Shoot-em-ups really seem to be growing in popularity as more and more are added to the AppStore. One of the main reasons is that players can pull off, what use to be, impossible-with-a-joystick moves with easy-as-pie finger movements. This coupled with being able to play some of our favorite shmups and bullet hell games on-the-go with a mobile device is propelling the shoot-em-up genre to new heights, and grabbing new fans with almost each and every new title. One of the newest additions to the genre is Wonton 51, by Quarter Circle Punch. This endless bullet dodging tap-to-fire arcade based shoot-em-up is one of the more intense titles to grace the iDevice. You’ll control Jonny in his Mech suit, as he tries to chase down the bad guys who took his girlfriend while they were in the middle of eating his “dope ramen”.
Now, one of the hardest things to get use to while playing Wonton 51 is the controls. You’ll use one finger to slide Jonny’s Mech left and right at the bottom of the screen, and use another finger to tap where you want Jonny to shoot wherever the enemies are on the screen. It can get pretty uncomfortable like this, especially after the first boss. But thankfully, the oh-so-wise Touch Arcade shmup mentor, Vally, told everyone to try holding their devices sideways, sliding Jonny up and down instead of left and right, and tapping on enemies when they hit the side of the screen, instead of the top. This frees up quite a bit of the screen, so that you can actually see what’s going on, and in turn, actually enjoy the game. Once you can get the hang of sliding one finger up and down to move Jonny, and keep another finger on the opposite end of the screen, controlling where Jonny shoots, you don’t need to move your fingers to the center of the screen to hit enemies, and you can focus a lot more on the action. The game is also supported by relative touch controls, but with Jonny only sliding around at the bottom (or side) of the screen, and not moving all around the screen, the relative controls can cause a lot of accidental deaths from picking up your finger when it’s at the edge of the screen to move it back to a spot where you can drag it further, but the option is there for those of you who might want to use it.
As for the graphics, animations, and sounds, they all come together to give gamers a pretty retro experience. The animations however, are great. Explosions are awesome, the impact of projectiles looks cool, and it adds a-whole-nother level on to the graphics, giving it a very modern feel. The sounds match the retro look with a chip tune soundtrack and great effects.
There are power-ups, and extra lives thrown into the mix, and Quarter Circle Punch has combined the two. Picking up a bowl of food will increase your shot power, as well as give you an extra hit point, but you’re only able to increase these 2 times. The first increase will give you a 3 shot gun, while the next increase will give you a rocket launcher. At full power, you will have a rocket launcher and 3 hit points.
As you speed along the street below, there are buildings as well as enemy’s shots to avoid. But what would a bullet filled shooter be without a nice scoring system? Wonton 51 is no different. Each enemy gives you a certain amount of points, 50 for the weakest, 100 for the second weakest, 150 for each boss gun you take out, and so on. You will also be able to gather up points by grazing the buildings that are in the middle or sides of the road. This does not include the buildings on the very edges of the screen, just the ones that you can crash into. Grazing these buildings will give you points, but these points also depend on how “hard” you graze these buildings. Barely scraping against the building will give you less points than mashing Jonny’s Mech up against the building as hard as you can without actually crashing into it. For instance, lightly grazing the wall could give you between 30 and 60 points, depending on how much of the building you lightly graze, while getting as close as you can to the building from one end to the other could result in 70 to 80 or more points. This might not sound like a lot when the leader board is full of scores that are over 20, 30 thousand points, but once you get into it, every little bit helps.
Speaking of the leader board, Wonton 51 is both GameCenter and OpenFeint enabled, with a top score leader board and 12 achievements, adding quite a bit of replay value to the game. Something that would be nice to see in future updates would be more characters and little story lines to unlock. It wouldn’t be too hard, as the Jonny story line has 4 or 5 screens with a sentence each, starting off with Jonny and Cookie eating, then her getting taken away, asking for help, Jonny saying he’s coming to get her, start the game. More little stories could go along with unlockable characters, which would make the game more interesting, and add more replayabilty, depending on how those characters were unlocked. If Quarter Circle Punch didn’t want to make up more stories, or add any characters, maybe making it so that different colored Mech suits for Jonny could be unlocked. It would also be very cool to see a boss mode where all you did was go up against the big bosses. I doubt we’ll see these things in the future, but there’s a lot that Quarter Circle Punch can do with Wonton 51 if they wanted to, which will give a lot of hope to those of you who pick this one up. Supporting these developers could lead to an even better game that completely stands out in the arcade shoot-em-up genre. For $0.99, it’s not hard to want to support the developers either, as you’ll get hours upon hours of challenging gameplay.
Speaking of the leader board, Wonton 51 is both GameCenter and OpenFeint enabled, with a top score leader board and 12 achievements, adding quite a bit of replay value to the game. Something that would be nice to see in future updates would be more characters and little story lines to unlock. It wouldn’t be too hard, as the Jonny story line has 4 or 5 screens with a sentence each, starting off with Jonny and Cookie eating, then her getting taken away, asking for help, Jonny saying he’s coming to get her, start the game. More little stories could go along with unlockable characters, which would make the game more interesting, and add more replayabilty, depending on how those characters were unlocked. If Quarter Circle Punch didn’t want to make up more stories, or add any characters, maybe making it so that different colored Mech suits for Jonny could be unlocked. It would also be very cool to see a boss mode where all you did was go up against the big bosses. I doubt we’ll see these things in the future, but there’s a lot that Quarter Circle Punch can do with Wonton 51 if they wanted to, which will give a lot of hope to those of you who pick this one up. Supporting these developers could lead to an even better game that completely stands out in the arcade shoot-em-up genre. For $0.99, it’s not hard to want to support the developers either, as you’ll get hours upon hours of challenging gameplay.
Wonton 51 gets a score of 8 out of 10.
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