Space Tripper - 3.99 (True Axis/PomPom)

The Tilt To Live and Shmup genres have been mashed together a few times, and have had extremely nice results. FlipShip and Blue Attack come to mind right off the bat. Though it’s no surprise really, as the whole Tilt To Live genre is basically bullet hell without any bullets, dodging and weaving through enemies like you would a bullet onslaught in a Cave title. True Axis (Jet Car Stunts) is the most recent publisher to see the potential with this genre, as they’ve released PomPom’s title, Space Tripper, their highly anticipated iOS port of the PSN and PC game, Astro Tripper.

In Space Tripper, you’ll shoot and dodge your way through 14 levels, split up across 4 different worlds, of wave-enemy battles, with quite a few boss fights, and even a task or two to mix things up, all building up to a final boss battle that could very well cause your heart to explode from adrenaline. One of the first things you might notice about Space Tripper, if you’ve never played it before, is that it is set up more like a shooter than a Tilt To Live type game, making it more reminiscent of Blue Attack than FlipShip or any other TTL genre’d title. However, if you go into the game thinking it’s going to play like your typical shooter, you’ll be in for quite a surprise, and maybe even disappointment.

Space Tripper is controlled by tilting your iDevice, which is where the Tilt To Live comparisons come into play. There are no touch, or relative touch for that matter, controls, which might throw some people off, and in some cases, might result in a few lost sales. But if you go into the game thinking of it more like a TTL type game with more shmup elements than any other TTL title, chances are, you’ll end up pleasantly surprised. There’s also controls for flipping your ship left and right, which is done by tapping on the right side of the screen, and changing your shot from straight on to a much wider shot, by tapping on the left side. The tilt controls are extremely tight, and work very well within the game. There’s tilt sensitivity options if you’d like to try and make it tighter, and an option to set up calibration, which, for some reason, is often forgotten in tilting games, which the only reason I’m bringing it up. The graphics in Space Tripper are ported amazingly well. Even though there aren’t as many particle effects as you’ll find in the PSN version, it definitely doesn’t look dull. A lot of the environments are almost reminiscent of R-Type, as are a lot of the enemies, though everything is done with 3D models, and very modern, it just has that old-school feeling about it all.

The level design is something that really should be brought up as well. The levels are not very big, but do scroll left and right as you move along, and a lot of the designs would be perfect for an FPS multiplayer area battle, with different levels, and great layouts. In a lot of the levels, you’ll end up spending your time on one side of the level, trying to take out an enemy that’s the cause for a ton of spawning enemies, while on the other end, the same enemies are forming an army while waiting for you to finish off the opposite side. This is where the 3D modeling for the levels can be used to your advantage, as you can fly over to the side holding the army, and come up over the edge of a ramp, swing from the bottom to the top portion of the screen, and then back off onto the ramp again, causing all of the enemies projectiles to either fly over you, or hit the bottom portion of the ramp, and then go back in for another strike.

You will need to be careful with how you handle all of the enemies though, as you won’t always have enough time to play cat and mouse with them, because all of the levels have a time limit. This adds to the already fairly high difficulty, and to the adrenaline you’ll pump out while playing Space Tripper. You’re given 3 lives in the beginning, and if you waste those, you’ll have an option to reset your score for one life. Don’t be fooled, even veteran Tilt To Live and Shmup players will have a fairly hard time with the game on Normal difficulty. The game is incredibly fun however, which will give you that ‘one more time’ thought over and over again, until you’ve wasted an hour of your life hammering away at a couple levels. The game is saved once you beat a world though, so you can come back and start a world with the lives that you had when starting that world, even after a game over, and once you finally do beat the game, you can try out the Hard and Very Hard difficulty settings, as well as the Score Attack and Challenge Modes that all provide an insane amount of replay value. On top of that, there’s OpenFeint and GameCenter integration, containing 21 different leader boards, one for each level in Score Attack Mode, one for each difficulty of the Campaign, and one for each of the 4 endless Challenge Levels. Not to mention the 8, incredibly hard to achieve, achievements.

Gamers have been waiting for this iOS port of Astro Tripper for quite some time, and even if you’ve got Astro Tripper, the gameplay in Space Tripper is different enough with the tilt controls that it’s basically a new gameplay experience. You’ll need to change your strategy, as tactics that are memorized, and fairly easy to pull off with a controller, are not to easy to pull off on a device utilizing tilt controls. $3.99 for this Universal game is a great deal, and one that any arcade, old-school, shmup, Tilt To Live, or adrenaline fanatic should jump on immediately. PomPom has definitely shown that they are the equivalent of Cave Inc. within the Tilt To Live genre.

Space Tripper gets a perfect score of 5 out of 5.

Posted in: $3.99, 5 Stars, Action, Arcade, Recommended, Shmup, Shooter, Syntheticvoid, Tilting, Universal