I sometimes think that the AppStore is largely based on some of my best dreams. For years I've wanted games with a Megadrive (or Genesis) feel to them. I want 2D, side-scrolling, old school action with sometimes intense difficulty; I want to decapitate an enemy by simply jumping on its head; I want a sense of adventure in a cute world with only two directions in which to walk; I want plenty of platforms to keep the puzzle rife; and (I know, I don't want much!) I want this kind of action visually overhauled. I don't want 16-bit, even though I made do with that in the past - I want lusciously rendered characters, backgrounds and effects, a game where something old and something new meet, something "borrowed" - well that's my knock off iPhone - and something blue is Castle of Magic, which is come somewhat out of the blue.

Castle of Magic has answered some of my prayers. It has classic, side-scrolling action that sees you assuming the role of a newly recruited wizard to save some girl. The story matters not - the deal here is that you'll feel right at home if you were into gaming a dozen or so years ago. There are loads of levels and stages to plough through, too - in full 3D you can walk into rooms (otherwise known as stages) where there are four more doors, otherwise known as levels. You walk through one of these doors to get started and then the action begins.

You really couldn't want much more when you get your first look at the actual levels; backgrounds filled with blue skies and puffy clouds, 3D trees and road signs, flowers and bushes all beautifully rendered to create a three-dimensional feel, even though this is a side scrolling game. Bridges, pirate ships and castles in the foreground where you run along, jump and attack also have that 3D feel in a game with 2D rules. The overall experience is something in between; 2.5D with colour and charm aplenty, as well as some great visual effects when you zap an enemy with your magic wand, sound effects accompanying every magical spell, bump and jump, as well as a cutesy looping soundtrack that neither adds to nor detracts from the feel of the game.

There are quite a lot of power-ups for you to collect too, to keep things interesting. Regular power-ups charge your magician up and he goes from a regular blue wizard who can merely turn nearby enemies into boxes into a flame-throwing red mage who can take longer shots with big, meaty fireballs. Nice. Another one of my favourites is the hunter pick-up, which transforms your magician into a hunter who wields a bow and arrow. While he doesn't differ much from the red mage in terms of range and power, the hunter can shoot at walls and them climb the arrows to get to places you otherwise couldn't - and that's quite a cool feature, if you ask me.

Aside from power ups and the like, your cute loveable wizard can run, jump, double jump, ass slam, and glide with the use of this cape - all the elements you could expect from a side-scrolling title like this one. The platform clichés keep coming as well; at the end of each stage you are faced with a big, tough, fearsome boss who has some kind of weak spot, though this isn't a bad thing - I really enjoyed persevering to get to the boss and then using every obscenity under the sun to express my anger at not being able to take him down despite the fact that I knew how to do it.

Then it suddenly dawns on you that there's something fundamentally wrong with this game. The graphics are amazing and the gameplay has all the elements necessary to make it one of the best platform games I've ever played, all the way from back then right up to the current date. However, the one big difference between classic platform titles and Castle of Magic is that in bygone eras you had a joypad (remember when that's what game controllers were called?), but here you have a makeshift touch screen controller. At first this wasn't such a bad thing, but then I realised just how important precision is in a game like this. Getting close to the edge of a cliff and jumping only to land on the other side by the silk of my wizard's cape; floating down the level to land on a platform with a power-up on it; shooting my fireballs consecutively to fend off enemies coming from both sides - well, all of this requires a degree of accuracy, and while you can scrape through the earlier levels with only a few deaths, blaming it on the old-school boogieman, that it must be purposely hard because older games were, later levels and hard bosses may leave you believing that touch screens are the work of the devil.

Castle of Magic is an amazing game and for the price it's worth picking up just to see the stunning visuals and the blast from the past gameplay. If you can deal with the imprecise controls then it's truly something magical and paves the way for future games in this reinvigorated genre - but hopefully with a better control scheme.

Review based on Version 1.0

Reviewed by Dexter Pearson for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).