Time for the Monday Musing then. What shall I muse about this Monday? What caught my eye last week the deserves 350-ish words of semi-coherent ranting about? Oh, I'll tell you what, let's do something about Lords of the Fallen.

It's a subpar Infinity Blade clone with an eye-wateringly high price tag. And it's stuffed full of IAPs as well. And that got me thinking. And as I thought, my mind wandering to strange and grim places, I came up with this.

Infinity Blade ruined mobile action gaming.

You see, the thing is, Infinity Blade did that big budget mobile action thing really, really well. And in doing so it unwittingly set a template. It laid a foundation for the annihilation of the entire genre. Thanks Infinity Blade.

And this phenomenon is something we've seen in other genres and on other platforms. And with similar perpetrators. Look at Gears of War. It's a series that defines the third-person cover shooter.

Now try and think of a third-person cover shooter that doesn't ape it, lift from it, or borrow its shades of grey and brown. It's pretty hard. Hell, just try and think of a third-person cover shooter that isn't Gears of War. There are loads, they're not very memorable.

It's about chasing success through iteration. It's something iOS devs are normally very good at. Most of the strategy management games on the App Store are sort of just shuffled around versions of each other with ever-increasing marketing budgets and different graphics.

But the iteration there doesn't matter so much, because mechanically the games are very simple. You don't really have much to get right with the controls of a Clash of Clone to get people to play it and enjoy it.

Action gamers on the other hand are a more discerning bunch. Even if they're not the sort of person who'd smash against the same boss in Dark Souls for the best part of a day in order to find its secrets, there needs to be a consistency of experience with everything in a game.

And so the same fate has befallen the action genre on mobile. You're either a substandard Infinity Blade clone, or you're Infinity Blade. There's not really that much in-between. Chair basically destroyed the wiggle room by making such a good game.

I guess this piece is really a call to arms. I love action games, I especially love non-casual action games. And I'd love to see one that doesn't play in the same way as Infinity Blade. There's a whole bunch of innovation on the App Store, let's see some in the triple A action sphere pretty please.