![]() Dreary space music plays under plain blip and boom sound effects. A limited lifebar can be replenished with health power-ups or protected with shields, but only a few hits will destroy your ship several different types of ships can be purchased, and numerous types of weapons are available, ranging from missiles and various types of spread-shot weapons to mines and explosive charges. You use dual joysticks, one to steer and turn, the other to fire in your choice of directions in a much-needed update to the classic forward-firing Asteroids concept. Blowing up asteroids leads to both smaller rock fragments and golden ore oddly called “crystals,” the free in-game currency that can be used to both upgrade your ship’s weapons and bolster its defenses. Black backgrounds have been replaced with a parallax-scrolling, colorful star field that stays mostly the same from level to level, and all of the objects-primarily rocks, but later spacecraft as well-are 3-D modeled for an added sense of realism. Judged strictly on its merits as a $1 game, Asteroids Gunner is a nice enough update to the original title. For only $100 of real currency, you too can have a million Space Bucks to use towards upgrades for your space ship-a dubious proposition if ever we’ve heard one. At that point, Atari offers players incentives to keep spending additional money for “Space Bucks” that unlock additional stages and items. The lure here is a free, visually updated version of the overhead shooter that starts out ad-supported, but becomes ad-free with a $1 “remove ads” purchase. So Atari and Fluik Entertainment have teamed up to release the universal iOS game Asteroids Gunner (Free/$1), a sequel that feels as if it was expressly designed to drain dollars rather than quarters out of players’ pockets. As much as it hurts to say this given the size of our retro game collection, the classic quarter-sucking arcade title Asteroids hasn’t aged particularly well as a shooter: yes, Atari had a novel idea when it originally placed a lone spaceship in the middle of a collection of rocks, challenging players to blast away until they were all gone, but the turn-thrust-shoot-shoot-shoot action quickly gets repetitive and boring for all but high score chasers. ![]()
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December 2022
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