Heavy Sword is a very classic soft of platformer. As the unlikely hero Pike, you must combat evil hordes in order to rescue the captured princess Lucinda. To aid you as you traipse through level after level is a trusty sword, as well as the ability to bash power-up blocks with your head, and the ability to stomp on top of all your foes. Yes, this game borrows many ideas from the platforming greats. Does this make it a copycat game or does it use these elements to create something special. We're about to tell you.

Movement and combat is handled by on-screen buttons. The arrows move left and right, the A button is your jump, and the B button your attack. For on-screen buttons, these are all very responsive, and take up enough of the screen (though being transparent to not obscure the action) to never have you accidentally hitting what you don't want to. The attack button will swing your sword, and presses in quick succession will unleash a four hit combo which ends with a burst of energy shooting from your sword. Like Cave Story, you can gain weapon level-ups that make your sword bigger and more powerful, but each hit from an enemy will remove one of these bonuses. The level ends when you have reached the arrow sign at the end, defeating all the foes in your path, and perhaps grabbing the three princess coins hidden in each stage. We weren't kidding when we said this game is sort of an amalgamation of genre greats.

Aside from the classic gameplay and tight controls, the game does look gorgeous in its pixel vision, with particle and lighting effects adding a modern edge to the throwback graphics. The chiptune music is quite engaging as well, offering a hard rock soundtrack that is enjoyable if not a little repetitive. Really the game would be a fantastic recommendation if it wasn't for the poor framerate issues. Oh it runs adequately on an iPhone 5 (although drops in frames are still noticeable), but on older devices it is pretty much unplayable.

So if you have the latest iDevice and love platformers, give this one a go. We think you'll enjoy it. Until they can work out their performance issues however, we'd recommend that everyone else steer clear.