Review: Tilt to Live HD for iPad

If you’re not familiar with Tilt to Live on the iPhone, you may want to get out from under the smoking rubble of your ruined city (I am so sorry about that, by the way, I didn’t realize it was loaded) and get with the program. TtL ushered in a new genre of what I guess you could call the Passive Agressive Arena Shooter, in which you had to tilt your iPhone to avoid swarms of red dots while leading the same within range of a cornucopia of devious traps and weapons, all in the name of scoring points. It was one of the first games to really nail tilt controls from an overhead view, to the point that if you died, there was never any doubt in your mind that it was entirely your fault.

Tilt to Live HD, just released today, is the brand new iPad version of the game, and if you were expecting exactly the same game with all of the sprites doubled in size, you’re in for a big surprise. And even if you didn’t, you’re still in for a treat, as, right out of the gate, TtLHD is one of the finest iPad games I’ve ever played.

The gameplay in TtLHD is essentially the same as in the original: Tilt the device, kill the red dots, don’t die. There are some subtle new graphical effects, but where the new game really amps things up is in its scale. All of the game objects are the same pixel size as before, but on a much larger playing field, and there are rather a lot more of them. Because of this, you have an order of magnitude more tactical options at your disposal at any given moment, but the game remains just as beautifully cramped and stressful as ever.

The four game types from the original return. Classic is the standard tilt, avoid, and kill game. Code Red is like Classic, but with extra sauce… terrifying, deadly sauce. Frostbite places a warm pool at the bottom of the screen and requires you to smash frozen dots before they fall into it, thaw, and come to kill you. And finally, Gauntlet Evolved is an updated version of the old Gauntlet mode on the iPhone, in which you must collect orbs for points while wave after wave of clever dots that you can’t do anything about zero in on you.

Tilt to Live HD is the definitive version of Tilt to Live. If you have both an iPhone and an iPad and can only afford one version, get it for the iPad. Though the central gameplay mechanic is unchanged, developers One Man Left have pumped so much extra love into the HD update that it feels like a brand new game. They probably should have called it Tilt to Live Deluxe or maybe Tilt to Live No There’s No iPhone Version You’re Crazy Get This One. You simply can’t go wrong with this game.

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TAGS: ipad games, one man left