Fastar! — Fight Angry Squares: The Action RPG! is an RPG in which you, er, fight angry squares? And it’s… it’s action? I’m not doing this justice at all.
Come to think of it, though, I’m not sure one could give this bizarre and deceiving game its due with the few paragraphs and screenshots I have for you today. On the surface, it seems inconceivable that Fastar! could have anything to offer apart from its simple mechanics and smartassed sensed of humor, but give this criminally underpriced $0.99 game five minutes to sink its teeth into you, and you’ll never question developers Cat in a Box Games again.
Prepare to die, Pink Square thing!
Fastar! carefully distills the classic JRPG formula to its barest basics, by which I mean clichés. You play as a nameless, spiky haired protagonist with a giant sword, traveling through environments such as fields, forests, and deserts, backed by a deliberately repetitive rock symphony soundtrack as you fight squares and collect money, allowing you to raise your stats, thus enabling you to fight more squares and collect more money with which to raise your stats yet further.
This is no 40-hour epic. An average game of Fastar! will take you less than five minutes to complete, ten if you’re sleepy and not paying attention. The main objective is to fight the squares and get to the end of the world as quickly as possible. Once you do, the game records your time to a global leaderboard full of far better times than yours, forcing you, on pain of pride, to play again, and again, and again, until your eyes are red and sore with herniated capillaries.
At the start of each game, you choose one of a wide variety of spell types, ranging from a straightforward fire spell to one that swaps your attack and defense stats. Probably to keep them all balanced against each other, none of the spells is particularly powerful. The meat of the game involves running to the right, encountering an enemy, hitting it until it dies, and repeating until you win. Every five or six enemies, you’ll reach a town, where you can heal and purchase stat upgrades.
The game appears button-mashy on the surface, especially in Easy mode, but once you get into the harder game modes, a great deal of strategy appears. Each enemy type requires a different set of tactics to defeat. Yellow squares hop and spin at you in a steady rhythm, pink squares like to stick and move, orange squares (infuriatingly) cast impenetrable shield spells when you attack them too much, and the vicious black squares aggressively counterattack every time you hit them.
Well bollocks...
There are several control options. The default control scheme has you tilting the device to move side-to-side and tapping the screen to swing your sword. I preferred an option that gives you on-screen left and right buttons, as it gave me far better precision control, which comes in handy against more difficult enemies.
There is a great balance of risk and reward as you make your way to the finish line. As your health wears down, you can choose to play it safe by retreating to the last town you hit to heal and power up, or you can try to shave precious minutes off of your finish time by pressing your luck and hoping you can make it to the next town.
The game is full of sarcastic little touches. Towns have silly names like Rusty Spring and Burgerburgh. The scrolling status text announces “You encounter nothing!” when you go more than a few steps without finding an enemy to kill. When you die, your coins burst out of you and the squares pick them up. The cheap doodle artwork motif wore out its welcome with me months ago, but given the tongue-in-cheekiness of the whole thing, it works just fine. And in any case, it’s really well done.
Fastar! includes 12 game modes, including plain old Easy, Normal, and Hard modes, an Arena mode, a brutal Sudden Death mode in which one hit usually kills you, a Marathon mode that takes more than an hour to complete, and even a mode that turns off the random number generator for all of the RNG whiners in the audience. Even with all of these options, however, the game does get old eventually, but I got a good seven or eight hours out of the game before I started to burn out. Even then, I still come back to the game at least once a day to face my sworn enemy that is Sudden Death mode.
Buy this game.
Fastar! is available on the App Store for $0.99.
Fastar! was provided by developer Cat in a Box Games 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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