Dust off that bandana, light your cigar, and put away your Teddy bear, because it’s time to become a turret-turning, machine-gun wielding badass. Heavy Gunner dispenses hot lead and frantic action in equally giant portions, and I guarantee you that your thumbs have never felt more powerful.
As the Turret turns…
If all that Heavy Gunner did was allow you to tilt the accelerometer to turn the turret and then tap on the screen to fire, it would have lost my interest within minutes of first loading the game up. While there are a few guns that require only a tilt of the device and the touch of a screen to fire, it’s the other weapons — the dual-wielded machine guns, for example — that really make this arcade shooter shine. These machine guns (your default weapons at the start of the game) are absolutely incredible because you have one analog stick to control each gun. This sounds pretty simple on paper, but it’s mind-blowing to see in action. This setup allows you to fire on enemies on the left side of the screen while tracking and killing all of the ones on the right — it’s a fantastic sensation.
Action Packed
The very first level starts off with enemies literally pouring onto the screen like evil, tentacled ink blots and only your high powered machine guns are standing in their way. Ripping into the enemy is insanely satisfying, which is a good thing, since there’s really nothing more to Heavy Gunner than a lot of heavy gunning. Each of the 25 single player missions (available in Normal, Hard, and Extreme modes) is either about surviving for a set amount of time or killing a set number of enemies. This formula works just fine for the first hour or so, but the fighting gets a little dull when the required enemy kill count for a stage is 300 (this is not Sparta).
Armed to the Teeth
There are a total of six weapons in Heavy Gunner, and I actually only played with two of them because I didn’t have time to upgrade them all. Each weapon has a set of three characteristics that you can improve multiple times with the points that you earn during missions, and you have to use these same points to buy new weapons. I upgraded the main machine guns to nearly max level and also played around with a set of dual missile launchers that could lock onto multiple targets and send out swarms of missiles to dispatch them. However, it should speak for the quality of the weapons that I was happy to use just two for the entirety of the game without even thinking to try the other four out.
Free Zion
One Apple Store reviewer hit the nail on the head when they said that the battles were reminiscent of the Battle for Zion in the Matrix trilogy. The enemies in Heavy Gunner mostly look like black, cyber squids, and they fly at you in huge swarms, just waiting to be swatted out of the sky. These enemy swarms will charge straight at you in varying numbers (and sizes — watch out for the huge cyber squids and bosses), but as you progress further in the game they’ll get a little bit tougher, and a little bit less fun to fight. That’s because the enemy will eventually take to circling you like a vulture, and the pace will shift from a frantic shooting gallery to a twisted version of a Merry Go Round. It’s a good idea to switch the gameplay up a little bit, but tilting the device to turn the turret while continually aiming at enemies that are just barely staying on-screen isn’t what I’d envisioned my late game Heavy Gunner experience being.
Considerate Combat
Heavy Gunner is pretty graphically intensive, if only because of the sheer number of enemies and bullets on-screen. The game is best played on a 3GS, but there are “Performance” settings that lower the graphics quality so that the game can be played on older devices. Performance mode doesn’t look nearly as good (distant enemies aren’t drawn, but are replaced by static images) and it was actually still a little choppy on my iPhone 2G, but at least it plays 🙂
Conclusion
The Merry Go Round problems did spoil a bit of the fun for me, but I thought that the dual stick and accelerometer control scheme was such a stroke of genius that it pulled me through the whole game. The single player mode includes just enough action to make the game, but the extra free play modes and online scoreboards add a lot of replayability to the title. If you’re a fan of arcade shooters or simply enjoy the sight of smoke rising from two over-heated sets of high caliber barrels, then you must play Heavy Gunner 3D.
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Heavy Gunner 3D is available for $2.99 on the App Store.
The game was provided by Com2us for review on Just Another iPhone Blog. For further information regarding our site’s review policies, please see the “About” page.
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TAGS: dual stick, shooter, shooting
