One of the first games to emerge when the App Store hit the scene was a little gem called Blue Defense!, by John Kooistra. It gave us a perfect, simple game mechanic: You are a lone planet being attacked by hordes of red aliens. Your single gun always shoots straight up relative to the gravity on whatever planet you’re currently inhabiting in real life, and you aim the weapon by turning your iDevice. Each wave you defeat begets another, more challenging one, until the inevitable demise of the 6.8 billion people living on Planet Earth.
Sadly, it appears both it and John’s follow-up, Blue Attack, have disappeared from the App Store, but it should serve as no small comfort to learn of Blue Defense’s first direct sequel, Blue Defense: Second Wave!, a universal iPhone/iPad game from his company, Cat-In-A-Box, that brings a vast list of tweaks and improvements to what we had until recently thought was already a perfect shooter.
The core of the game remains the same as the original: Shoot, kill, and eventually die. As before, you aim by rotating your device, but Second Wave! also introduces a touch aim mechanic in which you can lock your gun onto specific points in space. The gun’s firepower will then be divided evenly between the lock-on points you set and the point you are aiming at with the accelerometer controls. The added control makes distributing your attention between the enemies coming at you from 360 degrees a simple matter.
Speaking of the accelerometer controls, those of you in the audience with vertigo might be pleased to learn that they can be turned off, allowing you to aim solely with your finger — great for those times when you don’t want to look like a lunatic in public, spinning your phone around in the air while cursing under your breath. You have to change targets frequently, though, so be prepared for the occasional friction burn.
In addition to your standard gun, you get a devastating planet cannon that comes with three shots, plus a bonus shot after every ten waves. Even the biggest bosses can only withstand two shots from this weapon, but the limited ammo forces you to carefully choose when to use it. Tip: If it doesn’t already feel like it’s too late, you don’t need it.
To the classic play-until-you-can’t mode, the sequel adds a Gauntlet mode, also known as The Mode You Can Actually Win. It includes a long list of enemy scenarios, each with three achievements to collect for finishing the level without getting hit, abstaining from using the planet cannon, and wracking up extra kills by letting enemies like carriers, which spawn swarms of additional enemies, alive until the last possible moment.
Second Wave! is also universal, and looks fabulous, albeit a bit fuzzy, on the iPad. The bigger screen makes the accelerometer controls an order of magnitude more dizzying, but the extra space also makes it easier to aim with your fingers without obscuring the view of the action. Overall, my favorite way to play the game is on the iPad.
Blue Attack: Second Wave! is a deep, challenging shooter that will have you coming back over and over again to try to refine your technique against the myriad types of enemy aliens it throws at you. The constant worry of whether you’re choosing your targets optimally means that every game will end with you thinking, “Damn! If only I’d done this instead!” Nothing makes a game sink its hooks into you like personal shame. As long as you don’t happen to value your social life very much, you want this game.
Blue Attack: Second Wave! is available on the App Store for $1.99.
Blue Attack: Second Wave! 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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TAGS: ipad games, universal apps
