There are two stages of growth in a Tilt to Live career: the newbie stage, where you run desperately from the hundreds of enemy dots on-screen while praying for a random power-up to save you, and the Jack Bauer stage, where you thrive in an environment where you are out-manned, out-gunned, and are running out of time.
Tilt to Live is one of those games where the hunter and hunted are constantly switching roles, and although you’ll spend most of your time weaving your way through mobs of enemies without any way of fighting back, this makes the moments where you suck every single enemy into a deadly vortex all the more satisfying.
Assume the Position
Tilt to Live is another title with a fantastic implementation of accelerometer-based controls. This is one of those games that can’t be won, but when you do lose, you’ll likely never feel like it was the game’s fault, and that’s a credit to how finely you can move that mouse pointer. It’s very easy to turn on a dime, dash across the level, and weave your way through narrow openings.
Developer One Man Left really did a bang-up job here — even managing to make calibrating your controls fun. Every time you start a new game you’ll be prompted to “Assume the Position” and choose from Regular (iPhone at an angle), Top-Down (iPhone flat), Sleepy (lying on your back), and Custom. Each of these positions is illustrated by a very cheeky diagram — the most hilarious of which is Custom, showing a player in mid-cartwheel playing the game with one hand.
Dawn of the Red
A round of Tilt to Live starts off quietly, but gets exponentially more hectic with every passing minute. Your pointer has no powers of its own, except for the ability to move around the screen (big whoop). As you play, swarms of red dots will spawn on the screen, and touching any one of these dots will result in your death. Some dots will chase after you, some will move in a pattern, and some will even form up and start playing Pong on the screen (not a joke – this really happens).
Although you can just dodge the enemy (an in-game achievement if you do it long enough), your only means of scoring any points lies with the eight randomly spawning power-ups. You’ll only have access to three of them at first, and the best ones are unlocked as you attain achievements. The great thing is that every single power-up in this game is awesome: they all look great, sound great, and they kill even better than that. There are nukes that destroy everything within a certain radius and disintegrate anything in the blast zone for a few seconds after, swarm missiles that seek out any red dots, spiked shields that let you cut through the red horde like a Cuisinart, and a truly incredible vortex that sucks your pointer, enemy dots, and power-ups into a black hole before exploding in a stream of frickin’ laser beams.
There are a lot of very, very tense moments in Tilt to Live as you bait enemies into nukes or simply wait for an accessible power-up to spawn, but when you do finally pick one up, all of that stress that was building up suddenly turns into a huge stream of points as your combo meter builds up. It’s amazing how quickly you can go from 4000 to 50,000 points in Tilt to Live, and it’s a lot of fun.
AGON
I’ve never been much into these online scoreboard systems because I don’t have other friends who play these games, so there’s no spirit of competition for me. Tilt to Live uses AGON Online, which is a network I’ve never heard of, but at least you can post your scores there, which adds a lot of replayability to an already amazing game.
Highest Combo Conceivable
I haven’t even gotten to describing the great soundtrack (which reminds me of Kill Bill in Paris), the hilarious awards (“wow, mom! you beat the game!”), and the obscure loading screens (“eat fruits and vegetables to pass this screen”), but this review is already getting on.
There are a lot of little jokes jammed into almost every nook and cranny of Tilt to Live, and you have to be quick on your feet to catch them all. These jokes function almost as a training guide for the gameplay, which requires you to be even faster at spotting quick power-up opportunities on an ever-changing battlefield.
I have nothing but praise for the developers at One Man Left — they got pretty much everything right.
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Tilt to Live is available for $1.99 on the App Store.
The game was provided by One Man Left 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: game, iPhone, one man left, shooter
