I really enjoyed playing the single player initially but I don't seem to enjoy it as much now. The difficulty used to ramp up from easy to hard and a game would last a decent 10-20 minutes or so, but now it's hard immediately and my friends and I die after a brutal 5 minutes. They've all said a few times, and I agree, that it's now perhaps 1/4 as fun as it was initially, which is a huge shame. It's the same with co-op too. I'm like 4th in the country, but I plain enjoyed the game a lot more on the easier difficulty. It's like that super fun game has been lost to us, and now it's just a hardcore shooter. I'd love if you could perhaps let the user select the difficulty, but the choice of level would multiply the score accordingly? I wouldn't even care if it was unranked... Even just a simple 'fun mode' or something would bring me back to the game.
Interesting. Just to confirm: you (and your friends) are experiencing single-player gameplay on Apple TV as too difficult? More difficult than on iOS?
I face the same issue too. The Apple TV version seems to get hard from the get go whereas the Phoenix that I used to play on my iPad would gradually ramp up the difficulty. Granted that was many many updates ago since my iPad 2 bricked. But before bricking, Phoenix was my favourite shump on iPad due to that reason. Haven't really played that much of Phoenix for ATV 4 since it is hard and not as relaxing, though I did buy the latest IAP plane to support the developer since I had already bought all the other planes on my iPad. Hopefully that is enough information for the developer to tell which version was the relaxing one.
Well, I'm not saying this to make you all look silly or to say I don't believe you, but: since difficulty and progress is such a delicate thing we have not changed this in Phoenix HD since september 2012 (the update that added the coins). The Apple TV version is an exact copy in that regard, the progress should be there as it is on iOS. So now I'm going to find out why the Apple TV experience is more difficult in your opinion. There's a lot of other factors that determine the difficulty and influence how you play the game. Distance to the screen, delay between input and seeing it on screen (TVs always add a delay due to their image processing), extra space on the sides or the slightly tweaked scaling of enemies to take advantage of the bigger play area are just a few to mention. I understand you guys are interested in longer play sessions? Do others agree or do they enjoy the 'short session' appeal that's inherited from the mobile world? While we were building and testing it we were always afraid it was going to be too easy. So many interesting questions. The Apple TV is a different world than the mobile/iOS one, so we're taking our time to 'explore the surroundings' before moving
Woohoo, a new update is available now! We have investigated your feedback thoroughly and tweaked the difficulty here and there to be more on the forgiving side of the iOS difficulty. There is no armory on the Apple TV version, so we took that into account as well. Co-op is also a bit easier now. Among other things, reviving your fallen team-mate is a bit easier to achieve which makes the whole thing more fun too! When you select a ship you can also tap 'up' on your controller or Siri Remote to navigate to your High Score, tapping it will open the leaderboards for the selected ship or ship combination. The leaderboard will show compact views for each region, City up to World level. Did you know that there were separate Co-op leaderboards and you can see which combination was used to achieve the score? Let me know what you guys think and enjoy!
