Mirage Labs’ Hill Billy [App Store] has finally made it into the App Store. The game was originally rejected due to excessive gore. Well, the game was resubmitted (now with green blood), and has been accepted and released.
The game revolves around you defending your carrots from biomechanical creatures:
You are Hill Billy: the world’s largest carrot grower. You have a problem: a strange invasion of biomechanical creatures hungry of vegetables. You have a solution: your shotgun…
So get ready and try to rescue all the carrots by stopping those strange creatures; Explore and defend Hill Billy’s properties, find his homemade weapons and hidden odd items… Where those footprints will lead you?
Part of the appeal of this game is the fact that it looks like a high quality first person shooter. And in my brief time with the game, I can safely say this is the most impressive first person shooter currently available on the iPhone. Overall the game’s graphics are very nice with rather smooth gameplay and it also offers a reasonable set of controls to manipulate the action.
The game relies entirely on accelerometer controls for foward/back and left/right movement. Meanwhile, shooting is accomplished by tapping on the screen. Additional strafe (left/right) buttons are offered at the top of the screen. It’s hard to say at this early stage if these controls are superior to other options we’ve seen, but it is nice to be able to easily fire and change direction.
The gameplay, itself, is a bit unusual. The game appears to be split into five chapters. Each level appears to revolve around you finding a new weapon and trying to take out your enemies with said weapon. At 5 levels, however, there’s going to be a question of whether or not there is enough gameplay to warrant its purchase. We at TouchArcade have not finished the game yet.
Hill Billy does have a very nice atmosphere feel to it that adds to its creepiness. In just the second level, you’ll find yourself in close quarters, fighting against a number of the enemies.
This gameplay video offers a look at the game:
[ Full HD version | Low Bandwidth version ]
A lengthy discussion thread has already appeared with a couple of our forum users giving their first impressions: one, two.
App Store Link: Hill Billy, $5.99
