Podgamer -- game reviews and features for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad, except not rubbish

Universal Review

Tipping point

by J Nash (November 19th, 2010 at 8:53 pm)

Game: Tiltstorm. Publisher: Moonjump. Author: A Cowe. Supports Gamecentre. Price: £1.19/€1,59/$1.99. Buy the game.

In today’s modern convenient videogame shorthand, Tiltstorm would be Tempest Without Webs. (Actually, in today’s modern convenient videogame shorthand, Tiltstorm would be Not a WW2 Cover Shooter, WRY SATIRES.)

The thing is, there’s a reason Tempest has webs.

If you’re some kind of dunce, Tempest is the spiky wireframe game where you zip round the outside of a well while beasties clamber up at you. It was invented in 1948 by Jim Tempest and was the number two source of indie rip-offs after Robotron twin-stickery until Geometry Wars came along and epoch-shatteringly ripped off both at once.

Tiltstorm condenses the idea to (a) going around in a circle firing inwards while (b) monsters stab out at you in pseudo-3D. The gimmick is that you tilt to move, which I didn’t like at all.

Promo shots again. Incidentally, the gradient spikes zipping by are in the background starfield; the only bullet here is your solid red one.

(I have to emphasise here that I really am amazingly bad at Tempest. I’ve no idea how many levels Tiltstorm has, but I’ve only made it to 16, and then only because of the neat idea where dying auto-jumps you to the next screen. But I think that, as with Assassin’s Creed, I’ve sufficiently rumbled the mechanics.)

There’s no calibration (or in fact options of any kind) which means you have to play holding the iThing rigidly upright in portrait — a bit annoying — but because the playfield is a circle you have to flip the iThing away from you as you near the equator — incredibly annoying. I swiftly gave up using the top of the screen at all and remained in the lower “U” so I could keep my viewing angle reasonably acute.

Because that’s the thing about Tempest Without Webs — you can’t tell where the edge is. For a fast-moving coin-oppy game about ducking “underneath” beasties as they pulse in and out, this is a fatal absence of visual information. Coupled with the foreshortening caused by tilting and you’re suddenly raining deaths by crashing into something you thought was far enough away to slide past.

(Another side effect of weblessness is that all the beasties can do is stab in and out while circling the playfield; there’s nothing for them to hang on to for fancy flipper-style stalking or whatever. Again, this might change later, but so far I’ve met a colourful selection of adversaries all of whom circle and stab with variable rapidity, except one which shoots at you instead, plus the brief spiker-like maze of walls on level 9.)

The game also namechecks Gyruss, which I’ve never played. ANOTHER VITAL FACT THERE LIKE THOSE ABOUT SATSUMAS AND SUCH.

I really want to like Tiltstorm and there are some easy fixes around (hobely ho de ho) the edges — if you’re going to make the player start again when they lose, for example, you could at least add a Tempest-style level select — but I think either the tilt or the non-webbiness has to go.

As webs would completely change the game, I’d say that gritting the collective Moonjump choppers and adding a “dial” option where you can drag your ship around the circle with unfuzzy accuracy would cement this as a breezy little high-score shooter. As it stands, I’m falling over the tilt controls so much that even I think I could get further without them.

Judge this