Hands on with Guerrilla Bob on iPhone

John Gore is about to be saddled with an inconvenient truth when Guerrilla Bob storms iPhone and iPod touch guns blazing.

This twin-stick shooter is everything that Minigore and its contemporaries aspire to be, backing up the hype with actual gameplay. While there's plenty of room to load up additional features and improvements, our hands-on with Guerrilla Bob proves it to be a straight shooter.

Left stick moves and right stick shoots – that's the story behind Guerrilla Bob and its bullet-led plot. Set in an exaggerated Mexican desert, you tread the dusty wasteland as tough man Bob in a crusade to personally kill every last bad gun. Bob is apparently so macho that he halted a military plan to drop a nuclear bomb on his enemies so he could beat them one-by-one.

It's smacks of Chuck Norris spin, yet we're willing to put up with it if the action delivers. There are some issues that need to be addressed, but on the whole it appears that Guerrilla Bob walks the walk.

Variety promises to put the game ahead of its rivals with a different enemies, boss battles, weapons, and environments. Of eight levels, we played the first three and these had Bob trundling through two villages ripping into enemies with a machine gun, rocket launcher, and flamethrower. These are upgraded using power-ups hidden behind boulders and shanties.

Switching among weapons is done by tapping icons lining the bottom of the screen. It's worth cycling through weapons as part of a tactical effort to deal with the different enemies. Flamethrower-equipped foes are best dealt with using the rocket launcher at a distance, while suicide barrel huggers can be dispatched with the machine gun.

Rockets proved effective at obliterating tents spawning enemies, as well as whittling away the health of a beefy boss at the end of one level. During the latter, minor enemies swarmed about the enclosed arena that we had to evade while taking shots at the brawny leader. Of course, he fought back with bursts of machine gun fire.

What we really like about Guerrilla Bob is its willingness to step out of the genre's comfort zone. The end of the first level, for instance, has you fleeing from a front loading scoop truck. Avoiding damage is a matter of racing into the background while weaving through a maze of rocks. It throws something different in the mix that keeps the action from growing stale.

The third level we played also took an alternate approach, putting Bob on a raft floating down a river while enemies took aim from the banks. Since the space within which you can move is limited, combat becomes a matter of eliminating enemies as quickly as possible to avoid facing a torrent of enemy fire.

Kinks need to be worked out of the combat system, however. Enemies regularly caught themselves on objects in the levels, running madly in place for an easy target. New artwork for the health gauge – it runs vertical on the left side of the screen – is such desired because it's rather unattractive.

We're also not fond of the power-ups system. It's great that there are permanent upgrades available, yet it would be better to be given points or cash for enemies kills that could be used to unlock upgrades at will. That would guarantee access to upgrades instead of making them a condition of finding hidden ones in each level.

There's a good chance these things will be addressed for the final release, as Angry Mob Games is in the process of polishing Guerrilla Bob for submission in late December. An App Store debut is anticipated in January.