If you're looking for a challenging game, then its a safe bet that you'll enjoy SAGA Catapult. Its difficulty is perched just right between boringly easy and annoying frustration - because there's a surprising amount of variety. Let's take a look.

Your task is to prevent your peasants from becoming overrun with the enemy hordes, and you will protect them with your trusty giant catapult and a stash of boulders as ammunition. Things start off slow and laborious, as the reload speed and power of your catapult are not very high - the first two waves are more like training for you to amass some gold which you can exchange for upgrades. Along with upgrading the aforementioned attributes, you can also affect the damage radius of the rocks, buy more peasants (initially you'll start with 20 but you may need to buy some more) and even purchase an accelerometer controlled 'after shot' which lets you tilt the rock in mid air.

There's a few different types of enemies which will need different strategies to take them down. Even the basic orcs can be wily, in that they will start running at different speeds, or even diagonally to throw off your aiming. Tanks (yes, medieval tanks) require a few hits to take down, whilst flying creatures may need you to aim further away from the fortifications so that the shot hits them in mid air. Annoyingly, some of your peasants are not so bright and will flee towards the enemy - sometimes they may even run into one of the orcs when it has just spawned, resulting in painful death.

Once you complete the game's 15 waves, you're invited to play again on Hard mode, and there's even a special surprise for those who beat this harder difficulty setting. Unfortunately, there are no in game local leader boards, only an online one that will only work if you have WiFi enabled (or another suitable connection to the 'net) whilst you're in the game.

Annoyingly, some of your peasants are not so bright and will flee towards the enemy.

The presentation is good, although some of the 3D models and textures used here look muddy. It may be a limitation of the iPhone of course, but we have seen better 3D in prior games. However, the menu screens are perfectly OK and have a cool medieval map like theme - it would have been nice to have seen some kind of heads up display, rather than the amateurish white text labels in the game. The music is the best bit though, with a full orchestra performing what only can be described epic, engaging music that really brings the gameplay to life.

Overall, this game can be missed, as it's not huge on features and will probably only entertain you for an hour at most. With the low cost that's something to be expected however, and if you fancy a challenging game with quite a bit of strategy (no, it's not just a tap shooter) it's well worth a look.

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