The Quadsphere’s latest game, Icarus-X: Tides of Fire ($2.99) comes out firing with a great idea: combine a bullet-hell shoot ’em up with the loot systems seen in modern RPGs. You play levels, and can get new weapons and shields to do more damage and deal with enemy threats more effectively. You can also level up, applying points to a skill tree. It’s an idea that really works for the game, and is a cool fusion of two notable genres into one package. The problem is that the game tries to stretch a limited amount of content into a full game, and it grows tiring quite quickly.

There’s no story to Icarus-X: Tides of Fire, just that you’re a ship with powerful weaponry, fighting off ships with their own deadly weapons. Your ship has a primary weapon, a secondary weapon that has a couple of homing varieties, and a special ability that you activate by double-tapping. This can have up to 3 effects, activated over time, and can erase bullets, make you stronger, and regenerate your shield. The campaign mode does give you health, with a shield that also recharges over time. The shield is actually pretty clever, because it grows bigger the more power it has, so it has a bigger risk of being hit. AS it grows smaller, you grow closer to taking health damage, but you have a harder-to-hit shield. Your hitbox is visible, which does help.

Visually, the game is incredibly busy, and you kind of have to figure out how to focus on the top layer where all the action is. Once you kind of focus on that, the game definitely becomes manageable. The last of the 5 core levels is just an ocean background, and is probably the easiest to play on. The controls are 1:1 at the moment, albeit with offset movement, so this is actually a bit easier to control on a phone, though you can position your finger in such a way to avoid missing anything on the iPad. You want your ship visible so you can navigate the bullet patterns without damaging your hitbox. Still, the game is easy enough to control with the touch controls, and all the firing is auto-fire anyway, so you don’t have anything to worry about. Do be careful playing on a newer iPad, if your thumb touches the side of the screen where the bezel is thin, you may accidentally be warping around the screen.

The loot system is a ton of fun to play with. It’s just like Borderlands, or any other loot-driven RPG: you get items occasionally for killing enemies in the Campaign mode, and they have any number of stat variations, and can be sold to buy other items. The mechanics of the whole thing are perfect for a shoot ’em up, with stats like damage per second, spread shots getting different bullet counts and radiuses of fire, all coming into play. It’s kind of cool to have this system in a game where you’re dealing with bullet hell, firing all over the place. You actually get to see the effects of the different weapons that you’re equipping. Shields have perhaps more subtle effects, but they’re still there.

The campaign structure does take after the grinding seen in RPGs, where you can go back to earlier levels to try and collect more loot. It’s fun to be playing with a purpose beyond just trying to make it to the next level. There’s a material reward for progressing, with more experience points to be had, new loot to collect, and new skills to unlock. Campaign mode also caters to how you want to play, with casual mode for keeping all loot and experience, normal forcing you to complete a level in one piece to keep the filthy lucre, and hardcore ending your game as soon as you die.

The key issue with Icarus-X: Tides of Fire is that there’s just a limited amount of content. There’s basically just the five levels, that you can then replay in 4 tiers of difficulty, across 3 campaign modes, and the Arcade mode with 4 difficulties. It’s smart for a one-person developer with a limited amount of resources, I suppose, but it means that progress is about how much reptition you’re willing to deal with. I probably would avoid the normal mode if possible, because it hits a weak point between the two campaign modes. Casual lets you progress through failure, instead of replaying older levels to hopefully get better equipment and more skills. Hardcore at least challenges you to stay alive, to be careful, and to test your skills. As well, Arcade mode winds up being an extreme challenge, but at least something that stands out on its own. Also, apropos of nothing, but the game consistently hangs at the end of each level; I imagine this might be for saving replays, but it’s quite annoying, and it happens on the PC version as well as the mobile version, for whatever reason.

But no matter what, seeing the same backgrounds, the same enemy patterns, with only perhaps minor changes, one after another with consistency, is kind of draining. There’s a lot of great ideas here, and a solid game at its core, but the execution could have been a lot better.