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In Billy Frontier, you play a space cowboy in a series of mini-games to collect coins. These mini-games consist of Target Practice, Duel, Stampede, and Shootout. You can play these mini-games in any order, and they are broken up in two sections; the easy Town mode, and the harder Swamp mode. Games can be saved into 7 available slots, and resumed at any time. Within the Settings, you can turn up and down the sound volume, turn on/off music and sound effects, turn on/off the reticules offset, turn on/off vibration, and turn on/off help text. There’s a high score list to keep track of your best performances.
In Duel, you go through a series of cinematic scenes and during these scenes you are presented with two buttons on-screen. Each button has a shape on it, and at the bottom of the screen are the patterns you have to press to fill up a bubble in the bar below. When the bar is filled with bubbles, you win the duel against your opponents, which has them shooting at you, and you shooting at them. Depending on how well you do with the patterns and how many bubbles you filled, you win and lose based on your performance. While the cinematics are nice, the gameplay is repetitive and doesn’t make you want to come back for more after you beat it. The shapes are small and hard to read, and the buttons you press doesn’t register very well, and they are also a tad small.
In Target Practice, a number of objects are tossed up into the air and you shoot them by tapping the screen. There’s a slight lead-time involved, and at some point the screen will start swaying, adding an extra layer of challenge to your aim. When you’ve shot up enough objects, you win coins. This mode looks good, but as with Duel, can get repetitive and boring after a while. There’s just not much to this mini-game to make it compelling enough to keep coming back to.
Shootout is a first-person on-rails whack-a-mole mini-game that has you going through a series of scenes where enemies pop up behind cover and shoot at you. You shoot them down by tapping the screen. This mode features the offset reticule, kind of mimicking the aim you’d get when lining up the sights of a gun towards the destination. Some people may want to disable this in the Settings if they find it too unintuitive. After all enemies in a scene are eliminated, you can either go forward, or press the left and right arrows on the screen to look around and find more enemies. The game is over if you get shot up too many times and die. This mini-game has the most substance, but can still get a little repetitive after a while. It’s a bit more challenging, though.
Finally, there’s Stampede, which is a 3rd-person on-rails race that has the character running towards you, while kanga-cows (kangaroo cows) are behind him running towards him in a stampede. The game is over when a kanga-cow runs you over. You control your character by tilting the iPhone/iPod Touch to make him shift to the left and right. Tap the screen to make him jump over objects. You collect coins during the race by running into them, and to help you run faster and avoid the stampede, the course is littered with hot peppers, which when you touch them boosts your speed and puts some distance between you and the kanga-cows. However, there are objects on the course that can stop you completely, so jump to avoid them. Unfortunately, sometimes tapping the screen doesn’t register and your guy won’t jump in a timely manner, which largely breaks this mini-game. This mode has the most gameplay value, but even Stampede won’t keep you coming back for more after a few play-throughs.
The visuals are pretty good, right up there with the best of them on the iPhone/iPod Touch. It’s not as polished as we’d like it to be, but the 3D models, cinematic scenes in Duel, and smooth animation are well done. The western theme is used heavily and to good effect throughout.
Sound effects are the best part of Billy Frontier. Everything sounds great, especially gunshots. The music is just as great. As you would expect, it has a spaghetti western vibe to it and it helps to create the mood and atmosphere while playing the game. As expected, the game will fade off your music if you’re playing any.
The premise of Billy Frontier is a good one, but unfortunately it feels like a gimmick game, used mostly to take advantage of the different features of the iPhone/iPod Touch. There’s just very little actual gameplay value to make it worthwhile to play each mini-game more than a few times.
Tags: billy frontier, pangea software
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[The following was written by Kris Graft at FingerGaming's sister site Gamasutra.]
