I’m not sure what it is about iOS games and metal bands, but they seem to go together well. Take Hail to the King: Deathbat (Free), for example. The hack ‘n’ slash gameplay paired pretty perfectly with the music (and personality) of the band Avenged Sevenfold, and we even gave it a pretty favorable review at the time. Another example is… um. Okay, I could only think of one. But there’s just something about the gritty, messy nature of rock & roll that seems to translate well to tiny little taped-together indie games. Wait! Here’s another example: Engines of Vengeance ($0.99) by Serdar Balli. (And just in the nick of time. This review was going nowhere.)

Engines of Vengeance (the game) is heavily reliant on the music of Engines of Vengeance (the band), who Professor Google informs me is from Scotland. I’m not a huge fan of metal, but I do enjoy it from time to time, and the band seems pretty solid. I think it’s safe to say that if you like that genre of music, you’ll probably dig them. And if not, well, you can mute it in the settings.

As for the game itself, it basically takes the vehicle building of something like Bad Piggies (Free) or Fantastic Contraption and combines it with fighting. Each level begins in your garage, where you are given a barrel and some parts to add to it. The parts are different depending on the level, but it’s usually a limited series of wheels, planks, and weapons. You could go wild making the biggest, baddest lookin’ thing you can, but the game rewards you for building smart instead. See, you can view your opponent’s machine before each battle, meaning you can attempt to exploit its weaknesses with your own build. There’s a lot of strategy there, because you can either build something similar and go toe-to-toe with your opponent or go completely off script and make some crazy machine with jetpacks or something while they’re stuck on the ground with a couple wheels. (That second option is particularly satisfying when you beat them.)

Once you’ve built the ultimate death machine, the next step is to meet your AI adversary in battle. Each machine is placed at one end of the screen and you simply roll towards each other with your various assortment of weapons and wait until one of you is destroyed. There’s not a whole lot of strategy here, as I’d argue most of the “game” happens in the garage anyway. It’s still really entertaining to watch the machines duke it, though, as they slowly chip pieces off each other until there’s nothing left.

The game sounds pretty awesome so far, yeah? Unfortunately, there are quite a few things holding it back from greatness. First off is the lack of a tutorial. It just dumps you right in without telling you what to do or how to control anything. To be fair, at the beginning I did see some alerts at the top of the screen that seemed to be trying to explain how the garage worked, but they weren’t that helpful and I found it a little easier to just mess around until I figured things out. Once you’re in combat, the game doesn’t inform you that you are supposed to tilt your device to move your contraptions, and I spent the first few rounds as a sitting duck getting pummeled with a confused expression on my face. (I found out later that there is a Help menu tucked away in the Info section of the main menu, but by that point I’d figured most things out. Also hidden away in a random settings menu? Upgrades for each part. This is a fairly huge aspect of the game that I didn’t know existed until I’d already sweated through the first big chunk of levels.)

Another, perhaps bigger problem, is that there’s just a slight air of jank about everything. For example, fitting and rotating parts in the garage can be a total mess. It takes an awkward two finger twisting gesture to rotate something, and it can feel almost impossible to get a piece lined up just the way you want it. As I said earlier, the garage really feels like the heart of the game, and it’s unfortunate that it often feels more frustrating than fun. The game really could have used a few more polish passes, and hopefully the UI, controls, and tutorial see some improvements in future updates.

Hanging up my Game Reviewer hat for a moment, I have to confess that I absolutely love that this thing exists. I’ve played, written, and recorded in tons of different bands since I was a kid (one or two of them metal), and it makes my heart sing that this band managed to help put out a game that is unique and interesting and also serves as a fun promotional tool for their music. It’s weird, but after about 20 minutes of googling and learning a small amount about the band and developers Serdar Balli and Christoph Soyére, I find myself weirdly proud that they were all able to come together and pull it off (and the collaboration was basically an accident, according to the game’s website). Putting all that aside and sliding my Game Reviewer hat back into place, I have to admit the game is far from perfect. Really, really far. But a lot of love clearly went into this thing, and while that’s not enough to recommend a blind buy for people who just want something fun to play, I’m hoping it’s enough to at least encourage some to consider it. If you are super into metal bands or crazy machines fighting each other, you could do a lot worse than Engines of Vengeance.