Thursday, October 21, 2010
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MiniSquadron! Review
★★★☆☆
From the minute I took to the air, I couldn't help but feel like... a fly. Armed with weapons. Fighting for its life in a little cramped shoebox. This is one fast-paced, dog fight!
Title: MiniSquadron! | Developer: Gray Fin Studios | Genre: Arcade |
Players: 1, 2 (local wiFi) | Version: 1.12 | Size: 23.9MB | Price: $2.99
Click QRC image (from phone) or scan with a barcode reader.
MiniSquadron is a fast-paced, 2-D dog fighting arcade game. You hop from location to location (all eight of them), spinning in circles and figure-eights with your thumb held-fast on the trigger, blowing up everything from geese to UFOs. The main carrots being dangled in front of your nose are a) beating high-scores (your own and online), and b) unlocking dozens of planes. This game connects to the OpenFeint network, allowing you to post scores to global leader-boards. Creating a logon (if you don't already have one) is free.
Each plane has its own statistics (speed, armor, damage, turn-rate, etc.) and weapon variants. Like most arcade games, you progress through increasingly more difficult and numerous waves of enemies, beginning with geese. I found myself immediately cramped by the tiny airspace, but after realizing that you merely bounce-off walls... I came to terms. The sky and ground aren't as forgiving, however. If you pull the stick back and aim for the stars, you'll quickly stall and begin a free-fall. Accelerating into the fall will give you enough momentum to pull out of it, but you only have a couple seconds since there's only a few inches from the clouds to the water below. If you hit the ground, you go boom.
As you're pew-pewing your path to glorious victory, random power-ups fall from the sky. These power-ups give you temporary abilities such as super-speed, invincibility, rapid-fire, and more lives. You only have three lives, so use them wisely, gnat.
Controls
Simplicity is the key in MiniSquadron, and the controls are no exception. There are two on-screen, transparent pads - a radial pad for movement, and a trigger to shoot things. I find it best to use a heavy-thumb and spam bullets all over the sky. The pads work perfectly, but leave nice, circular smudges on your screen.
Graphics
The look of the game seriously reminds me of Super Mario. The backgrounds are cheesy at best, sport basic-colors, and are extremely cartoony. They could've done a better job on resolution, in my opinion. If you pause the game and look closely, you'll see that the backdrops are pretty grainy and pixilated around the edges. Perhaps this was necessary to preserve the speed of the game. The game is fast.
Sound
To continue with the Mario theme, the sound is equally cheese-ball, but it goes along with the humorous and casual nature of the game. Nothing fantastic here, but surely jovial.
Options
The solo-campaign spans across eight whopping levels, but there are a couple other options of interest - Survival and Multiplayer. Survival mode is just what you'd expect; staying alive as long as possible and kill as many enemies as possible for the highest score. Multiplayer, however, allows to you go head-to-head with a friend via local wiFi. This is a pretty cool feature, and makes for some fun, casual gaming.
Verdict
The Market community is absolutely in love with this game, giving it 4.5 to 5 stars across the board. In my opinion, it's fun, but not worthy of quite so much praise. I can see this getting old really fast, but it certainly does suck you in do to the fact that one glance away from the screen results in certain death. If you like frantic, pew-pew combat in sputtering bi-planes, MiniSquadron would certainly be worth your time. My biggest gripe is the lack of space. If this game sported a larger play-area, perhaps 2 or 3x the size, it would be a hell of a lot more fun.
Get MiniSquadron on AppBrain!
From the minute I took to the air, I couldn't help but feel like... a fly. Armed with weapons. Fighting for its life in a little cramped shoebox. This is one fast-paced, dog fight!Title: MiniSquadron! | Developer: Gray Fin Studios | Genre: Arcade |
Players: 1, 2 (local wiFi) | Version: 1.12 | Size: 23.9MB | Price: $2.99
Click QRC image (from phone) or scan with a barcode reader.MiniSquadron is a fast-paced, 2-D dog fighting arcade game. You hop from location to location (all eight of them), spinning in circles and figure-eights with your thumb held-fast on the trigger, blowing up everything from geese to UFOs. The main carrots being dangled in front of your nose are a) beating high-scores (your own and online), and b) unlocking dozens of planes. This game connects to the OpenFeint network, allowing you to post scores to global leader-boards. Creating a logon (if you don't already have one) is free.
Each plane has its own statistics (speed, armor, damage, turn-rate, etc.) and weapon variants. Like most arcade games, you progress through increasingly more difficult and numerous waves of enemies, beginning with geese. I found myself immediately cramped by the tiny airspace, but after realizing that you merely bounce-off walls... I came to terms. The sky and ground aren't as forgiving, however. If you pull the stick back and aim for the stars, you'll quickly stall and begin a free-fall. Accelerating into the fall will give you enough momentum to pull out of it, but you only have a couple seconds since there's only a few inches from the clouds to the water below. If you hit the ground, you go boom.
As you're pew-pewing your path to glorious victory, random power-ups fall from the sky. These power-ups give you temporary abilities such as super-speed, invincibility, rapid-fire, and more lives. You only have three lives, so use them wisely, gnat.
Controls
Simplicity is the key in MiniSquadron, and the controls are no exception. There are two on-screen, transparent pads - a radial pad for movement, and a trigger to shoot things. I find it best to use a heavy-thumb and spam bullets all over the sky. The pads work perfectly, but leave nice, circular smudges on your screen.
Graphics
The look of the game seriously reminds me of Super Mario. The backgrounds are cheesy at best, sport basic-colors, and are extremely cartoony. They could've done a better job on resolution, in my opinion. If you pause the game and look closely, you'll see that the backdrops are pretty grainy and pixilated around the edges. Perhaps this was necessary to preserve the speed of the game. The game is fast.
Sound
To continue with the Mario theme, the sound is equally cheese-ball, but it goes along with the humorous and casual nature of the game. Nothing fantastic here, but surely jovial.
Options
The solo-campaign spans across eight whopping levels, but there are a couple other options of interest - Survival and Multiplayer. Survival mode is just what you'd expect; staying alive as long as possible and kill as many enemies as possible for the highest score. Multiplayer, however, allows to you go head-to-head with a friend via local wiFi. This is a pretty cool feature, and makes for some fun, casual gaming.
Verdict
The Market community is absolutely in love with this game, giving it 4.5 to 5 stars across the board. In my opinion, it's fun, but not worthy of quite so much praise. I can see this getting old really fast, but it certainly does suck you in do to the fact that one glance away from the screen results in certain death. If you like frantic, pew-pew combat in sputtering bi-planes, MiniSquadron would certainly be worth your time. My biggest gripe is the lack of space. If this game sported a larger play-area, perhaps 2 or 3x the size, it would be a hell of a lot more fun.
Get MiniSquadron on AppBrain!
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