Vertigore Games’ Pacific Defense puts you in the role of a World War II anti-aircraft gunner as you fight ever-increasing waves of Japanese fighters and torpedo assaults working to destroy your ship. As in a first-person arcade game, you focus on a heads-up display and tap the sides of the iPad to fire your machine guns. Combined with the vintage radio clips and grainy, grayscale graphics, this creates an immersive feels that pulls you in over the course of the game. When you’re overwhelmed, power-ups such as additional health and smart bombs that clear all the enemies from the screen help even the odds and clear the level in the designated amount of time.
Unfortunately, this is where the good news ends. Vertigore Games may have overreached its bounds by throwing in a cool-in-principle Augmented Reality mode that lets you sit in a rotating chair and swivel to rotate the gun turret and fight off oncoming targets. Sadly, this feature doesn’t work so well, and with no sensitivity or calibration settings, it feels too gimmicky. Yes, the game’s 3D sound works with headphones and the realistic sound of gunfire (and your shipmates screaming in agony if you let a bomb or torpedo hit the boat) is presented in outstanding quality, but it seems easier to simply use the iPad’s standard accelerometer feature to acquire your next target than to rely on this.
The game’s rough edges are plentiful. Occasional crashes to the Home screen make progressing that much harder. The app refuses to flip to a horizontal position that allows you to use headphones without constantly hitting the headphone jack with your left hand during gameplay. And small but critical items, such as the incoming torpedoes you’re supposed to shoot to save the boat, are almost invisible to the naked eye.
Pacific Defense has potential, but additional rounds of beta testing seemed necessary before shipping this off to the App Store. Everything could change with a few software updates, but between now and then, Vertigore had better put some coffee on -- there’s work to be done.
Pacific Defense 1.1
COMPANY: Vertigore Games
CONTACT: www.vertigore.com
PRICE: $1.99
REQUIREMENTS: iPad running iPhone OS 3.2 or later.
Good graphics and sound; addictive gameplay.
Buggy performance and occasional crashes. Augmented Reality feature shows promise but needs some form of user calibration. Poorly designed display mode makes using headphones with the iPad cumbersome.
