Game Reviews

Sine Mora

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Sine Mora
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| Sine Mora

There's something incongruous about playing a bullet-hell shooter on an iPad. It doesn't matter how many you play, or how good they are - discovering touchscreen controls that work in a genre that demands precision is always a pleasant surprise.

Sine Mora is no different, although it uses a slightly more complex floating-stick and button combination than the usual single-fire, auto-fire setup. The end result is a game that takes place in a thick stripe down the middle of the screen so your fingers never obscure the action.

Bullet to the head

You play as a number of different pilots, each performing his own role in a convoluted plot that's never very well explained and never particularly important. Whatever your motivation, the aim of the game is the same - shoot stuff.

You weave your way through waves of enemies and globs of plasma fire, blasting anything that moves. Killing an enemy tops up your time bar, giving you a little longer to get to the next checkpoint.

Time is very much of the essence, and there's a button that lets you slow down the tick of the clock, giving you a better chance to navigate your way through the maze of exploding shells and attack craft.

Everything feels slick, from the punked-up World War II aesthetic to the clever 2.5D graphics that shift and twist as you play. There's a level of spectacle expected in bullet-hell games and Sine Mora is all too happy to provide it.

There are power-ups to collect that increase the spread of your auto-firing bullets, and each character has a unique special move that unleashes its own particular unholy destruction.

Hell of a game

The violence is slick and clever, and challenging enough that even the most seasoned bullet-hell player is going to lose a couple of continues here and there. Boss training and a hardcore Arcade mode provide even more content to blast through.

For fans of the genre, Sine Mora adds enough of a twist to feel fresh and exciting. It won't appeal to everyone, but if you've a hankering for a bullet-hell blaster for iPad that's full of ideas and innovation, then you're going to find an awful lot to like here.

Sine Mora

Slick, polished, and an awful lot of fun, Sine Mora is a must-play for iPad shooter fans
Score
Harry Slater
Harry Slater
Harry used to be really good at Snake on the Nokia 5110. Apparently though, digital snake wrangling isn't a proper job, so now he writes words about games instead.