Space Impact Kappa Base-Funny mobile Stuff II

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This is a big part of the game, actually, in that you earn money playing the missions, and then spend it on upgrades or new Skyblades. So, you might start off with your three weapons being gun pods, a beam cannon and an auto-turret, but later on might splash out on a shockwave, homing missiles and orbital lasers.

The visual payback for resorting to such armament, like the rest of the game, is great. Big, bold, colourful graphics give it a pleasingly distinct style, with proper meaty exposions and a varied range of enemies to prove it with.

The controls, meanwhile, have been kept simple, with an auto-fire option enabling you to focus on movement and triggering your special weapon.

Oh yes, that. Another innovative feature is the way you have to ‘graze’ bullets to build up a Combo Gauge. In fact, the idea is most familiar to us from console driving games, where you fill up boost meters by going past cars as close as possible without hitting them. So here, you have to let bullets graze your Skyblade to fill up the meter, before pressing ‘2′ to trigger the special weapon. Or, you can wait for it to fill up two or three times, to get a more powerful effect.

And there are a shedload of bullets to do this with. If we weren’t reviewing the game, we might have lost heart around our ninth go at cracking the second mission, such is its toughness. And this is on ‘Easy’ level.

Our problem isn’t with the difficulty level in itself, but in the sheer steepness of the learning curve, since there’s little sense of playing your way into the game before slamming cockpit first into the tough stuff. It’s like ?and this is pure speculation on our part ?Nokia rounded up a ninja team of shoot-’em-up experts to make a game, but then it made one that would challenge their focus group’s gameplay skills, rather than those of the more mainstream consumers who’ll make up a large part of the N-Gage audience.

It’s a shame, because everything else about Space Impact is excellent. The World Battle online mode is well thought-out, for example, getting you to play individual missions and then upload your score to the rankings table as soon as you die.