Radio Flare: A Flare for the Dramatic
Written: Oct 07 '09
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Product Rating:
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Pros: simple, fun, OpenFeint integration, great graphics and sound
Cons: easy, vanilla gameplay, limited replay value
The Bottom Line: You can play it even if you have a Radio Allergy.
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| kjell1979's Full Review: Radio Flare for iPhone |
Side scrolling shooters are always a fun genre of game to play. The best ones get my heart racing during moments when I'm doing especially well. While for some its pattern recognition is like playing a complicated melody, others are all about action and reaction in a hail of pixilated bullets. So when Radio Flare went on sale this past weekend for free, I couldn't resist picking it up. Over a dozen hours later, I'm left impressed with what they did with the game.
Gameplay
Radio Flare is a side scrolling shooter game that draws a lot of its identity from its theme. This is a standard side scrolling shooter where the idea is to avoid collisions with other ships and with the projectiles they fire at you. However, instead of firing your own projectiles at your enemies, you have a device that desynchronizes enemy ships and thus destroys them. There's a 1 second delay between the times a target is selected to when it becomes desynchronized. This means you must move your ship if they're about to fire a projectile at you, but it also allows you to chain together up to four enemies at a time. Enemies gradually get harder to deal with. Some just float out there and are a threat to ram into your ship. Others are more active by firing their own projectiles at you, while others when they explode break apart and threaten to destroy your ship.
Enemies drop these red dots when they're destroyed. As you collect these dots your progress bar begins to fill up. Once it's filled it expands out a little more thus opening a more challenging section of the stage. The stage ends when you fill your progress bar after it cannot expand any further. Radio Flare has many different stages to get through each of which get more and more challenging as you go along.
There are three different gameplay modes: arcade, bomb run, and flow. Arcade mode is the standard method of play. You progress via stages and it progresses like a standard side scrolling shooter with stages. The mode provides a medium level of difficulty for this game. Bomb Run advertises itself as a more "intense" version of Arcade mode, but I didn't see much difference. There were a few more challenging enemies seen earlier on, but it offered the same amount of challenge to me as the previous mode. Bomb Run also allows you to compete in stages but has its own high score table. The final mode is Flow. This is an interesting mode in that it allows you to play through a single level in an effort to get the highest score possible. I like playing this mode when I don't have a lot of time to play through an entire Arcade mode or Bomb Run.
Radio Flare also integrates with OpenFeint. This is a fantastic decision by the developers because this game works really well when you introduce the achievement features to this game. Most of the achievements are pretty easy to obtain, especially if you're used to playing harder side scrolling shooter games. There are a few which took me a few tries to get, but overall it's a nice feature to integrate into the game and earns some high praise from me as a result.
Overall I found Radio Flare to have some solid gameplay. However, I also found the game to be quite easy. I found myself just flying through this game and not really challenged at all. Radio Flare also bombards you with extra lives and if you have at least 3 spare lives, you get "marks" which select all the enemies on screen or just off screen. But even if you take those away, then I can still get through most of the game without losing a life. But I think the development crew wasn't seeking to make a Radiant Silvergun or Ikaruga, but rather bring a Rez style to the side scrolling shooter genre. To that extent they've succeeded in creating a compelling game if only because of its style.
Controls
The controls are entirely touch-based. You move your ship with your finger while targeting other ships and objects with your other finger. The ship is big enough that you can use your index finger; however I highly recommend using something that's much thinner. So often the rest of my finger obscures the screen such that I can't see what's coming, and when you have two fingers on the screen at once it's like driving home in a heavy fog. The controls are really responsive and it's surprisingly precise as far as navigating your ship and targeting your foes. Overall the controls get a huge thumbs up from me, especially when so many other games tend to have much more terrible ones themselves.
Graphics
The menu graphics suggests that this game would be cell shaded, given the Jet Set Radio type presentation. The ships take on kind of a 90's retro feel to them. The game is sprite-based and there's no perceived depth in the graphical presentation. The backgrounds are a simple bland space theme and the enemies are surprisingly bland. But what works well in this game graphically is that it can handle a lot of movement between the red dots, enemies, your ship and other projectiles. The graphics could be a little better, but it works especially given the presentation.
Sound
I think the sound is one of the best aspects of Radio Flare. For each enemy that gets desynchronized it adds to the background music. The cohesion between the sound effects and music works almost as good as Space Invaders Extreme. Plugging in your headphones (as suggested) really amplifies the experience as well. This is definitely a must have game if you like great audio experiences in your gaming.
Replay Value
Like most side scrolling shooters, unless the game is insanely difficult, you're going to put it down after you've finished the game. Sadly Radio Flare falls more on the easy side of side scrolling shooter games. Therefore it wasn't long before this game was completed and I put it down. Having OpenFeint integration does help in that the achievements are definitely worth striving for after the game is finished, but by the time you've finished the game you'll have likely polished most of them off already.
Overall Radio Flare is a game for people who like side scrolling shooters and games with great presentation who are not looking for something hardcore like Ikaruga. Even though it didn't take me long before I finished the game, I found myself playing it again and again because it had great music and presentation. If you're looking for a good 99 cent game, you should give this one a try.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
kjell1979
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Location: Oxford, Mass
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Smack! Smack! Sugar Smacks! Give me a smack and I'll smack ya back!
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