Isotope: A Space Shooter Review

Affogato Software caused a bit of a stir a bit ago when they released a Lite game for a game that hadn’t come out yet. It proved to be a very smart move. Much like drug dealers give you “the first one free”, the devs hooked several of newly addicted game players with their fun to play, top view, space shooter. Now that the full game is out most of them are rushing to downloading it.

Now it may sound strange to compare a game developer to a drug pusher, but I’m hoping the iDrinkApp will look past that and realize that I’m making this a very high compliment. I’m also grateful that they’ve made the game a nice price and it’s a one time buy.

All right, enough of the comparisons with that world, let’s put everything in the context of the gaming world. Many will look at this game as a Geometry Wars clone. The comparison is fair, it does look and act a lot like that game, but you’ll find that it’s a whole lot deeper than that game – and even more fun.

The graphical look is close to that of Geometry Wars and even Blue Attack with its sharp neon look. I really like this look for games. It’s easy to tell what you’re looking at, and the vibrant colors really bounce off of your screen.

But I will say that I can’t for the life of me figure out why so much work was put into the game play graphics, but then they made the HUD so strange. Sure the experience and health bars are a part of every game like this, but what’s the deal with that ugly white house to get you back to the main menu? To me it is totally out of place. Just about anything could replace that.

The controls are very good. And that includes five different settings. The default allows you to work as we’ve seen in games like iDracula and classics like Robotron and Smash TV. There are also settings where you can use the Accelerometer for movement and a targeting system for firing. Liked being able to just tap the screen where I wanted to fire, but I also found that it blocked part of the screen and that you couldn’t fire into the lower left hand quarter (since the D-Pad was there). But everyone will find some control setting that will work for them.

The same sense of polish went into the sound. It’s nothing exceptional, but it’s a little better than the basic SpaceDisco you get in most games like this.

Where things really take a big step up is in the depth you get with the game. It’s all about leveling and powering up, and Isotope has plenty of both. It’s mind boggling how much you can do, but I haven’t even mentioned that you can do all of that with 40 different ships. That’s a lot of game play.

And speaking of game play… there are 30 different missions to play. When I started playing I thought I was always going to be in a rectangle playfield (which would have been okay), but things changed up quickly and there were several different types of things going on. The game also had some nice boss fights (though there might have been too many boss fights).

While almost everything about this game makes it seem perfect, but there are a few blemishes with it. Of course you’ve already read my rant about that stupid house in the heads up display so I won’t bring that up again (though I guess I just did). The only other big thing might be that the game could use the ability to flip the landscape screen to the other side. I like to play with headphones and the jack got in my way while playing with its current format.

But that’s really about it. A couple of fixable things is the best I could do when looking for bad things. And, it seems that the devs are doing a lot of listening to their customers. Updates are already on the way that will take care of some things. I don’t know if that will fix my stuff, but there’s always hope.

Fans of this type of shooter may have found their newest addiction (see how I brought it back to the beginning?). Isotope is a great game and will keep your thumbs busy for hours and hours. In fact, if I could give one last piece of advice to the devs… You should change the name from “Isotope: A Space Shooter” to “Isotope: THE Space Shooter”.

Now… go and pick it up. Sure you can start with the Lite version, but you’ll want another hit very quickly.

The Good

Great Graphics
A Control Scheme For Everyone
So Many Things To Unlock I Couldn’t List Them
Devs Are Already Working On Making It Better

The Bad

It Does Get Tough (If That’s A Bad Thing)
What’s With That “House” In The HUD?
Needs To Allow You To “Flip” Screen

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Category: Games