Hello folks, I wanted to let you all know I am launching a (hopefully!) regular article highlighting new games for the iPad! Best of all, for those on a budget, all of these games will be .99 cents! For this first installment of Gaming For Under $1, I will review ‘Tiny Planet’Basics:
This is your basic defend the tower game, however instead of a tower – you are faced with alien invaders swarming down, trying to attack your very own planet. You rotate your player around the outside of the planet, shooting the whole way and repealing the baddies and keeping your skies clear.
Gameplay:
Pretty basic – you spin your player around and he shoots the invaders. As time goes by minor upgrades will pop up, and later you can unlock different and more powerful upgrades. Also more and more invaders will come and come, until your planet is too damaged (3 hits, and your dead but you can regain health through power-ups). There are no levels, completions, anything – just survive for however long you can.
Controls:
I have a problem with most iPad games, since the controller will inevitably take up and cover much of the screen where the action is happening, and that problem plagued this game. You are supposed to use two thumbs to rotate your player around, (I found myself abandoning that for one finger) and because you finger(s) are covering parts of the screen and invaders come from all corners, you often miss a few until they are seconds away from crashing into your planet. Also, as the player rotates, he shoots automatically and to be honest randomly, with no real way for me to control. I would just put him in position under an invader and just waited for a shot to go off. It was pretty fast to shoot, but still out of my control.
Graphics and Sound:
The graphics for this game are cartoony style, but it does it well. It is hard to do any graphics on an iPad badly, so I have no complaints for the cartoon style chosen and any “realistic” graphics would not have fit the feel the game was intended to have. The game has a very nice and simple melody going on while you play, and it will be muted if you have your music playing. Invaders make a very satisfying squash sound when you hit them, and as your health decreases, a heartbeat sound gets louder and louder – both for indicating your health and to induce a panic in the player.
Overall:
A simple game with no ground-breaking gameplay elements. I would hope further updates increase the amount of upgrades to make the gameplay a bit more diverse, and hopefully the cost to unlock those upgrades goes down. (After one game I got 12 stars to use to unlock upgrades, however the cost of the upgrades were 15 stars, 100, 150, 200, 300, and finally 400 stars, so it is going to take awhile to get them all) If you want a game to pass 5 minutes, then by all means spend the money on it, but if you are looking for a more long term game to get invested in, then maybe pass this one up.