Today we got hands-on with Chillingo’s side-scrolling shooter ‘Inkvaders’. You’ll have to read our review when the game is out to get our full opinion of the game. But what I can say is that if you like the metal slug series, or other side-scrolling shooter games of that nature then Inkvaders will be right up your street.
You play as a marine who, armed with a multitude of weapons, must take on hordes of invading aliens. What makes this game different from so many other alien shooters out there is in it’s presentation. It’s all presented as if it’s a doodle created by a bored teenager during a dull class at school. Sure, there are other games such as Doodle jump which uses this look and feel. But Inkvaders takes it further by even implementing the creators finger, which creates the menu screen and places your marine character in the level, and even takes him away and replaces him with a new torn out drawing should you die. It’s done to great effect, and adds a freshness to an otherwise overdone genre.
Gameplay-wise – as you can see in the video of us playing below – the game employs a simple left/right control scheme with tap icons to shoot and activate your rocket pack. You can tap items on screen to upgrade your character, as well as boost your self up to collect stars. Points can be swapped for upgrades at vending machines in the level, such as new weapons and health packs.
To change weapons, you tap the weapon icon. You start out with a hand gun, and then get a laser on the moon. The laser lasts longer, but is not as powerful as the hand gun, which has limited ammo… so you’ll need to look out for ammunition boxes around the level. To kill an alien you’ll need to shoot them once or twice, depending on the power of your weapon, and they explode in a gory but strangely pleasing mess. At certain points in a level you can pick up a rampage powerup, which drastically increases the amount of aliens on screen, this can be both rewarding and devastating at the same time, on the one hand you can amass more points, but at the expense of your health.
We haven’t played through the whole game yet, we’ll leave that for the review, but what we have played is fun, but in our brief playtest, a little shallow… as I’ve mentioned before what jumps out most when playing is the great style of the game, of which it oozes!
The game has been submitted to Apple, so expect it out in the next week or so. In the meantime check out our footage below.
