Tilt To Live, an arcade-style survival shooter from One Man Left, is now available from the app store. Great tilt controls combine with fun power-ups and engagingly humorous enemy behavior to create a top-notch iDevice title.
Tilt To Live Pros:
- Impressive enemy AI
- Clean and colorful interface
- Worthwhile soundtrack
- Lively sound effects
- Agon global leaderboards and achievements beef up replay-ability
Tilt To Live Cons:
- A bit slow in the beginning
Tilt To Live contains only one game mode and one difficulty level. Playing as a white arrow, you navigate your way around the board, avoiding the spawning red dots at all costs. Touch just one of those little buggers and it’s game over. Several power-ups become available to assist you in staying alive. There is a bomb that creates a temporary blast zone, disintegrating any red dots that enter into the area. A purple ball projects a directional blast that wipes out anything in its path. A yellow ball releases a half-dozen homing missiles that zero in on and destroy individual red dots. These are the main pick-ups. As you progress in the game and achieve certain awards, you unlock various other pick-ups that then become available in future games, such as the ice blast, which creates a giant icy circle that freezes any red dots in the vicinity. Using your arrow, you can then run into and shatter the dots before they thaw out.
Things get crazy pretty quickly and you’ll need good reflexes and a steady hand to do well. The enemy AI is one of the highlights of the game. The red dots don’t just float around the board and create obstacles. Every one of them senses you, and they are constantly closing in on your position. At times, they even exhibit coordinated behavior, with dots coalescing into arrow shapes, surrounding you gang-style, or even creating impromptu pong games in an effort to end your game. It’s a lot of fun just to see what the dots will do next.
Graphically, the interface is clean. The muted green backdrop with spinning circles is a nice complement to the action on screen. The screen top indicates your current score, as well as your high score. There’s not much more to it. The soundtrack is pretty catchy and worth listening to, while the sound effects are also fun and appropriate. Controls are strictly accelerometer-based, as you might guess from the game’s title. Tilt To Live offers 4 calibration options at the start: regular, top-down, sleepy, and custom. Regular covers the gamer who is sitting or standing and holding the device at a slight angle. Top-down is calibrated for players who hold the device parallel to the floor. Sleepy covers you if you are laying down. Custom allows you to set the calibration for any position. We did encounter some issues with Sleepy and even Custom when we were laying down. The left and right tilt controls weren’t quite working as we expected. Otherwise, everything was fine, the game ran smooth as can be, and it wasn’t too difficult to move with precision and even stop on a dime.
Replay value is very good, with Agon integration for global leaderboards and an amusing achievement system. There are achievements for items ranging from triggering 30 nukes in a game to racking up an x213 combo to being very, very bad at this game. Improving your scores, utilizing new strategies, and unlocking new weapons are just a few of the reasons that we’ll keep playing. The only negative that we can see is that each game starts a bit slow, though things do get chaotic fairly quickly. At $1.99, One Man Left has created a brilliant title worthy of our 5-Dimple praise.
