Kryzer Prologue

It’s amazing how little can separate a passably enjoyable game from a frustrating, fist-poundingly shoddy one. Sadly, Kryzer Prologue is more the latter than the former, but only because of some silly, easily fixable flaws.

The set-up consists of a circular playing area made up of five concentric rings where you pilot a ship that revolves on a circular path around each of them. You can move freely between the rings by pressing the positive and negative signs positioned on the left and right bottom corners of the screen.

Enemy entities materialise sporadically on the battlefield in the form of variously coloured circles. Some enemies are fixed on a single circular path, while others float across the play area or weave around it in a choreographed attack pattern.

Your ship fires continuously and the aim is to move it between the rings in order to line up your autofire and take out the enemies. Dispatched enemies yield time bonuses, which you need to collect in order to top up the timer.

Crashing into enemies doesn’t damage your ship, but it does strip valuable seconds from the timer. When the timer ticks down to zero, it’s Game Over.

So what’s wrong with it?

Even on the easiest of the three difficulty levels, Kryzer Prologue is impossibly tough. Crashing into other ships docks 30 seconds from the clock, which, for a game that starts with a timer of 1:30, is overly punitive.

This is confounded by the fact that the time bonuses you get for killing the majority of enemies are only five seconds, with the occasional 15 second bonus appearing once every wave (read: 'level') or less.

This means that even if you manage to kill every enemy that materialises and collect every bonus, the timer is unfairly stacked against you and any collision that occurs after the timer is below or near 30 seconds remaining is effectively an instant death.

The other big problem is that enemy ships can, and often do, materialise either directly underneath you or immediately in-front of you, resulting in frequent unavoidable collisions.

This pushes the Kryzer Prologue experience past frustration and into twitching catatonia.

As the name suggests, Kryzer Prologue is the precursor to another title - one which, according to the game’s App Store page, will offer 3D gameplay based on Kryzer Prologue’s basic mechanic.

As such, Kryzer Prologue is a test bed for user feedback so that developer, FDG Entertainment, can steer the course of Kryzer 3D’s development. Nobody should have to pay for what is essentially an open Beta and, prologue or not, it’s no excuse for slipshod design.

An update or two could rectify Kryzer Prologue's glaringly obvious and simple to address issues and would go a long way towards making the game more enjoyable.

The game’s concept is so one dimensional, however, that even post update it’s hard to imagine Kryzer Prologue holding anyone’s attention for long.