With the recent release of Dodonpachi Resurrection [$8.99/Lite], developer Cave has set the gold standard for bullet hell shooters on iOS devices. One problem with that game, however, is that it just pushes too many pixels to be able to run well on older devices, leaving gamers with anything below a 3rd generation device out of the loop. For those people, developer Firi Games, who previously brought Flare Elite [99¢] to the App Store, have something in store for you. Their upcoming top-down shooter Phoenix features quite a bit of onscreen action of its own, and runs smoothly even on the original iPhone.
Phoenix looks to do a couple things differently than your typical shmup as well. Instead of progressing through a series of predesigned levels, the entire game is one randomly generated level that scales the difficulty based on how well you are doing in the game. Tijmen Roberti of Firi explains how the gameplay will work:
The game centers around a single, procedurally generated infinite challenge. The goal is to destroy as many enemies as possible, going as far as possible, in an attempt to achieve the highest score. There is no set difficulty, instead Phoenix uses an AI director that adapts the difficulty on demand, depending on the player performance. In this way, Phoenix generates an exciting challenge for players of all skills. The procedural content generator can create millions of enemy variations, and combined with the adaptive AI director, no single play through will be the same.
Firi has developed their own game engine called the Flare engine which allows Phoenix to run well on all devices despite the intense action onscreen. To prove this, they created a video of the game running on an original iPhone exclusively to show readers in the upcoming game thread in our forums:
Phoenix will feature regional and worldwide online leaderboards to compete for high scores. One point brought up in our forums is that the ship you use seems unusually large for a top-down shooter. Firi explains that while the ship model itself is big, the actual hitbox is just the blue circle of the cockpit, and that will be the only part of the ship where you will have to avoid getting hit. True that Firi doesn’t quite have the pedigree of Cave when it comes to developing shooters, but Phoenix is looking pretty good based on the video and should offer another alternative for bullet hell gameplay. If you’ve been feeling left out of the bullet hell fun due to having an older device, you can look forward to blasting and dodging bullets when Phoenix hits the App Store sometime this month.
