iPhone App: Occurro!

July 31st, 2009

= 3 stars

Fly a spaceship and blow as many enemies up as possible in this top view space shooter.

The Good

• Cool graphics, especially like the little glowing exhaust trail that traces a bit as you move.
• Has several control options. By default, the ship’s movement is controlled by iPhone tilt, and firing is a d-pad on the right. I’m not a big fan of navigating with tilt alone, so thankfully there is an option for a d-pad to the left to control movement.

The Bad

• It took me a while to realize your ship runs out of shots after a period of time. A green bar above the play field represents your gun’s energy which depletes with each shot. You replenish energy by moving. It’s a strange feature which I found personally more annoying than fun, and seems more motivated by some odd logic that you shouldn’t be able to rotate and fire while standing in one place for too long. This wasn’t a problem for Asteroids.
• No added variety in terms of power ups, additional weapons, or crazy bad guys and bosses. There’s a “quad laser” and a variety of enemies, but they aren’t compellingly varied enough.

Conclusion

Occurro is a solid foundation for a great game; it just needs more variety to take it to the next level.

iPhone App Store Link: