Game Review: Circuit_Strike.One

Circuit_Strike.One by Chillingo Ltd.

Let me start out by staying that this game is about as far from casual as you can get. It's complex and engrossing— expect the game to suck you in and keep you occupied for hours at a time. Find yourself immersed in bright colors, ears filled with techno tunes.

Circuit_Strike.One is like asteroids at a rave! One of the coolest things about this game is that it has real world properties in it, like inertia. Mix that in with trippy visuals and some blaring techno music, and you have Circuit_Strike.One.

The basic concept of the game is to destroy shield generators protecting the central power core. Once the core is vulnerable, you'll have about 30 seconds to destroy it and win the level. Sounds simple right? Wrong!

This game will take even the most skilled gamers a while to perfect. To put it lightly, the controls are extremely sensitive. Most of the time, I found myself having trouble keeping my ship going in the direction I wanted it to go.

There is a control wheel on the left side of the screen, which serves as a sort of steering wheel for your ship. On the opposite side of the screen, you will find the controls for thrusters, as well as your breaks and weapons. Touch and hold the Go button to activate thrusters, and slide your finger down the right side of the screen to put on the breaks. To fire your weapons, tap the .exe button.

And so you're contentedly flying along, shooting and destroying your enemies as they spawn— but! Suddenly you realize you're heading straight into a wall! Oh no, whatever will you do? But it's no problem! In this game, you can fly right through it and come out the other side, back in the playing field. There's a achievement for it called Wall Hax. This game has quite a few achievements— some of them aren't very hard to get, though there are others I'm not sure if I'll ever get my hands on.

Blasting enemies will give you points, but more importantly they will leave behind green ghost data, which transfers directly into "bullet time". To activate it, simply shake your device. Bullet time slows everything around your ship down considerably, while your ship will remain the same speed as before it was activated.

The good: Challenging game play with highly responsive controls, bumping techno beats, and sometimes hilarious 1337 (leet) speak messages when you croak.

The bad: Perhaps a little too challenging. It's really hard at first to even steer your ship in the right direction, let alone dodge incoming enemies and fire at them. Note that there's a steep learning curve to this one.

The breakdown: I got this for $0.99, and I gotta say that it is one of the games that I play the most on my iPhone. It's tricky— but it's this trickiness that keeps me coming back to see if I can do better. 4.5/5

If you think of anything I left out of this post, please feel free to put that on the comment.