on a slightly different form.

One example offered was a scenario in which the player is tasked with doing as much damage as possible to a Titan in 30 seconds. Their results are then totted up and added to the cumulative total.

Another challenge has you trying to hoover up as many treasure bags as possible in a 30-second-long on-rails sequence.

Should you manage to recruit more of your connected friends to take part you'll be rewarded with various extras, such as additional combat time, bonus cash and more ClashMob attempts.

Some ClashMobs will be limited to more advanced players to ensure novices don't win powerful, potentially game-breaking weapons.

The free update also adds 24 new pieces of equipment to get hold of, a redesigned gem swapping interface and a new gem forge feature.