Retro shooter fans won’t want to miss Spheroids [App Store], a recent iPhone release by Fabio Policarpo.
Spheroids takes the classic, black-and-white game of Asteroids and wraps it around a wireframe sphere. Your familiar-looking ship remains centered on the screen while rotation of the sphere is controlled by tilting the iPhone in any direction. A one-finger tap to the screen fires while a two-finger tap sets off a bomb. Large asteroids drift lazily about the sphere and break into smaller pieces when fired upon. On higher levels, homing mines are added to the mix. Various power-ups, dropped from large asteroids, can be picked up to enhance your ship: a weapon power-up to increase your rate of fire, a bomb power-up, and a shield power-up.
The game looks and plays much as I imagine Super Stardust HD would, had it been released for the Vectrex.
Spheroids convincingly conveys a sense of the vector displays of old thanks to its clean anti-aliasing and the subtle glow present on the brighter vectors. I find this title quite enjoyable and my only gripe is its lack of an accelerometer calibration feature (the neutral point is exactly parallel to the ground)–hopefully the developer will do the right thing here in a future release. I feel that most gamers who enjoy a nice retro remake will find Spheroids to their liking.
See our gameplay video for a closer look.
[ Full HD version | Low Bandwidth version ]
App Store Link: Spheroids, $1.99
