Sketch Nation Shooter from Engineous Games is the long awaited iPhone game that first came to prominence after winning the first ever Appsfire App Star Awards in late 2009. Since then we’ve been waiting and waiting for this game to come along and finally it’s here!
Sketch Nation Shooter Pros:
- Nicely designed
- Easy to use
- Amazing level of options
Sketch Nation Shooter Cons:
- Can be complicated to make a full game
Let us start by saying that Sketch Nation isn’t just a game, no way. It’s a great way of making games based on a simple set-up for sharing them or just playing them. The overall look of the game is replicating a notebook, with each screen looking like a sheet of lined paper. It is nicely designed and looks great.
First things first, you’ll need to create your game. Make sure you’ve got a pen and paper ready and plenty of it too. You can create a simple game or a much more complicated one with level designs, multiple enemies and a big boss, but we’ll save that for later. At the main screen you can choose to log in to your Facebook account so you can share your games and check out the games your friends have created. You can tap Create to either create a new game or edit an old one, or tap Play to play your games or any you’ve downloaded. Download brings up a list of all submitted games under the headings of popular, new, friends or update. There are already a lot of really good games on there, so if creating your own isn’t your thing, get some downloaded and get playing! There are also options to change to volume of the music and/or sound effects, touch input and vibration.
Getting to the more important issue of creating your own game, the overall method is fairly simple. The game takes you through seven steps one by one, from taking a photo of your hand drawn player and a couple of enemies or uploading the pictures from your photo library directly on your iphone. You can also select images from preselected Art Packs which makes it much easier if you can’t draw, and as you can see from the screenshots, we can’t draw! Once you’ve created your game you get to play, edit or share your game. Editing goes back through each step of the setup while sharing uploads your game to the Sketch Nation servers for everyone else to see.
Each game is really basic at this level and you only really get to take shots at your enemies as they come flying in from fairly predictable directions. To be honest, this way is too easy and you’ll be bored within minutes. The real fun, and the cutting edge from this game comes when you take the time to develop your own full game. Fully designing a game obviously takes some time and is usually better if you take good quality photographs of your sketches and upload them to your iPhone via your Mac or PC, especially for 3G users like we used for this review.
In designing a complete game you get to create your own cartoon intro, your main player and a big boss, five different enemies and four different level designs. You can alter the in-game music, the boss music, points per powerup, missile life and bullet level collision. For the bigboss you can edit the number of hits needed to destroy them, the number of points for destroying them, the weapon and weapon patterns. And finally, with the other enemies you can alter their size, velocity, ammo, rotation, AI, points and number of hits as well. Wow! Editing levels involves placing enemies, their patterns and the directions they fly from as well as the location and type of powerups available.
As you can see from all this, Sketch Nation Shooter is a massively involved way of creating really great games. There are no end of options available and we’ve downloaded a huge amount of brilliant designs from other gamers out there. Yeah, I suppose we should also admit that we are way behind in designing good games compared to some people out there! Engineous Games are living up to the name with Sketch Nation Shooter and we would easily recommend you download it now. Sometimes an app comes along that is streets ahead of the competition and Sketch Nation Shooter is one.
