Japan loves shooting games that look more like Space Invaders than Halo or Call of Duty. The objects are simple, the bullet patterns are beautiful, and you may never be more challenged by a video game in you life. There is a huge shoot-em-up culture in Japan centered around the sheer difficulty of games we Americans can hardly even pronounce, let alone excel at. This community of shooter fans has lead to some great indie developers making free games for multiple platforms just to spread the fun, and now these gems are becoming available on the iPhone.
Enter: rRootage. The beautiful space-shooter from indie developer Kenta Cho has been ported over to the iPhone by Lazrhog. This game is elegant in its simplicity. You have a little ‘ship’ on the bottom of the screen that you must maneuver through ever-changing waves of bullets while keeping your laser trained on the enemy. Basically, all you do is move. This may sound boring as hell to you, and you might be right, but if you’re a shooter fan, having something like this on the iPhone is heaven.
There are a whopping 40 stages and four different game modes that add up to a staggering combination of 160 combinations of game play. Keep in mind that this game is free and created by one man. These stages start off relatively simple and ramp up to sickeningly hard at a moderate pace. The different modes borrow from classic shoot-em-ups and offer unique takes on the genre, ensuring that rRootage will keep you coming back for more.
Playing the game requires you to have a steady, quick finger. You’ll physically be placing your finger on the phone’s screen, obviously, and your ship will mimic whatever movements are made with your finger. You don’t, however, have to keep your finger on your ship to move it, which is good because you don’t want your view blocked when you’re weaving in and out of the tiny spaces between bullets. The different modes require you to do different things with your other finger, usually making the ‘zoom’ gesture of a reverse-pinch. This will set off a bomb, allow your ship to absorb bullets, etc. depending on which game mode you’re playing.
From the standpoint of a fan of Japanese style shooters, you really can’t pass this game up. The graphics are plenty good for freeware and there is a huge amount of challenge to be had with rRootage. If you’re not a fan of the genre, you could still give it a shot. It’s free, so see if you like it. You might be surprised.
