You can't beat a good shoot-'em-up when it comes to letting off steam. Spending ten minutes dodging bullets, collecting power-ups and blowing the bejaysus out of waves of enemies remains one of the most satisfying gaming experiences around. Trouble is, most of the good shooters were made back in the 1980s and are showing their age.
Alpha Wing 2 is here to save us from nostalgia overload. It's a thoroughly modern arcade-style shooter that nicks the best bits from all manner of vintage games to make a new game that feels reassuringly familiar, while at the same time making the most of the graphical capabilities of current phones.
You choose from three cartoon characters to play as, each with their own skills and weapons. The idea? Plough through the vertically-scrolling levels shooting everything that moves, while snaring as many power-ups as possible to boost your arsenal along the way.
The key thing about a shoot-'em-up is the pace and rhythm, leaving you breathless with all-action sequences when the screen is full of enemies and bullets, yet giving you enough slack time in between to recover. Thankfully, Alpha Wing 2 delivers the goods in spades, with carefully-crafted gameplay ensuring your attention never wanes, but equally that you don't get trigger-thumb cramp.
The visuals are ace, too. On most handsets they're 2D, with boldly-drawn enemies and colourful backgrounds. Importantly, the bullets from your foe are well-defined, helping you to dance around them while blasting your way through.
However, if you've got a 3D-capable handset, the backgrounds have been given a pseudo-3D tweak, which doesn't change the gameplay but makes the scenery look genuinely jaw-dropping at times. That's if you had time to admire it, obviously – you'll be too busy shooting 'n' dodging.
Alpha Wing 2 can be a bit intimidating if you're new to this shoot-'em-up lark, as the difficulty level ramps up fairly sharply. But the sheer craft that's gone into it will make you want to persevere with its charms. The bosses lurking at the end of levels epitomise this: they're big, tough and require lateral thinking to be seen off, which is as it should be.
Forget all those retro blasters clogging up the operator portals. If you've got an itchy trigger thumb, you want Alpha Wing 2.
Alpha Wing 2
This action-packed game has everything you'd want from a shoot-'em-up
Stuart Dredge
Stuart is a freelance journalist and blogger who's been getting paid to write stuff since 1998. In that time, he's focused on topics ranging from Sega's Dreamcast console to robots. That's what you call versatility. (Or a short attention span.)