FingerGaming

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Rating:

• Price: $3.99 (Get It)
• Version: 1.0
• Developer: JadeGame

Version 1.2 Update: After the previous update which added accelerometer controls and made the game worse, this update added back the touch controls and fixed the game significantly to now be more enjoyable and fun. Weapons are more powerful and shoot faster, and enemies are stronger. The game and animation are much smoother now. Finally MetalAngel is living up to the promise I saw in the beginning. It still needs to be tweaked and tuned, and more variety in levels and enemies added. However, we now have a classic vertical scrolling shooter worth playing. The rating has been changed from 2 stars to 3 stars to reflect these changes.

The previous two reviews on FingerGaming are, like MetalAngel, space shooters; Tilt Fighter and Starsmasher. Both were underwhelming, so third time’s the charm with MetalAngel, right? Not quite.

MetalAngel is a vertical shoot ‘em up, where you guide your ship, which automatically fires its guns, by using your finger. You can either drag the ship across the screen for fluid movement, or you can tap anywhere on the screen to instantly teleport there. The teleporting thing seems like an unintentional design flaw, because it just doesn’t fit in this kind of genre. To fire, what seems to be a torpedo, you double tap your ship and it fires. This has the side effect of also teleporting you to whereever you double tapped.

As you shoot down enemies, you progress in levels based on the score you have. Eventually you’ll face a boss that you have to defeat in order to advance. The bosses, however, are incredibly easy due to the super-slow pace of the game. Since there’s no difficulty level to choose from, you have to bear it.

The game just plays very slow overall. Enemies are slow, your fire rate is slow, their fire rate is slow, everything’s slow. Looking at the developer’s site, and their gameplay video, is misleading because their video shows the game moving fast and playing fluidly. Not the game I played. My guess is that this developer programmed the game on a Mac without testing the game on an iPhone or iPod Touch, without getting someone else to test it, and released it in a hurry to make money.

The graphics, if it were to work properly, would look fairly nice. But it’s choppy, slow, and the animation is horrible. Your ship blinks in and out of existence when moving, and that’s not just the teleport that you do when tapping around.

Even more unforgivable is that there are no sound effects. At all, whatsoever. There’s no music, either.

Tags: jadegame, metalangel, shooter, space