Twin Legend Review

Cross Galaga with a vague story about two kids who build a spaceship, then have their galaxy invaded by strange creatures and you've got Twin Legend.

It's a vertical-scrolling shooter of the retro kind. The sort of game where all you have to worry about is ducking and diving left, right, up and down in order to avoid the enemies constantly streaming in their waves from the top of the screen.

Of course, you can also shoot the blighters and that's done with an ever changing arsenal of guns. As you progress further, different types of power-ups and upgrades appear. Collect them and your ship is graced with automatic guns, speed boosts, triple firing cannons and so on.

You could say it's quite difficult to make an entirely terrible shooter of this type. And Twin Legend is definitely very playable. It just doesn't stand out for any particular reason.

One problem it has is that the ship you pilot is quite sluggish. The sluggishness improves after picking up a few speed power-ups, but it's still not the nippy nitro-packing spaceship you'd ideally want to be at the helm of with alien creatures invading your planet.

Without the necessary speed to weave through enemies, you need to able to think ahead a fair bit. It's very hard just to meet each wave completely blind and get through on quick reactions alone – because your reactions might be speedy but your ship isn't.

So enemy attack patterns need to be learnt. Which, when they start coming at you from both sides of the screen, as well as below and above, turns into a pretty tricky task. At the start they're mostly dumb and harmless, but once they start packing weapons you've got bullets flying about the screen together with enemies, and Twin Legend it turns into a much tougher ride.

The boss battles, meanwhile, are rock solid and probably the most impressive bits of Twin Legend, especially in terms of visuals and explosions – giving you everything from giant dual-gunned spaceships to huge rippling space creatures, each with their own weaponry and forms of attack.

Oh, each level starts you off with three lives and once those are gone you can choose to continue from the start of the stage. Which is pretty typical for the type of game it is and, because levels aren't too long, isn't a big hardship.

What is more troublesome is that you can't save a game and then return to it. Once you quit you're stuck replaying from wave one again. Twin Legend may only hold eight waves in total, which doesn't sound like many, but some of them will take plenty of replays, especially if you're going for a high score or trying not to miss a single target.

Survive to the end and there are harder modes to unlock, which up the difficulty for anyone who misspent their youth in arcades honing their reactions to imitate those of a venus fly trap stuck on fast-forward.

Of course, getting those elusive high scores and unlocking various achievements in the game are what it's all about, and you get to share your superiority by uploading these achievements to an online leadboard. So while you can choose to avoid much of a level's conflict and still complete it, the truly hardcore will want to go for the big points.

Point-scoring aside, though, there's not too much more to Twin Legend. Its visuals are adequate but not particularly jaw-dropping, which is a comment you can level at the game's content. You'll have seen it a thousand times before.

It's definitely playable, but there are better retro shooters out there for mobile. Alpha Wing 2 and Time Rider 2, for instance. But if you've ticked those off already then Twin Legend is worth checking out. Just don't expect to be blown out of the galaxy by innovation.