Neoteria: An Old School iOS Spaceship Shoot’em Up

Contest Closed

Neoteria (universal) by OrangePixel is a retro-style shooter. The fast paced arcade action and congruent retro theme music will have the gamer in the shooter hot seat. The overall package with Neoteria is well balanced and the minimal storyline does leave the gamer to carry on shooting things up.

The controls are basic, up and down with a single fire button to control your ship. A unique gameplay feature is the ships fire rate is determined by how fast the player can rapidly press the fire button, this does bring back nostalgic ‘gamers thumb’ from trips to the game arcade back in the 90’s! This does get tiring and sometimes undermines the gamers co-ordination with the shifting iOS device but a nice touch for such a simple game.

The interface is as informative as need be, a small bar indicating ships’ health and a bar indicating how many blue diamonds are needed to upgrade weapons. This is very important to progress to the next stage. Enemies become more difficult to kill and without firepower gamers will have to play previous stages to get their weapons up to par.

I would like to see a joystick control of the ship as moving up and down does become frustrating when players learn the layout of the level by crashing and burning so often. The gameplay is difficult even on the easy mode. Players have to master the controls by not sliding their fingers off the up/down pads on the left and quickly press the fire button while dodging enemies. There is a big incentive to collect blue diamonds not just for points, but to upgrade weapons. A map of each world does allow some choice in checkpoints  and the boss battles offer a good contest.

Neoteria is a fun little pocket shooter with a clean retro styling, Orangepixel put together a decent title to accompany their other retrofitted games. There is room for improvement. but the simple shoot’em up action will have fans on all levels catching a case of ‘gamers thumb’.

__

Contest Closed