Details
- Genre: Third-person shooter
- Price: $2.99
- App version: 1.2
- Reviewed on: iPhone 3G, version 4.2.1
Pros
- It’s a shooter
Cons
- Crashes most of the time you try to start it
- Long, annoying load times
- No way to strafe
- Repetitive, tedious, annoying gameplay
- Too expensive for what it is
- Extreme difficulty due to design
Reading the app description for Assault Commando, you will be extremely mislead. Reviewers boast great controls, outstanding graphics and gameplay. This is not the case.
First, the game crashed three times before I could get it to work. I believe it happened because each time I started the game, I received a text message, but this is no excuse. That’s the main feature of playing games on a cell phone: you can still receive messages in the middle of a game. It also crashed without receiving a text message. 90% of the time I start the app, it crashes.
Second, the load times are incredibly too long. This game isn’t advanced at all. The graphics are decent, but nothing complex or incredible at a technical level. Load times should be short and not make the player impatient, but unfortunately that’s all it does, and makes wanting to play the game not very enjoyable.
The controls can do some work. They’re not bad, as your character moves around just fine, but there is no way to strafe. This means that you need to aim at your enemy with the control stick and tap the fire button. This is okay, but this causes you to constantly run in a different direction, wait for the enemy to stop shooting, then face them again and start shooting, then move again when they shoot. This breaks the gameplay, making it slow, repetitive and tedious, the exact opposite of what you expect a shooter to be. Shooters should be fast-paced and exciting, but this game is just dull.
My main complaint, however, is that the enemy’s projectiles are exactly the same as the player’s. There is no difference, so most of the time you don’t know if you’re shooting or if they are. This makes the game incredibly difficult, even on the Easy setting. You can move out of the way and shoot from a different direction, but then the enemy does the same thing, again, making it difficult to know which projectiles are whose.
The game is practically unplayable due to the crashing, load times, controls and difficult, confusing gameplay. It offers nothing new or original, just another top-down shooter lost in the endless ocean of “games” that try to be games. The last time the app was updated was October 19th, 2010, so don’t expect the game to get any better anytime soon.