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‘Current’ Review – The Hexog Are Coming

TouchArcade Rating:

The Hexog are coming, and it’s up to you, as the ARC pilot, to stop them. You’ll need to bring your best Bust-A-Move skills to the table if the Hexog threat is to be eliminated, and the universe of Current [$0.99] is to be saved.

While some action match games let you play calmly, Current demands nothing less than your best reflexes. The Hexog breed, you see. Let them get a foothold, and they’ll spread swiftly. The green ones grow exponentially, each one spawning into every surrounding hex. The red ones fill straight lines. The blue ones… well, let’s not talk about the blue ones.

To fight them, you need take your ship to their systems and yank them out of the sky. Firing them back at a matching Hexogs will destroy both, and take out others around them. You have a limited number of shots per level, so make them count. Each of Current’s 56 levels is a struggle as you fight to swiftly defeat the multiplying hordes before you run out of ammunition.

In the first sets of levels, your only weapon is your shot. But eventually, you discover the game’s namesake “current," a force you can use to arm yourself against the Hexog. You unlock weapons that use their multiplying powers against them, blowing them to bits when they breed and forcing them to infect each other. This is war, and it isn’t always pretty. Well, actually, it is quite pretty, with all those wireframe Hexog exploding all over the grid.

The whole thing happens to the beat of an original techno soundtrack – make sure to wander into the music menu and play with the different songs. They take Current from a pretty interesting Puzzle Bobble clone to something really cool. The beat of the music rules everything – the Hexog breed to the beat and you slaughter them to it as well. It gets downright hypnotic at times, when you get in the zone and polish them off with style.

Other times it’s a little more frustrating, but a recent update addressed that problem. Now not only can you switch between three difficulty levels, you can also toggle the game to a turn-based mode at any time. The Hexog will only breed once per each of your shots in this mode, avoiding the utter chaos of the original action. Things can still get completely out of control if you’re not careful, but it’s all a little more strategic and a little less reflexive.

If you can’t get enough of Current, you can replay on higher difficulty modes or try to get three stars on each level. The levels are procedurally generated, so it shouldn’t be the same experience twice. Game Center Leaderboards seem like an obvious addition, and hopefully they’ll show up in an update some day. It sounds like there are more levels, game modes and songs in the works, so there should be plenty of opportunities to destroy the Hexog yet to come. Good thing, too – I just love to watch them disappear.

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