DARIUSBURST -SP- review (iOS/Universal)

February 10, 2012

♫ “Nobody told me it feels so good
Nobody said you’d be so beautiful”

10 word description: Horizontally scrolling shoot-em-up from Taito’s classic Darius series.

10 word review: Utterly gorgeous, action packed, pretty much a perfect port. Recommended!

The cybernetic sea-creature enemies are traditional and always entertaining

You will like this if you enjoy: Side-scrolling shooters. The Darius series or any arcade style shoot-em-up.

The good news: Beautiful graphics, really good music and sounds, great gameplay (that doesn’t overwhelm with screens full of utter chaos or complex scoring systems), two different game modes, 4 ships (2 unlock within game), hardly any slowdown at all. Relative touch controls and a couple of on-screen buttons that can be moved wherever you like.

The massive, detailed 3D bosses fly in and out of your field of view before taking up their attack position

The bad news: Screen orientation is fixed in what I consider to be upside-down mode. To take the screenshots for this review I played the game upside-down (right-to-left) in order to be able to get screenshots without performing bizarre hand contortions. Hopefully an update will introduce automatic screen flipping or at least an option to flip the screen orientation. Saying that, I still managed to complete original mode on normal difficulty playing upside-down…

It's a pyrotechnic masterpiece. The almost total lack of slowdown, even in the busiest sequences, is very impressive

Arcadelife verdict: Absolutely stunning game on every level. Looks, sounds, gameplay, and it’s a lot of fun. This isn’t a bullet hell shooter, it’s very much an updated version of the kind of arcade games that emerged in the late eighties – Gradius, Darius, etc. and I think it’s more fun than the admittedly technically phenomenal games from companies like Cave.

It’s considerably more expensive than the majority of iOS games, but when you look at what you’re getting, any arcade or shoot-em-up fan will love this and have no regrets buying it.