Game Reviews

Roswell Fighter Reloaded

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iOS
| Roswell Fighter Reloaded
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Roswell Fighter Reloaded
|
iOS
| Roswell Fighter Reloaded

The Roswell incident must have been quite reassuring to people who believe that planet Earth is under constant threat of alien invasion.

It turned out that the first extraterrestrial on camera was not the planet-destroying bum-prober of legend. It was a gaunt, pale, hapless dead wimp on a slab with its guts all open.

On this basis, Roswell Fighter Reloaded is even more reassuring. Not only can you repel an alien invasion, pursue the retreating army across the universe, and crush it on its own home planet, but you can achieve this with a single WWII-era fighter plane. Talk about contempt.

But the kicker is, you'll do it. You might lose a couple of lives along the way, but you'll never use a continue - in fact, I don't think Roswell Fighter Reloaded even has continues - and you'll never have to revisit a single inch of its generically beautiful stages if you don't want to.

Batteries not included

Roswell Fighter Reloaded is a vertically scrolling shooter in the style of 1942. It belongs to the venerable arcade genre that once dominated the amusements and has now evolved into bullet-hell shooters like DoDonPachi Resurrection and Sine Mora - which, funnily enough, hit the App Store just this week.

But it doesn't seem to have enjoyed the same evolutionary process.

Levels unfurl interminably across terrestrial, cosmic, and alien landscapes while forgettable alien entities appear from the edges of the screen in raggedy formations. Every so often there's a boss, a bank of turrets, or something more adventurous like a meteor shower.

Destroying enemies earns you combos, and they leave behind them silver and gold stars that you can pick up, along with power-ups, to boost your score and your destructive capability.

You have no choice about the particular capabilities you acquire - you just get progressively more powerful, until all the gushing ordnance makes you resemble a sort of catastrophic disco peacock obliterating everything with its deadly plumage.

In the early stages this has the redundant effect of making you even more ludicrously overpowered than you already were, but the levelling-up comes in handy later on as the aliens become progressively more robust.

Also, you have a recharging laser and a limited number of bombs, but you won't need to use these very often.

Star schlep

Roswell Fighter Reloaded is very easy and very monotonous. You can make it a bit harder by playing in the Difficult mode, but all this does is deprive you of a life. It's a modification that affects your chances of victory, but not the gameplay.

In either mode it feels more like wiping ladybirds off a coffee table than battling with a high-tech military organisation from space.

This isn't necessarily a bad game. The controls are fluid, the gameplay is accessible, the graphics are attractive and detailed, and the sense of growing power as you make your way through each of the 11 stages is quite gratifying.

But it contains almost no challenge or depth, and consequently no replay value - in fact, it barely has any play value.

You won't actively dislike the hour or so it takes you to complete Roswell Fighter Reloaded, and at 69p it won't make you feel as though you've been anally probed. But once you've seen off the last of the bosses and returned to your Home screen you may find that your memory of the experience has been wiped.

Roswell Fighter Reloaded

Roswell Fighter Reloaded isn't actively offensive, but it's far too flat and easy to recommend
Score
Rob Hearn
Rob Hearn
Having obtained a distinguished education, Rob became Steel Media's managing editor, now he's no longer here though.