Kenta Cho is a sort of buzzword name in the shoot'em up world of developers and has been well received for his inspirational and quirky design ideas. Tumiki Fighters on the iPhone is a port of his Katamari inspired shooter and while successful on other platforms it loses its charm here.

At the heart of any good shooter is the agility of your fighter and this version of Tumiki Fighers is amazingly hard to control. The fighter is controlled by accelerometer tilting, which can be calibrated, but the sensitivity is akin to sliding a melting ice-cube on a sheet of glass - making it next to impossible to reliably make use of the game's unique mechanics of attaching pieces of enemy ships to yours.

Tumiki Fighters uses a simple colorful 3D vector/block aesthetic which is typical of Cho's work and despite the frantic bullet dodging remains easy to watch. However it's disappointing to see that the menus are somewhat lazily crafted (using standard OS buttons/features) and recent updates have only added calibration and extra lives/continues to offset the difficulty of the game.

Ultimately there's not a lot to like in this port of Tumiki Fighters as it manages to remove a lot of Cho's style and gameplay mechanics. Fans looking to add to their shoot'em up collection will certainly find a fairly standard (if difficult) challenge here, but there are better options.