Finished the game! Each stage takes anywhere between 8 and 12 minutes to finish so you're looking at roughly 1.5 to 2 hours of continuous play without skipping cutscenes and if you intend to play through it just once. Your performance is graded with up to 3 stars but there's currently no leaderboard for scores. It's best to take the game in as a story-driven single player on-rails space shooter rather than a high-score-chasing arcade game in its current state. Story-wise, it pulled off a Mass Effect. No, not the colors. You'll see if you play through it. The characters didn't feel like they gave realistic responses to the events of the game and with the ... passable voice acting, I lost interest in really accepting and understanding the shallowness. I haven't played the game again yet to see how the other choices would affect the story but it would seem it all boils down to one ending anyway. The game's difficulty has exponential growth, but for my taste, only gets to a satisfying point in the last 2 to 3 stages where some enemies finally needed more than just a swarmer to bring down (edit: try playing without upgrades and see where that gets you). The overall experience is still very good for an iOS game. I just wish there were some more battles with the final chapter's level of difficulty. Looking back at what I enjoyed most, it would have to be the explosions. You hear the sound of a lock on and unleash your swarmers and maybe even a torpedo, their trails of light brilliant in the darkness of space. Exploding ships looked and sounded so awesome, with some leaving behind a trail of smoke before before blowing up and becoming nothing more than space junk. If only there was more.
Fantastic post. I greatly appreciate your clear and detailed impressions. I hope the developer doesn't take this the wrong way but you probably saved me some cash. It sounds like a lot of people will enjoy it while possibly complaining about the length.
"Each stage takes anywhere between 8 and 12 minutes to finish" Are there checkpoints or some other mechanism to save within a stage?
