Game Reviews

Wave – Against every BEAT!

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Wave – Against every BEAT!

There once was a time when all a real gamer needed to get his kicks was a stiff joystick in his hand and a responsive 'fire' button.

The days of the coin-op 2D shooter may be a distant memory, but titles like Wave – Against every BEAT! (which we’ll simply refer to as ‘Wave’ from now on) are doing a fine job of keeping the memory of smelly, overcrowded arcades alive.

Wave is an old skool shooter in every sense of the word: there’s no plot or exposition to speak of, and you’re thrown right into the blasting action almost as soon as the app boots up. You control your ship using a single finger, as your cannons are mercifully jammed on auto fire at all times.

Your craft dutifully follows wherever your digit moves on the screen, which is a system we’ve seen successfully employed in other notable iPhone blasters. It works equally well here.

Danger, cubed

The enemies you face are glowing cube-like fellows, most of which merely fly down from the top of the screen is a set formation. Failure to deal with them promptly usually results in your ship colliding with one of them and you losing a vital life.

Occasionally you’ll encounter ‘smart’ cubes, which are altogether more cunning. They're also able to return fire. Successfully destroying each wave yields stars, which not only add to your points total but are also collectable as part of your mission objective on some levels.

You’re armed with a fairly weedy single-shot blaster to begin with, but picking up power-ups boosts the offensive capability of your plucky fighter. Better still are the special skill warp zones which appear periodically and imbue your ship with even greater talents.

Step into the portal

The red portal triggers Fever Mode, which introduces another ship for you to control. Both of your fighters are invincible in this mode, and using two fingers you can steer them on entirely different courses of death and destruction.

Flying into the green portal initiates Drive Mode, which transfers you to a first-person view of the action. Your aim is handled by the iPhone’s accelerometer. It’s hard to successfully land hits from this perspective, but it looks and feels really impressive.

Indeed, every aspect of Wave’s presentation is worthy of praise. The neon-infused visuals are eye-catching and the thumping trance beat is perfectly attuned to the on-screen carnage.

There’s even a mode where you can use music tracks stored on your iPhone to influence the enemy patterns, but to be perfectly honest we struggled to really spot how it was any different from the standard Arcade mode.

With OpenFeint support, fiendishly compelling gameplay, and a steep challenge, Wave is bound to please any self-respecting shooter addict. If you’re not a fan of the genre then you’ll most likely struggle to fathom the game’s appeal, but then bullet-hell blasters always were about sorting the men from the boys – a task that Wave does with admirable efficiency.

Wave – Against every BEAT!

It’s sure to be impenetrable to causal players, but Wave is the perfect tribute to old skool shooters: it boasts addictive gameplay, sterling presentation and is as tough as old boots
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Damien  McFerran
Damien McFerran
Damien's mum hoped he would grow out of playing silly video games and gain respectable employment. Perhaps become a teacher or a scientist, that kind of thing. Needless to say she now weeps openly whenever anyone asks how her son's getting on these days.