Review: Tilt to Live
Available on Apple’s iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch. Developed by One Man Left. Reviewed by LisVender
Dual-stick shooters don’t work so well on the iPhone. Sliding my thumbs around a touchscreen with no physical feedback makes for very imprecise control, which is no good for games that often require surgical precision. Nevertheless, there are many, MANY dual-stick shooters on the iPhone, each one hoping to be the next Geometry Wars. Hell, Geometry Wars itself is available on the iPhone, and it sucks too!
So the iPhone game Tilt to Live, an ostensible Geometry Wars clone, confused me, because of its many positive reviews. Folks were calling it unique, a blast, and perfectly suited to its platform. I scratched my head and wondered how that could be. I decided to take the chance, wire Apple my two bucks, and jump from the airplane. And holy shit, this game is good!
In Tilt to Live, you play a little white arrow in a rectangular arena that slowly fills up with magically-appearing red dots. One touch from a red dot, and you’re history. You move around by tilting the iDevice. Just imagine that your arrow is a little ball bearing that you roll around. It’s simple and intuitive. The tilt, however, is your only control. Touching the screen doesn’t do anything. All you can do is move about. No shooting!
So how do you fight back against the oncoming hordes of evil red dots? You grab pickups, which appear in random locations in the arena and float about innocuously. Colliding with a pickup instantly creates some sort of offensive that lays waste to red dots and clears a good chunk of the screen for you. There are always three pickups onscreen at any given time, and your survival depends on maneuvering through the crowds of dots skillfully to grab them.
Some of the weapons must be unlocked, but the three that are available from first play pack an effective punch on their own. There’s a purple pickup that launches a broad death wave from your arrow’s point, annihilating any dots in its path. There’s the fireworks pickup, which scatters five homing missiles across the screen, and then there’s the radioactive nuke pickup, which creates a large, lingering explosion that roasts red dots while keeping you momentarily safe. Each pickup is powerful and satisfying to use, and it’s especially fun to grab one after another in quick succession, so you can mow down red dots and build up a humongous score.
Tilt to Live has three modes of play: Classic, Code Red, and Gauntlet. Classic is the vanilla game which starts off easy, with only a couple of dots harassing you at a time, and then gets cooking after a couple of minutes. Code Red is Classic without the foreplay; it jumps from zero to intense in a second. It’s great for those times when you’re not in the mood for a gentle upswing in difficulty, and want to get right into the excitement. Gauntlet is a dodging game. You get no red dots or pickups, only a series of deadly obstacles scrolling across the arena. You have wend your way through rotating gears, walls that smash together, spinning blades, and other deadly traps for as long as you can. Thankfully the tilt controls are excellent, and when you die, you have no one to blame but yourself.
Tilt to Live is connected to a network called AGON Online, which not only means that you can upload your score to a leaderboard, but you can also earn achievements. These achievements, here called “Awards,” are pretty silly. One is earned by literally not lasting five seconds, and another is earned by building a kill combo of 42, because it’s the answer to life, the universe, and everything, you know. These awards are good for more than just bragging rights, though, because collecting enough of them will unlock the game’s most powerful weapons, such as the ice blast and the spike shield. Stupid though the achievements are, unlocking them is worthwhile.
Here’s proof that arena shooters can work on the iPhone after all. Tilt to Live, with its smooth controls, wild weaponry, and goofy sense of humor, is a winner. You won’t want to put your iDevice down, even after you’ve died fifty times and picked up the Masochist award.
Controller1.com rating: 3/3
Update: There’s been an update which adds a new game mode called Frostbite. Frozen dots scroll down the arena, and if you don’t touch them and shatter them before they reach the bottom, they’ll thaw and come after you. A powerful firewall pickup will only appear after you destroy a certain amount of frozen dots. Fun!
