Oh Ikaruga, where art thou? Presumably deeply manifested within developer Fabien Sanglard's mind, who devoted more than 18 months working nearly single-handedly on what he promotes with the words "Don't wait to rediscover the joy of a Dreamcast style shoot'em up!!". The generically named Shmup can't possibly deny its inspiration being taken from Treasure's black-an-white classic, and it doesn't make an attempt to.

Anybody familiar with Ikaruga will immediately get flashbacks as he flies past fully polygonal backgrounds full of skyscrapers, long-stretched tubes and a sky reddened by the dawning sun, twisting camera angles included. The game retains its frame rate of 60 FPS at all times, despite numerous background objects speeding by. In addition, the general range of colors is varied, while also maintaining consistency at all times. One area might be dominated by grey buildings and black abysses for example, while a short section in-between such cold and dark places is dominated by warm orange, showing a small glimpse of hope and life in this apparent dystopia.

The music is also worth mentioning, being taken (with permission) from an old demoscene video – Second Reality by Future Crew, to be more specific. And let's be honest: A lot of demo videos feature stunningly brilliant electronic music, that possibly not just I have often felt would make a perfect fit for a fast-paced shooter. Fabien has taken the 10 minutes of music and sound, and he has arranged its bits and pieces to set a fantastic mood throughout the whole experience. During the stages you'll be lifted to a constant high, pushing you forward, and as soon as you get a game over and return to the (extremely dark) title screen, you're greeted by an eerie set of sounds, not too dissimilar from the first Half-Life, where you'd hear the wind hissing and machines rumbling somewhere in the far distance.

Compared to Ikaruga, the gameplay has been simplified quite a bit. You'd naturally expect enemies and bullets to be color-coded, and these colors to have a great impact on how to cope with any given hazard. While all enemies are in fact either white or black, bullet color doesn't matter at all and your ship can't even change color. The only importance granted to colors is that white foes will go down in a single shot or after a few seconds of constant fire (depending on the enemy's size), whereas black foes aren't meant to be destroyed and thus sustain extreme amounts of damage. Although you won't find any traditional objects or landscapes to dodge, this system allows for some intricate passages where you read the movement patterns of black enemies in advance while at the same time taking down their white buddies. Every five seconds you can also unleash a set of homing beams by double-tapping the screen. Unlike Ikaruga, these are simply replenished automatically and building up any kinds of combos is not only unnecessary, but simply impossible. Scoring entirely relies on hitting as many opponents as possible.

Disregarding the simplified mechanics, Shmup is still a great game, or rather it could be. The atmosphere is thick enough to be cut with a knife, the relative touch controls leave nothing to be desired, the action is fast and varied enough and you even get online multiplayer on top. The free lite version should keep any shoot 'em up fan well entertained, but you might not want to be fooled into buying the full version. The lite version contains the complete first level, so after beating the full version's second level you are looking forward to more content as the third stage starts off with a huge boss (the first of the whole game, by the way) and then...it ends. The boss remains motionless, the screen fades back to the title screen and you are told that more was to come. This, however, seems to be bogus, since the last update has been released in January 2011. To summarize this, you are paying for a single additional level in the full version.

In addition, the game lacks a continue function after losing the last life, the three difficulty settings only vary in the amount of lives given, there is no pause function at all (tapping the screen with five fingers just brings you back to the title screen, forcing you to start all over), there is no indication for when the homing attack can be used again, and the second stage requires some memorization, otherwise leading to certain deaths.

After having played just the demo, I already thought of placing Shmup well near the top of the crop, and it is undeniably a neat game with much going for it, but the full version fails to deliver what the demo promises. There is still hope here, as just a few more stages and some minor tweaks could easily render this an essential App Store purchase, although it is highly uncertain if we are ever going to see any of this happening.

You know you’ve got to be in for a treat when a game title contains not only a single exclamation mark, but three of these semantic action guarantors. ISUD (It shoots – you dodge) is basically a stripped-down rRootage beefed up in the visual department.

Like in rRootage you only face bosses in open space without any form of level design or any standard enemy encounters. The main difference is how the explosions, sound effects, bullet design and the piano music add up to a design highly reminiscent of Touhou shooters. While the backgrounds are bland and black, bosses shine in different colors and boast some neat, abstract designs. The controls work the same way as in rRootage, which isn't the worst aspect to ape. Tap the screen anywhere and move it to make your ship with the always visible red hit box mirror your every move. Using a second finger triggers a smart bomb. For (theoretically) increased comfort the lower end of the screen is supposed to function as your finger's work space, though this area actually is part of the playing field as well, so some boss patterns will place shots there, subsequently pulling them up, leaving you barely any chance to see and anticipate them.

Other than that the game plays out pretty nicely with varied and (mostly) fair boss patterns. Prepare for boss options moving up and down while firing at you, circles of bullets swirling across the screen and just about any other general bullet pattern kind that you would find in halfway modern shooters. Bosses have between four and seven lives, each with its own distinct pattern. Defeating them without using bombs, without dieing and staying in a circle close to them just when they are done for earns you different score multipliers. Other than that there is no scoring system, so you won't find anything to pick up, no grazing, no nothing. It's all about straight forward survival and ISUD also lacks the gameplay variety rRootage offers. There is no Ikaruga mode or anything else spicing up the experience. Worst of all, though, is the amount of different bosses to battle as there are only four of them in total. Sure, they all feature different phases and there are three different difficulty settings for each plus an adaptive difficulty system further defining their aggressiveness and there also is a boss rush stage pitting you against all bosses one after another, but it's still quite a small package overall.

Still, ISUD is an enjoyable little game, mostly hampered by falling short of the vastly superior rRootage, which even happens to be free of charge other than ISUD. If you get this for free one day or don't mind paying a buck for it, then it's still very well worth a recommendation.

Similar in concept to Phoenix, the Japan-developed Techno Trancer is a randomly generated, infinite run for survival and points, down an empty corridor. Still, despite somewhat fresh mechanics, it fails to reach Phoenix's quality, ending up being just too repetitive. This starts with the overly sterile visuals that seem to favor bright lighting effects over any form of design, it continues with the "been there, done that"-music consisting of a handful of fast electronic tunes, and it culminates in the lack of bosses, special enemies, upgrades or any form of variety.

Your ship is steered using reliable relative touch controls, and the screen size can be adjusted to have an empty section at the bottom dedicated only to your finger's placement. Shiny, white enemies keep pouring in, firing off streams of the same red squares again and again. While enemies can be touched without punishment, their shots immediately take away one of your three precious lives. Fortunately, you're basically always surrounded by a force field that slows down those shots. What's more, downed foes drop golden energy bits, that earn you points and fill up the energy gauge. Once full, Awakened Mode is activated automatically, turning your ship invincible and cranking up its destruction power for a couple of seconds. The more enemy shots in your force field at the time when destroying a foe, the more energy bits it drops, so you'll often have to consider whether you want to play it safe and let bullets leave the screen, or rather collect them for a big bonus and the eventual activation of Awakened Mode. Tapping the screen with a second finger repels all shots currently onscreen, serving as a last resort.

Ever since the first games tried to tie the onscreen action and the music together, for every successful attempt (Rez, Vib Ribbon), it seems like we get two complete failures (pretty much every shooter, that dipped its feet into this). Techno Trancer is advertised for with “listen in amazement as music syncs with dazzling action”, which couldn't be further from the truth. It doesn't even appear as if they were trying to make the music interact with anything, since enemies neither appear nor shoot in correlation to the beats, and vice-versa, no input ever alters the music.

Techno Trancer is fine for a while as long as you keep your expectations low, and only if you get it for a dollar, which it only goes for during special sales. It's just sad to see the interesting mechanics being wasted on an otherwise unimaginative game, that appears to lack any kind of aspiration on the developers' behalf.

The genre? Vertical shooter. The setting? Second World War. The game length? About 20 minutes split up into 6 levels plus a bonus stage. The title? As stupidly generic as can be. That's pretty much all you need to know about Mortal Skies, although admittedly there is a little bit more to it. Developed by a lone Belgian guy, the game is surprisingly well made despite some shortcomings. The graphics for example are perfectly functional albeit the background only consists of a single screen endlessly looping and all three available backgrounds (mountain range, snowy mountain range and...somewhat desert style mountain range despite the frequent appearance of lakes?) lack any kind of distinguishing features like buildings or trees. The music on the other hand is unexpectedly catchy, especially the recurring boss theme. Even a few hours after my last playthrough it is STILL stuck in my head now.

Nowadays all kinds of games get light RPG elements squeezed into them, with shooters usually being an exception to this rule. Mortal Skies however cleverly integrates its achievement system by granting the player an update point with every achievement he unlocks, allowing him to power up either the plane's attack, defence, speed or the effectiveness of all bonus items. These points can even be reassigned before each level, giving ample possibilities for customization, which really is rarely more than a tacked on feature as a high attack level is mandatory for most of the game. Only a few of the achievements ask for a little more thought to be put into the upgrading system.

Enemies are recycled throughout all the game and even two bosses are once reused in smaller form together on screen as the level 5 boss and then again one after another in their original size as the final confrontation in level 6. Even if there were more enemies, chances are they would still end up feeling highly generic. Of course Nazi-Germany didn't have anything fancy to use in mountain ranges other than planes, helicopters, tanks and occasional missile batteries, but it still could have used a bit more creativity and ultimately makes it hard to distinguish one level from another apart from the boss. The gameplay might suffer the same fate of being generic up to a certain degree, yet it still is enjoyable. Fly along, destroy whole squadrons to be rewarded with all kinds of temporary bonus items like wingmen, invincibility, a cool shield that reflects shots back at enemies, a smart bomb and so on.

There are some nice touches that add a bit of flavor to this otherwise stale gaming soup. Shooting down enemies simply feels downright good. In some games enemies just pop out of existence without appealing to the evil nature inherent in all of mankind. Just about any artsy-fartsy guy every once in a while has to give in to his guilty pleasure of watching John McClane blowing up shit and I wouldn't believe any fan of Flower or Ico stating he wouldn't have kept a soft spot for Doom or Quake. In Mortal Skies not only explode, but big white letters and numbers pop up, telling you not only the increase in your score, but also proclaiming how "great" or even "perfect" you are. In a more serious shooter, asking for constant concentration this would feel awfully out of place, here, however it perfectly fits the whole time waster scheme.

Another great idea other developers might want to take note of is the way powerups disappear. Usually power-ups suddenly fade away or at most they start blinking shortly before or they have a countdown-like circle around them (think Mushihimesama), but here items constantly shrink in size, clearly indicating when they will be gone for good. It's as easy as that and I can hardly believe nobody has ever thought of that before (there probably IS some obscure Japan only computer game that already had it before). Also, if you think of shooter bosses, just about anything that comes into mind are huge, overpowered creatures or machines. Even Solar Striker on GameBoy had big ass bases and the first boss in video game history in Phoenix was huge as well. Mortal Skies' third level boss takes a different approach by pitting you against a single enemy plane that is said to have already shot down lots of your friends. Rather than staying on top of the screen, constantly raining down destruction on you, it will swoop in and out for short bursts of fire. The difficulty can be adjusted quite freely on a slider, allowing for basically 100 different settings.

Despite being a very commendable effort when taking into consideration that it has been developed by a single guy (easily putting Space Phoenix to shame), it can hardly deny its amateurish traits at some points. The achievement system for example used to offer another neat feature in that you would unlock a bonus stage in case you got all achievements. By now this stage is open from the very beginning (and it's awfully boring), with the game still repeatedly telling you to obtain all achievements to unlock a special stage, which is plain wrong. At least you can still unlock three additional planes, although they hardly differ from the standard one in terms of visuals and gameplay they even are exactly the same. Also, dying triggers the screen to be covered in blood, which crudely clashes with the rest of the game and would feel more in place in some Newgrounds flash game.

Another strange design decision is the order in which boss #1 and #4 are integrated. Both are huge bombers, both are pretty much the same, but the first one has turrets closer to the bottom of the screen and requires more engines to be destroyed, hence making it considerably more difficult than the one in stage #4. Especially given that using touch controls makes it impossible to use the lower end of the screen for manoeuvring. Every stage also has a section where you are supposedly "going down" to fight some tanks and anti-air missile turrets along the way. If this was supposed to freshen up the gameplay, it simply falls flat. The backdrops look muddy that far zoomed in and gameplay doesn't change all that much, since there are still a couple of planes around and turrets can also appear outside of these sections.