Game Reviews

Metal Angel

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Metal Angel
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From its dark sci-fi visage, Metal Angel suggested something tremendously exciting to fans of Japanese homebrew games. I don't mind admitting I'm one of 'em, and the raw, caustic appearance and tough androgynous title suggested someone had made the exciting leap from iPhone to doujin-soft in a single leap.

Doujin-soft is the general term for Japanese home made and freeware games, but it carries retro connotations these days, and a developer who dips into this particular barrel of techno-apples does so at significant peril. Borrowing from doujin-soft stylings really won't do - a game's either doujin-soft or it's not, and any dilution only serves to create a malfunctioning and unwelcome mutant.

Granted there are only two screenshots of Metal Angel on the App Store, but they've been carefully chosen so they scream 'bullet hell!' at J-pop gamers. Call them what you want – bullet hell, bullet curtain, curtain fire, manic shooters – these far eastern homebrews are immensely popular because they've kept the 2D shoot-'em-up genre alive since the arcades died in the mid-nineties. It's a proud and authoritative underground culture that plays these games, and it doesn't suffer adulteration easily.

Metal Angel has adopted many attributes from the doujin-soft bullet curtain shooter's style, but either for technical reasons or a terminal misunderstanding of the genre, it tragically fails to provide the intense gameplay this type of game demands.

The game begins, rather obscurely, with a gaudy high score table in a mostly unreadable font, followed by a ship selection screen. Choosing a ship is seemingly difficult (or impossible - it's hard to say), as the game always chooses the same one to begin the shmup quest. It's unlikely to matter too much, but the lack of instructions leave you wondering if you've missed out on something or simply misunderstood what choice you were being presented with.

Controlling a vertical scrolling, 2D shoot'em-up on the iPhone was always going to be a difficulty due to the lack of physical buttons, but even by accelerometer standards Metal Angel adopts a rather unusual method. Whether it's good or bad is difficult to say, though it undeniably feels dislocated from standard scrolling shmup mechanics. The ship is controlled with your finger - sliding it about the screen under your fingertip. Lifting your finger and touching the screen elsewhere jumps the ship to that point, however, removing the vital necessity to accurately pilot your vessel between enemy fire patterns. On top of this, your hand gets seriously in the way of the action, and enemies approaching from the rear have an almost free reign.

To get around the firing button problem, your ship simply shoots constantly. This actually works quite well, as there aren't many bullet hell games where you take your finger off the fire button for more than a microsecond anyway. A double-tap sends a bomb up the screen, and defeated enemy ships drop a collectable cargo of gems to build up your fire power.

The controls could be forgiven if Metal Angel lived up to the doujin-soft bullet hell heritage it adopted in style. Unfortunately, the game is so slow it becomes a chore simply waiting for the next enemy to trundle onto the screen to get blown up. The scrolling speed of a good bullet hell game might be fairly steady but the action should be non-stop, yet Metal Angel features very few enemies on the screen at any one time, and these never get up much pace.

Special weapons, built up by collecting the gems dropped by the lethargic enemies, seem to run out before you even get much of a chance to use them, while bombs are as sluggish as the aliens you fire them at, and regularly fail to meet their targets.

There have been shoot-'em-ups that have made a feature and a working gameplay mechanic from a slower pace (not least of them being the immortal coin-op R-Type), but Metal Angel regrettably doesn't have the depth of play to fall in line with such classics. There's every chance that the iPhone hardware doesn't provide the CPU oomph to properly recreate an archetypal manic shooter, and time might well prove Metal Angel to be the best the platform can offer in this genre.

There's just as good a chance that Apple's handheld will prove to be a gift for doujin-soft fans, which leaves us struggling to provide any kind of recommendation for such slow and featureless gameplay as we see in Metal Angel.

Metal Angel

Far too slow and unremarkable to slot into the J-pop shoot-'em-up culture it's inadvisably styled after
Score
Spanner Spencer
Spanner Spencer
Yes. Spanner's his real name, and he's already heard that joke you just thought of. Although Spanner's not very good, he's quite fast, and that seems to be enough to keep him in a regular supply of free games and away from the depressing world of real work.