As the mobile market trends further and further away from classic, no frills, pay-up-front gaming in favor of freemium models, games like The Silver Bullet ($4.99) become an ever increasing rarity. I don’t really hate freemium, and there are still plenty of places to find that classic gaming experience. But it would still be nice to see more games like this one, from Korean developer KwangSam Kim and Byulbram studio, supported by the masses. Because man this one is a surprising treat, with awesome gameplay across a fairly lengthy campaign.

So what is The Silver Bullet? No, it’s not the awful 1985 werewolf movie with Gary Busey. Developed by the same people who brought us the Her Knights series on PC and Asura Cross (Free) which was published by Gamevil (In association with ChungKang College of Cultural Industry while I’m being thorough), The Silver Bullet puts you in the combat boots of a dual pistol wielder and total fox named Kali. Official alias ‘Goddess of Death" who gained her reputation in the South American revolution, Kali, in all her jacked muscle gun toting glory, works for the Vatican through an organization called Neverlight, and her day job involves killing demons and other dimensional monsters, plus any gang members or soldiers that get in her way.

This is a surprisingly lore and story rich game for a twin stick shooter. Not to say the story is particularly great, but it was very appealing in a 90’s Konami game kind of way. Super cheesy, oddly translated at times; all that jazz. There are many hints to a larger world, with some characters that are clearly meant to come back in future updates or sequels, like the katana wielding schoolgirl named Destiny who is an executioner from the eastern council, along with being a total jerk face. In the 32 levels of the game (31 really, 32 is an epilogue cutscene) you get loads of dialogue and world building. But you don’t really want to hear about the story. You want to hear about gameplay.

This twin stick shooter offers super versatile controls. You can go the classic twin stick route for aiming, but you can also use your finger to point in the direction you’d like to aim, which is super easy and useful when you need to rotate in circles, and you can also tap directly on an enemy or two to target them. Being a dual wielder, you can actually target two enemies at once. It can get very Christian-Bale-from-Equilibrium up in this game, what with his Gun Fu or whatever. You also have a dodge roll button, and a stealth button. Certain levels give you the option to stealth your way through, taking down certain enemies silently, even going so far as to show you how much noise you’re making via the diameter of the purple circle at your feet. But the vast majority of the time, it’s easier to just… well… Christian-Bale-from-Equilibrium your way through the level.

I’d say the stealth could also be used to sneak past certain groups of enemies, but I don’t know why you’d want to do that. Once I got to the late game, I had to replay levels to farm items and experience anyway, so you might as well kill everything that moves. Before I get into that, a bit more on controls. Everything else you can do is contextual. Kali has leg power to rival Chun-Li, as rolling into any enemy will make her drop kick them into the freaking stratosphere. One hit kills, every time. I swear. Except bosses, of course. You can melee any enemy by just walking into them, which is much more viable than you’d think, and auto climb onto desks or auto hug walls by walking into them. Oh, you can also hide in barrels to get by stupid auto-turrets.

As you level up, your stats will be raised somewhat, but the real way to raise your stats are through the Demon Souls you pick up, which can be used to upgrade your damage, accuracy, movement speed, and health. You’ll also pick up grenades, which can be used on slow or unsuspecting groups of enemies, and also to destroy the environment. Lights, laser security systems, etc. You’ll also pick up Miracle Crosses, which can be used to revive if you die up to a limit of thirty. You’ll also find magazines that increase your total ammo count, and while it almost never happens, you can and probably will run out of ammo during some of the final levels. The best part? You can’t buy any of these things in-app. Which, honestly, as much as I super appreciate, I would have understood. I had some trouble with the final levels, and had to grind this one long and easy level before it to build up stats and revives for the final boss, but the difficulty was generally extremely fair.

But considering you can use revives and grenades in the leaderboard tracked endless randomized level mode, Abyss Dungeon, that would be pay to win, and as Sonic the Hedgehog said a few times in that cartoon, that’s no good. You do have molasses slow regenerating health, and if you really wanted, you could exploit that and wait around on each level, but health pick-ups are generally fair as well. Certain levels have enemies that ambush you out of nowhere, but it’s not frequent, and not that hard to deal with anyway. So how do I feel about gameplay in summary? It’s excellent, yo. Seriously. There is a good variety to the enemies, which are broken up by very many boss fights, and the game is generally very rewarding to play. As someone with minor game development experience, I like the way assets are used and re-used here. There is just enough variety and spice to keep things interesting, despite being pretty samey.

Naturally it’s not free of issues. Certain levels have wonky physics that mostly just look funny, though there are occasional bugs. It’s possible to mess up the starting spawn of Kali sometimes. I managed to do this on the final boss, which led to me being on the ground under the battle area. I could still hit him sometimes, but there was no way I’d beat him with finite ammo. The dev has already released updates with bug fixes too. There are lots of neat touches to this game, like the changing starting screen to reflect your progress through the story. There are very few settings to tweak. Mainly you just adjust texture quality and change the language from English to Japanese or Korean. There’s one other really random feature. You know how with newer iPads there is that perspective zoom feature as you tilt the device? This game has that. All the time. It can be mildly disorienting, but mostly it’s just there. I tried playing on both my iPhone 5S and my iPad Air 2, and it played great on both devices. Don’t let this game go off quietly into the night. It’s seriously worth it.