Most people on this planet do something in order to live. Some catch bad guys, some heal — others yet write pithy reviews about tiny games.
A relatively new game has another suggestion, by dint of its title: “Tilt To Live.” If you do wind up with this little $2 gem in your hot hands, though, you’ll find it usurps any other activity you might have been engaged with in order to live.
The objective is simple: stay alive. You do this by move a pointy arrow around the iPhone’s screen by tilting it in any direction, picking up weapons along the way with which to destroy the red dots that appear on the screen in increasingly alarming numbers. Touch a dot, and you’re dead — the only exceptions being if you’re arrow-ship is equipped with one of three weapons, or if they’ve been frozen by the Ice Blast weapon. Oh, and the dots follow you around like zombies hunting fresh brain.
Luckily, there are always three weapon pickups floating around the screen somewehere. Activate one, and another pops up in it’s place, somewhere on the screen (hopefully, not behind the wall of dots advancing on your position).
However, the game could very well have been called “Tilt to Kill,” because this is where it gets really interesting: The more dots you destroy at one time, the more the bounty for each dot increases. So in order to score maximum points, you have to keep destroying dots — stop, and that hard earned bonus multiplier evaporates. Ouch.
Augmenting the game’s wildly gripping play (I swear I’ve screamed like a little girl on a few occasions while narrowly escaping a horde of dots advancing on my position), are slick graphics, smart, funny writing and neat little effects — like the humming sound when equipped with the Bubble Shield, of the way lines run across the screen like electrical interference from the Lightning pickup — that give the overall effect of a well-polished game with details the developers sweated over.
Unfortunately, the latest update hobbled the game’s superb control options by introducing some confounded, neanderthal steering mechanism that makes my brain ache; fortunately, the “top-down” option still works as it always did. Also, the game seems to suffer from a bit of early-stage lull — a problem easily (and hopefully) patched in future updates, though.
Verdict: 4.5/5 – Highly immersive and polished to a high gloss, this game tops any I’ve yet encountered on the iPhone for addictiveness. Must-have. Seriously.
When he was eight, Eli Milchman came home from frolicking in the Veld one day and was given an Atari 400. Since then, his fascination with technology has made him an intrepid early adopter of whatever charming new contraption crosses his path. He calls San Francisco home, where he works as a journalist and photographer. Eli has contributed to the pages of Wired.com and BIKE Magazine, among others. Hang with him on Twitter.
