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Review

Semi-sensible software

by RevStu (October 13th, 2010 at 9:53 am)

The first thing to point out is that Shoot To Kill actually looks quite a lot better than this in real life. But we had to grab a tiny fragment of screenshot off the developer’s site, crop it and then blow it up just to get one without marketing crap all over it. And no, we’re not going to stop going on about that.

But anyway. Most of Podgamer’s readers to date have been people from Her Majesty’s United Kingdom Of The Great English Isles And Some Trivial Other Bits, who are also the people most likely to have fond memories of Sensible Software. The famous UK developer crashed and burned in the mid-1990s, but not before making some of the most beloved videogames of all time, and since then the company’s creators have done little of note. The rise of the iOS machines, however, has finally brought back the conditions in which independent devs can happily thrive, and former Sensi supremo Jon Hare’s new Tower Studios label recently released its first iPod game. This is it that we’re talking about now.

(That said, Shoot To Kill wasn’t actually directly developed by the Sensible gang, but by Poland-based Vivid Games. But we’re so desperate to acclaim the Return Of Sensible Software that we’re just going to gloss over that, except this sentence.)

The game is certainly in keeping with the Sensi ethos of instant accessibility and fast-moving action, even if the characters are a little bigger than we’re used to. It’s a defend-the-core shooter, with your hero placed front and centre and glued to the spot, able only to turn and shoot. Various demons (for the game is set in Hades itself, with your job being to escape back to the world of humans) advance on your position and you tap the screen to blast them with your shotgun.

At first it works brilliantly, but a couple of levels in you start to encounter enemies against whom you have to deploy your secondary weapons, via a horribly ill-considered system of holding down the virtual button in the bottom-left corner while tapping to shoot in the normal way. Since you’ll probably be holding the iPod in your left hand and tapping with your right, this involves a complete change of grip which is both uncomfortable and wrenches you out of the gameworld. A two-touch system would have worked a lot better – causing the player physical discomfort with the controller is never an acceptable gameplay technique.

(You can try holding the iPod the whole time in a way suitable for using the secondary weapons, ie not using your thumb, but that’s awkward, loose and distracting, as you’ll constantly fear catapulting the iPod out of your hand onto the floor with an over-hard tap.)

Apart from that, the game is pretty good fun, if limited. The lack of movement means that the only way for it to increase the difficulty is by swamping you with more and more monsters, who overrun you in the gaps while you’re reloading. (The main gameplay factor is that manual reloading is quicker than the automatic one that kicks in whenever you’ve got an empty magazine, but in the frenzied assault of later rounds you’ll be too busy blasting to keep track of how many shots you’ve fired, and the extra second an auto-reload takes is enough to tip the balance in the baddies’ favour.)

An interesting innovation ensures that you don’t have to take our word for it, however. Shoot To Kill employs Tower’s inventive “Free For Freaks” system, whereby the game is free to download and you only have to pay for continues (10 lives for 59p), meaning that if you put in the effort to get good enough you’ll never have to fork out any cash. With three initial lives (plus an extra one if you register an email address, and lots more awarded ingame) in the main story mode plus a generous and replenishable energy bar, you should make a fair bit of progress before facing that decision, so you’ve got nothing to lose.

(There’s also a multiplayer game and a one-life Survival mode with four difficulty settings, of which even Easy is ferociously tough, and online leaderboards via Facebook which currently appear to be broken – it refused to accept my login info despite numerous attempts, and the 5th-place score on the high-score table is only a tenth of my own best, suggesting nobody else can get in either.)

Shoot To Kill isn’t bad, but it’s not Sensible. We and the rest of Her Majesty’s loyal subjects, though, have our fingers crossed that it’s just the first step in a long walk back to glory.

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