There is a simple equation for danmaku-style shooters: Lots of bullets + big hit box = safe fail. Cosmic Birds perfectly falls prey to this trap. While the screen is usually not that littered with bullets outside of (sub-)boss fights, taking damage during said battles is basically inevitable, thus ruining the theoretically well-constructed bullet patterns. Every stage plays home to a couple of big foes that flood the screen with shots, leaving only tight passages to pass through, just like you'd expect it from a Cave game, for example. Unlike the more polished competition where only the cockpit/heart/center can be hit, however, your entire jet serves as your hitbox in Cosmic Birds.

This alone would be enough to pretty much ruin the whole game, but even with a properly sized hitbox, Bale's creation couldn't leave mediocrity, for it being rather dull, eventless and repetitive outside of boss encounters. The standard array of enemies severely lacks variety and imagination on behalf of the designers, and even the few different types that do exist all appear too similar to be easily differentiated during the action.

So as you're treading through somewhat boring stages and battling frustrating bosses, none of the positive aspects the game still holds for you get a realistic chance to shine. The relative touch controls leave nothing to be desired, but what are they worth, when you're nonetheless unable to weave through the incoming fire? The backgrounds pull off the doodle style better than most competitors, featuring great-looking cities, islands and planets all apparently drawn with a ballpen, but there are only four different backgrounds and – as mentioned before – the standard enemies look extremely dull, not only in comparison. Collecting stars is rewarded with cash, which can be spent in shops to finance special abilities such as health refills, shields or smart bombs, but when these become the only viable option for survival, it kind of misses the point of a shoot 'em up.

Much like many competitors at this point in the article, Nanoids has its strong points, but messes up any good impressions one might have and ends up being highly unremarkable and simply forgettable.

Nanoids is fortunate enough to get most things right at the outset. Cheesy techno music gets your blood pumping, developer eBattalion intertwined all stages via a detailed description of the ultimate battle between two alien species called the Petralites and the Nanoids, new players are shown a survival mode and a boss battle mode for later unlocking, and an upgrade shop promises motivation through customization. Also, the direct touch controls work well enough, items you don't want to pick up can be flicked off-screen, and the enemy design offers a couple of neat ideas. Some torpedo-style foes cross the screen either vertically or horizontally, leaving behind dangerous spiderweb-railroad...-things, big jets drop spiked balls if not taken down quickly enough, and when combined cleverly, these kinds of foes make for a surprisingly fresh feel, as you weave through tight corridors in the need to decide for which enemy to hunt down first in order to broaden your playing field.

Nanoids is unfortunate enough, however, to go only downhill from here on. The bland and amateurish visuals could be swallowed if the gameplay was well designed, but alas, it's not, being marred by a couple of entirely unnecessary flaws. For one, enemies are constantly reused, making levels feel too similar to each other. Another bummer is the weapon system. No matter which of the five weapons you have equipped, they all pretty much behave the same. Green beams, blue laser shots, brown lasers and yellow fire balls all share a similar rate of fire and mostly hit targets right in front of you, only varying slightly in how far they spread to the sides. Forget about homing weapons or any other fancy characteristics. Even forget about the choice between spreader shots and focused fire, given in more shooters than you could possibly count. It's all essentially the same, just with different damage output, as the constant laser for example packs a nice punch, while the rapid laser shots are comparably useless. Why even include different weapons, when they aren't different, but just better or worse?

This amounts to the player desperately dodging most weapon items or flicking them away, in an attempt to keep the difficulty down, which still eventually fails for two reasons. First, weapon upgrades from the shop are essential, but too expensive (see Boss Battles for an upgrade shop done right) and you also need to upgrade each weapon, your smart bombs and your various defences individually, setting you back a massive fortune. Secondly, checkpoints scattered throughout the levels often spawn you right within an enemy, causing many a cheap hit. As it is, Nanoids could be a good game and it actually can provide some spurts of fun as long as you're properly equipped, but for the most part it's just tedious.

Icarus-X's main draw lies in the post 16-bit aesthetics, relying completely on polygons and yet looking surprisingly great. Instead of being all blocky and messy, at least the backgrounds really look the part. The first stage has you scale a huge pillar-like structure reaching far into the clouds, stage 2 takes place in front of two "cleaner" and more sterile looking towers complete with hatches opening and closing between them. Stage 3 lets a whole city full of skyscrapers zoom by beneath you, stage four takes place in space with an abundance of metallic structures and the fifth stage features what seems to be an alien base. That's it. Five rather short stages.

Probably in a desperate move after realizing that their game was a tad bit short, developer The Quadsphere split up the game into two different modes. Classic only lets you use a simple laser cannon which is good enough to rid yourself of most enemies in no time. Destroying enemies also earns you energy for the tap tap missile bar, subsequently allowing for heat seeking missiles to be launched after an eponymous "tap tap" on the screen. Despite featuring no color sensitive mechanics whatsoever, the visual style, the narrow hatches, the robotic voice announcing your chain's progress and these missiles still evoke quite a strong resemblance to Ikaruga. Or maybe it's just me as I can already hear some of you mourning how I dare bring up the beloved Treasure classic in such an instance. Redux mode takes you through the same five stages, adding in weapon upgrades left behind by destroyed squads as well as classic smart bombs replacing the missiles.

There are some more changes throughout the stages depending on which mode you choose. Counterbalancing the decrease in difficulty due to the more powerful weapon, enemies tend to throw heaps of suicide bullets at you in Redux mode and some enemies that used to resort to predictable movement patterns suddenly resemble enemies coming onscreen in Galaga...on all kinds of illegal drugs. They are spiralling so unpredictably it's nearly impossible to defeat them all and keep the chain running, especially as enemies in Redux mode can also sustain a lot more damage than in Classic mode. Some stage-specific changes can also be found like the hatches in stage two which stay static in Classic, boasting a small opening to fly through, they shut or open actively in Redux making for some cheap deaths without memorization. The first boss's two gun turrets don't seem to even care about your existence in Classic, firing in set intervals while constantly swinging around, whereas in Redux they actively target your craft.

Both modes are neither all that different from another nor anything special on their own merits. Icarus-X is filled to the brim with uninspired enemies moving in formations just as uninspired. It could at least be a run of the mill shooter with great background visuals if it wasn't for the sloppiness in execution. The first boss in Classic Mode for example has two turrets theoretically doling out well-planned patterns that can be dodged by either moving around them if they are together too densely or by flying straight through the eye of the storm. The interval between their shots seems to be timed wrong however, so sometimes the curtains leave no space to get through. Another unnecessary nuisance is how the backgrounds, as pretty as they may be, only serve to confuse. The first level tower is a prime example with its fast pace and shifts to the left and right plus the blue light strips quickly moving by, resembling potentially lethal lasers. The last boss is the worst offender in this regard as one of its attack patterns consists of red laser beams that look just like some red beams in the background.

And the last boss is already made bad enough by a green laser attack that leaves way to little space to dodge. I can't exactly put my finger on why that is, but for some reason dodging certain attacks in the game is made painfully more difficult than it should be. Maybe the hitbox is too large, the collision detection is a bit off or it's the whole layout that often has you obstruct your view on formerly seemingly harmless bullets with your finger. Whatever it is, one thing that certainly has you scratching your head is the decision to make the bottom half centimetre of the screen inaccessible. By the end of the day Icarus-X does have two drastically different styles of play, though found outside of the choice between Classic and Redux: It constantly alternates between being utterly mediocre and frustrating.

Citing the Atari VCS classic River Raid for this shoddy piece of code is nothing but an insult, as the two games don't even share any similarities beyond both being vertical shooters. No rivers, no fuel gauge, (nearly) no fun.

River Raid F22 throws only tanks and jets at you, changing color and growing sturdier with every new level, but otherwise not changing much. Despite looking different, all stages pretty much play the same, only growing in difficulty suddenly after stage 3, and occasionally lowering enemy diversity even more, as stage four is only inhabited by tanks. The first few stages are boringly easy, with enemies quickly exploding and health refills regularly flying across the screen. Then, however, as your arsenal is growing with an infinite stock of homing missiles and three smart bombs per stage, especially the jets suddenly become nigh impossible to down, requiring you to constantly spam missiles and keep away from any hazard.

What's more, River Raid F22 is visually bland and often ugly (a clearly visible cut marks the point of the surface cycling again and again), the sound is equally bland with the effects often drowning the music entirely, and the direct touch controls work only well until you decide to use the homing missiles. This requires the tap of a virtual button on the left, which the game often interprets as you trying to move your plane to the button's position. So as you keep a finger on your plane and tap the button, you'll jump to that position for a brief moment before reappearing in your old position again, often making for cheap hits. The first three or so stages are mildly fun, but still wouldn't warrant any money to be dished out for the game, so unless you can get it for free and only need it to waste a couple of minutes, you had better completely ignore its existence and get one of the true River Raid homage on the iPhone.