Game Reviews

Razor: Salvation

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Razor: Salvation

Saving humanity is a noble pursuit, and one that many of us have taken up with over the course of our gaming careers. We've battled back countless alien invasions, thwarted innumerable evil plots, and averted more catastrophes than we've had hot dinners.

In Razor: Salvation, however, you're already too late. The world's a smoking slagheap populated by terrifying aliens and infected zombies. This isn't so much a last stand as it is a hit and run to pick up survivors before you hot foot it out of Dodge.

Alien insurrection

You play the commander of the dropship Salvation, and you're tasked with collecting up the remnants of human society and slaughtering any alien resistance you might encounter. Your ship lands on the field of battle, and you defend that position until you're about to explode.

You're rooted to the spot, so while you can twist around to get a better shot on the oncoming waves of alien scum you can't dive for cover or shift around to get a better shooting angle on the murderous brutes.

In one way, the stationary aspect of the game solves the problem of screen space in smartphone FPS titles, but seeing the three levels from exactly the same perspective over and over does get rather repetitive, and there's no room for strategy either.

Trapped in your immovable rescue ship, you'll spin around and blast away with one of eight weapons, two of which - the machine gun and the auto-cannon - have unlimited ammo supplies, while the rest need to be topped up with cash earned in-game.

Kill box

The shooting is reasonably robust, but the damage indicator - which makes your screen flash red in the direction of recent attacks - isn't the most helpful device, sometimes tricking you into spinning through 359 degrees to find your target.

Razor: Salvation isn't a particularly bad game, but nor does it add anything new or interesting to the shooter genre. The enemies you kill look like generic sci-fi grunts, and the weapons you kill them with are just as dull.

If mindless alien slaughter is your goal, then that's fair enough, But there's no real depth to Razor: Salvation, and if you have any gaming aspirations beyond simply shooting stuff then you'll soon end up wishing you part of a different apocalypse.

Razor: Salvation

While it tries to tackle some of the problems inherent in the smartphone FPS, Razor: Salvation ends up feeling dull because of it
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Harry Slater
Harry Slater
Harry used to be really good at Snake on the Nokia 5110. Apparently though, digital snake wrangling isn't a proper job, so now he writes words about games instead.