WIN A COPY FOR FREE!!! **This is Eric Pankoke (Site) second guest review with us. Something tells us there’s a third one.**

It’s another vertical shooter… Do we have a room for one more?

Glandarius Wing Strike ($4.99; Free)

Creating an adequate control scheme for shooters has been a hard nut to crack for iPhone developers, and it’s clear that the developers of Glandarius Wing Strike (GWS) put some thought into their unconventional control scheme. Unfortunately, there’s little beyond the control scheme to make GWS stand out from the competition. It is tried and true vertical scrolling action, but I think players want a little more than that these days.

Presentation

This is probably the best part of the game. While not groundbreaking, the visuals definitely look good. The different vehicles are nicely detailed, if not just a bit on the standard side for shooter fair. I do like the look of the bosses, however. The backgrounds also look good, though the bleak cityscape on level two hurts my eyes after a bit. There are a couple of nifty graphical effects like guns hiding in the shade of certain trees in level three. The sound effects are also decent, and again are pretty much what you’d expect from this type of shooter.

I am pretty impressed with the music. Each level has its own track, and while the music doesn’t necessarily go with the level it’s playing on, I didn’t really care. It just sounded good. The bosses also have their own theme, though I’m not sure if there’s a unique theme for each boss or if all bosses share a theme. Either way, the music was the highlight of the aesthetic portion of the game.

Controls

The key to GWS is remembering to keep your finger down at the bottom of the screen at all times. Anything else is visual suicide and will insure you don’t fare well in the game. Despite fairly informative help screens, it took me a bit to get the controls. Once I did, it turns out that they’re quite manageable and actually make for a decent playing experience. A simple tap on the screen moves your fighter left or right towards your finger. When you release your finger your fighter will shoot off some bullets.

You can, however, target enemies, up to four at a time. To do this you keep your finger pressed on the screen and slide so that your ship is in line with an enemy. Once you’ve acquired your targets you let you and homing missiles will ravage your targets. This is the part that was throwing me – for some reason it took a bit for me to catch on that you had to be in front of the enemies to target them. In easy mode it might have been nice if the nearest four enemies were targeted without necessarily being in front of them, but without being able to try it I suppose there’s a chance that could have made things too easy.

Game Play

You fly around. You shoot enemies. You destroy a boss – or sometimes two – per level. That’s pretty much it. This is where I think GWS missed the boat. The developers actually came up with a control scheme that works pretty well on the iPhone, but there’s nothing to back it up. There are no objectives in any level other than “destroy everything”. There are no power ups. There’s not even a whole lot of variety to the attack patterns. It’s almost like they spent most of their resources developing the engine and controls and threw in just a dash of content as an afterthought.

Suggestions

My main suggestion would be to overhaul the game play area. Give the user something to do besides just shooting everything. Add some cool power ups, and maybe even some things that aren’t necessarily good for the player but doesn’t kill them. Add some variety to the game. Give me a reason to want to play the game over and over again.

Conclusion

Glandarius Wing Strike has a lot going for it. Solid visuals, a rockin’ sound track, and a control scheme that actually works make this a pretty solid foundation for a killer vertical shooter. It just felt to me like they really dropped the ball when it comes to actual game play. In its current state I’d find it difficult to force myself through the five levels of the game once, let alone go back for any replay.

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