Similar to Lightning Fighter, Bunz Fighter has been thrown onto the market by its Chinese developers without much refinement or any will for innovation, trying to make up for it with a tight presentation. Only, unlike Lightning Fighter, Bunz Fighter isn't visually impressive. It's not as ugly as its name is plain odd, but even after activating all of the optional graphical icings, you're still confronted with unimpressive explosions and unimaginative design aplenty. Musically, the game offers the usual style of electronic music, ranging from atmospheric to bass-heavy, and from average to actually pretty fine.

Weapon pick-ups cycle through “straight shot”, laser, energy wave and homing missiles. Consecutively grabbing items of the same type, your weapon is upgraded a couple of times. While the laser and the energy wave are your standard poles in the damage-spread discussion, the straight shot and homing missiles both are a tad more unique. Usually merely firing up straight, touching a target on-screen lets you aim these weapons more precisely. For the straight shot, this works rather well, but the homing missiles don't deserve their name, or have you ever seen homing missiles that can't even target anything themselves, or just a single enemy at a time, despite being fired off in sets of four or more? Homing missiles are known to comfortably attack anything you encounter, usually marred by low damage output, but in Bunz Fighter, the homing missiles are arguably the hardest weapon to aim with. You tap on a single enemy, wait for your slow explosives to finally reach their target and in the meantime numerous other foes have already appeared and disappeared. Overall, the weapons also all feel too similar to one another.

Bunz Fighter isn't guilty of any game-breaking faults, but sweet lord, it's so awfully derivative, the enemies and bullet patterns are so boring and the bosses are either frustrating or as boring as the rest of the stages. If you'll ever be able to get it for free, it might be ok for a playthrough, but otherwise just pretend it wouldn't exist and instead try one of the many, many, MANY alternatives.

The Chinese share an exceeding love to media set in Chinese history and classic Chinese literature. The heaps of MMORPGs, movies, TV dramas and books founded on either the second Sino-Japanese war, the last decades of the Qing dynasty, the era of the three kingdoms or the Journey to the West are thus constantly growing, with no signs of slowing down any time soon. The reasons behind this, including an ever-growing nationalistic spirit and a government that isn't exactly supporting a media coverage of any issues in contemporary China, could be discussed here, but this is obviously not the right place for that, so let's just say, it doesn't come as such a big surprise that one of the many China-based developers for iOS shooters has turned the novel Journey to the West into a vertical shooter.

While I can't comment on whether the five landscapes (five stages) you come across are based on the novel, I'd at least consider it to be likely, seeing the three playable characters definitely being borrowed from the book. The monkey king, a humanoid pig and a Buddhist monk all play almost the same, relying on a standard rapid fire that can be upgraded up to four times and a smart bomb. Goku flight (flight isn't capitalized) lacks in the visual department, with non-animated foes that are hard to define as to what they are supposed to be. The colorful backgrounds and the bosses somewhat alleviate this, though not by much. At least the music truly delivers. The licensed tracks from Japan wonderfully fit the mood set by the backgrounds, with calm flutes playing in misty mountains, and violins going crazy in the volcano stage.

The first two stages are likely to both bore and frustrate the living hell out of you. Enemy formations are simple and repetitive, and bullets are mostly scarce, though the occasional sturdier creature as well the bosses clutter the screen with unfair attacks. The latter isn't helped by the controls in the slightest, as your character moves rather slow, not quite catching up on your finger as he should. Also, Goku flight is one of those shooters, where you are moving on some sort of a grid. You're not moving freely around the playing field, but you're rather jumping from position to position. These issues mostly prevent you from precisely dodging tight bullet formations, which in turn holds Goku flight back from being more than a (still) mediocre game. The long life bar and the three continues per stage help lower the frustration, and stages 3-5 can be surprisingly fun, thanks to some intricate bullet patterns and (visually) original bosses.

One man's classic is another man's very definition of repetition and dated gameplay. Raptor was originally released by cult publisher Apogee as shareware on DOS PCs in 1994 and has since managed to maintain a steady fellowship of loyal fans, although it can be argued that this can't be attributed as much to it being a genuinely great game as to it having been one of the first shooters on a platform previously not best known for action games in general.

The iOS version is as straight a port as can be, retaining all the good, the bad and the ugly. "Ugly" really doesn't do the visuals any justice. If you've ever played any early 90s PC games before Voodoo, 3Dfx, Glide or any other similar terms popped up, chances are you'll love the simplistic, pixelated landscapes and the mechanical enemies inhabiting the skies, the seas and anything in-between. The menus consist of more than bland lines of text, instead you are brought back to your HQ after each stage, choosing between different rooms in a hangar, e.g. the local weapon dealer's storage space, where you're immediately greeted by his pixelated portrait akin to classics such as Jagged Alliance. The sound similarly brings back memories of allegedly better times, as doors sound suspiciously similar to the ones in Doom when opening, and the varied soundtrack might get lost a bit amidst the constant sound effect staccato, though it's still good for a nostalgic sigh every once in a while.

Another welcome holdover from Raptor's PC origins lies in how its lite version is handled. The full game contains 27 stages spread over three sectors, and the lite version simply is identical to the original shareware version, thus offering the whole first sector with nine stages without any restrictions. The only truly new aspect obviously has to be the controls and it's sad to see the developer's of this port kind of mess up this one and only part where they had to take action themselves. Instead of making relative touch controls at least an option, you are stuck with direct touch controls that don't even have your plane immediately follow your finger, probably in order to keep the movement speed of the original version intact.

You'll eventually get used to this, but by then it might already be too late, as Raptor simply doesn't hold a candle to its modern brethren. Sure, it was one of the first shooters to feature an item shop with various optional weapons, funded by money that is left behind by enemies, blowing up bridges, buildings and even innocuous rocks feels great for a while, and it's fairly long for a shoot 'em up, but what good is this quantity, when all stages of a sector constantly recycle assets from a small pool? Sometimes it's hard to tell whether you've really advanced to the next level or merely repeat the previous one. Even the bosses differ only slightly in their shot patterns, while their appearance remains the same. Another hardly bearable shortcoming would have to be the extremely limited range of vision. Since your're asked to hold your device sideways, despite this being a vertical shooter, it's hard to see what's coming ahead in time. Add in large sprites and occasionally confusing shadows and you've got some serious issues.

At the time of its first release and especially on a Computer rather than on a small iPhone, Raptor possibly was as big a deal as dinosaurs have been during the 1990s. Nowadays, however, both kinds of raptors feel more like a long-extinct relic.

There are many iOS shooters that feel decidedly amateurish, and MoonTakers is no exception. Unlike most other shooters of this peculiar category, however, MoonTakers is still quite a bit fun and well worth a shot, even though it's very short even by shooter standards, clocking in at about ten minutes. The App Store description might be promising "15 levels", but it really comprises of just a single flight from earth to the moon with 15 waves of different aliens attacking humankind and trying to steal the moon.

Using reliable relative touch controls only marred by a hitbox that should be a tad smaller, you shoot down hordes of insects, pick up a few shield generators to rid yourself of the fear for instant deaths, and your peashooter is also slowly upgraded, ultimately culminating in homing missiles. If you also pick up at least eight parts of the "mega gun", you'll suddenly have said huge weapon attached to your ship for the final battle against the alien mothership. Aside from the mothership you'll face two more bosses during the short ride.

MoonTakers doesn't reinvent the wheel, and not even the three difficulty settings warrant a second playthrough, but it delivers some quick, uncomplicated fun, and you'll find yourself looking forward to seeing whatever insect the designers have implemented next and how they behave. On a final note, the classic soundtrack is simply amazing for such a low-profile release, which is probably the reason why it weighs in at 65 MB. In case you're wondering just how obscure the game really is: I used to be number two on the GameCenter leaderboards. Two out of thirteen.