Arc War: Infinite Shooter

Written by: Kaminin

Arc War is an arcade game that is faithful to its name. You, the player, are the pilot of something akin to the Snowspeeder from Star Wars who continually flies around the earth on the intercontinental arc. Your mission: save the earth from the alien invasion. This game is designed in an arcade fashion with a very retro touch, similar in style to space invaders. The graphics are simplistic, yet clear and effective.  The music is apt, though perhaps repetitive when one considers that this game is designed to go on eternally. Indeed, the aliens who invade can be found in 23 different types of ships, including 6 bosses, and  they seem to be made from one unending mineral store. My question: is this game a mobile Resogun in the making?

 So, if a game is designed to last forever there should be a proportional increase in difficulty. The idea of this game is to achieve the best score; a number which represents your ability to kill aliens while dodging their attacks. This game has a very smooth transition in the difficulty, which is something many games struggle to achieve, allowing a very accurate scoring system. I do however question what the limit will be: At what point will the game stop getting harder? At what point will the game become so repetitive that it is no longer entertaining?

Unfortunately I found that the greatest limiting factor in playing this game was the control system. The game uses a finger swipe default, where the player swipes in the direction that they want to move. Personally I believe the acceleration on this need to be adjusted so it is smoother. At the moment, there is a slow initial motion that suddenly transitions into a burst. At the fast pace of the game, it is again frustrating seeing an attack coming and fly right into it. Furthermore, enemies often make surprise attacks from under your thumb leaving you swapping fingers in frustration only to be ambushed yet again. While this may be improved with the introduction of the d-pad input for the moment I don’t believe this is fully functional yet.

So ultimately, this game is targeted at casual gamers who are looking for something quick during a break. The arcade style is complemented by the online scoreboard, which allows you to measure yourself against your friends. Personally I don’t find myself going out of my way to play this game by myself.  With no goal in sight, a narrow range of enemies and repetitive bosses, it really isn’t hard to get a very high score. While there are many successful endless games on the mobile market, such as iCopter, version 1.0 at least lacks the factor that made iCopter simply fun. However, mobile games are in the unique position of being able to absorb the players feedback and easily make vast improvements with each update. So no, currently this is no Resogun. Endless entertainment is very different from an endless game and without any real goal to aim towards; I don’t believe this game offers endless entertainment, but for 69p, it certainly gives you its moneys worth of entertainment and it has the potential to become a very good game.