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Shmup outreach program

by RevStu (November 1st, 2010 at 2:00 am)

It’s not the first time we’ve asked the question, but do you love the look of Espgaluda 2 and Dodonpachi Resurrection, only to lack the appropriate hardware/funds/time to play them? (Since both games need a 3GS CPU or better, come in at a stiff £5.49/€6,99/$8.99 price point and require a minimum play session of 20 minutes or so for a single game.)

Well, this time we’ve got you something that’s not just a decent substitute for people with older hardware, but is in at least one important respect better than either of Cave’s bullet-hell masterpieces. Come over here by the kitchen for a minute. We’d like you to meet Phoenix.

Phoenix (59p/€0,79/99¢) is a procedurally-generated shoot-’em-up that’ll run smoothly on pretty much any iThing ever. It’s basically a mini-boss-rush, sending an endless procession of medium-sized enemy battleships at you down an infinite space tunnel until you die. Blowing them up (which you can do a turret at a time) releases pickups which upgrade your weapon, bestow energy or shields on you, or unleash a massive smartbomb-type attack.

The game’s unique (ish) feature is on-the-fly difficulty adjustment. As you shoot down enemies your star rating (displayed at top left) increases, which gives you more points for each ship destroyed but also makes the space-baddies shoot faster. Get hit and the rating (along with your scoring and the intensity of the bullet-storm) racks down a notch. You can “lock” any number of stars at the beginning of a game, ensuring that the star rating never goes below that level, but you pay a penalty in that using the locking facility gives the enemy attacks a further boost. (That is, if you lock in three stars, bullets will come at you faster than if you just achieve a three-star rating in normal play.)

Where Phoenix scores over Espgaluda and Dodonpachi is that you’ll be doing well if you have a game lasting much over a minute. The dynamic difficulty makes things pretty challenging if you display any skill at all. The control system is also simpler, copying the Cave games’ relative joypad method but without requiring any extra buttons – firing and smartbombing are both done automatically, leaving you with nothing but steering to worry about.

The only real downside is that there’s no “dead zone” at the bottom of the screen, which means you have to keep your finger pretty close to the vulnerable part of your ship (the blue cockpit) if you want to be able to use the full height of the screen, which makes avoiding bullets trickier and identifying how damaged your ship is impossible. (As the only indicators of how much damage you’re carrying are the plumes of flame coming from your fuselage.) It’s also a little vague as to how much of your cockpit is actually a hit zone – I haven’t quite been able to tell if it’s just the top part or the entire cigar-shaped blue section, because when I get hit my finger is covering the bottom half of it.

But these are Phoenix’s only flaws. It looks and feels beautiful in play, with a silky-smooth framerate even on my old 2nd-gen iPod Touch, and you get local, regional and global GameCentre leaderboards to test your skills against. If you want to shoot stuff and dodge death-blossoms but don’t have 20 minutes to spare at a time, it’s currently the best 59p you can spend on the App Store.

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