We’ve often wondered what it’s like to be a sperm: a brainless tadpole bungling through fallopian tubes, flanked by thousands of rivals, propelled by the contraction of a pair of testicles and the implacable instinct to penetrate a gargantuan egg. Only one can succeed, leaving his brethren to live out their short senseless lives questioning why they couldn’t have swum just that little bit faster.

Sperm fantasies aside, the easiest reference point for Nucleus would be PlayStation Network shooter Blast Factor. Both games operate on a singlescreen/ single-level basis and both have very similar controls; the left analogue moves your remote unit around the screen and the right analogue shoots and directs your enemy-killing projectiles. Nucleus also adds a grabbing function that allows you transport blood cells (more on them later) around the arena, as well as a handy speed boost to get you out of tricky situations.

Each level has a biological theme. Enemies take the form of bacteria and viruses, while protein – harvested from bacteria – is collected and converted into health or area-of-effect “protein bombs”. Transportable blood cells litter each arena and are a key element in the game, harbouring extra protein and acting as a makeshift shield against swarms of baddies.

Nucleus may look like just another shooter, but the introduction of quirky puzzle elements will keep a wry smile on the face of the most jaded gamer. One level sees you transporting clusters of blood cells from one enclosure to another, as shoals of rabid bacteria float above you, swaying up and down with the tidal vicissitudes of the surrounding plasma. Timing each run with the ebb and flow of the current, while grabbing onto blood cells, shooting down bacteria and steering your sperm-craft, is a truly thumbcontorting challenge.

However, the above example also highlights Nucleus’s main drawback: it gets bloody hard. The average gamer will find themselves ploughing through the intermediate levels in an hour or so, before hitting a tear-inducing wall of boss encounters which are innovative enough to sustain a “just-one-more-go” factor but still feel like a cheap way of prolonging the game’s life span.

Perhaps we’ve spent too much time thinking about sperm and not enough honing our gaming skills. Either way, Nucleus is a strong addition to the PlayStation Store catalogue and, with a £4.99 price tag and brilliant soundtrack by beat maestro Bogdan Raczynski, it’s well worth checking out.

Christopher Reynolds