Run Or Gun (If You’re Like Me) In Neon Shadow [Review]

First-person shooters are tough to pull off in mobile. You have to manage two virtual joysticks if you want the flexibility of their console and PC cousins, and you also have to figure out how to make shooting work on a platform with no buttons. And thirdly, you have to compensate for the fact that the player’s thumbs must, by necessity, cover up part of the screen.

Neon Shadow is a new first-person shooter for iOS devices from developer Tasty Poison Games that aims to capture the bare-bones, “You are trapped in a cramped space with things that will kill you unless you kill them first” experience of classic FPSes, and it succeeds. It even does a callback to the original Doom games by having a picture of your character’s face that gets more bloodied and beat-up as you take damage.

Plus, you start with the shotgun, and the game gets an extra star just for that.

The plot (read: excuse for shooting things) of Neon Shadow has an elite commando storming a space station to defeat a rogue A.I. But of course that doesn’t really matter; the point is that you have a lot of bullets looking for new homes.

It plays really well. It uses the standard move/look controls, and you tap a separate button on the right to fire. More importantly, you can still drag around while you’re firing to target new enemies without pausing your bulletstorm.

You start with the shotgun, and the game gets an extra star just for that.

It’s probably a matter of skill here, so this didn’t really affect my opinion of the game, but I had a little trouble moving while shooting, and I was never very good at locating enemies that were attacking me before I finally turned around just as they killed me. The game for me ultimately became finding the “sweet spot” where I could stand perfectly still and hit everything in a room while minimizing my own damage. And hey, it worked.

Neon Shadow is a solid game that will satisfy any random desire you might have to shoot some bad robots. I personally would have been better at it with a controller, but mobile veterans shouldn’t have any trouble here.

Game Name: : Neon Shadow The Good: Controls work, shooting is fun. Shotgun. The Bad: Kinda crappy checkpoints, and those robots sneak up on you and they’re jerks. The Verdict: It does exactly what it needs to, and does it well. This is a classic FPS experience for your iOS device. Buy from:App Store

[rating=game4]