No Code’s Super Arc Light ($1.99) has just gotten a big update that provides some major tweaks to the game. The big obvious one is the new easy mode. It’s more of a ‘practice’ mode than anything, as it gives you three lives but no high scores on the leaderboard. What it does give you is an opportunity to see more of the game and get further, or just to enjoy longer sessions if you don’t care about the leaderboard tradeoff. It’s not like anyone who cares about Game Center has a working Game Center anyway.

A key tweak to the game is the weapons system. Now, when you earn a special weapon, you get three different icons to shoot that give you different weapons, allowing you to strategize based on your preferred choice, or just to skip some of the more useless weapons, like that one that shoots mostly short-range shots. The game also explains how its scoring system works now – namely, it shows your score, and how much each enemy is worth, while showing at the end of the game how many enemies you killed according to the internal 3-star scoring system. This transparency is great, and I think the game is much stronger for these new tweaks. Oh, and there’s new music and a new enemy to take on. Plenty of good reasons to jump back in to this game, with the update available now.