Siberia is cold. Famously cold, so the abundance of ice in Siberian Strike comes as no surprise. It's an arcade-style vertical shooter where you use your finger to control a plane. Whenever you've got your finger on the screen your plane fires, so the controls are perfectly simple.
Thankfully, your plane rests just in front of your finger, meaning you can always see it, unlike some other games of the genre that plonk your plane right underneath your finger. Although reasonably frantic, it's not so fast that you have to move you finger at a speed to cause it to smudge into a blur of movement.
The majority of your enemies are airborne, but there are also tanks, boats and grounded gun emplacements that try to blow you out of the sky. The enemies appear in squads, generally formations of planes, and if you manage to destroy the whole lot before they fly off, a bonus will appear. This might repair your plane, improve your firepower, give you another life or give you a special weapon.
Special weapons include the lightning gun and flamethrower. They run out after a fairly short while, but they're a lot more powerful than your standard guns. In fact, the upgrade path of your normal gun isn't that interesting. It stays as a stream of little yellow bullets, and the stream just gets a little larger with each pick-up you collect.
We rather enjoy it when shooters of this type go all out, letting you upgrade your weapon ???til it virtual fills the screen with hellfire, and it's a pity that all three of the planes you can choose from feature more-or-less the same weapons.
Each one has different ratings for speed and power, but when most enemies generally only take a hit or two to kill, the gap between them all isn't that pronounced. As you progress through the seven levels, you unlock new paint jobs for each of the planes too. Extra details like this mix-in with the excellent overall presentation to give Siberian Strike the unmistakeable mark of an A-class title.
A great feature that we sadly couldn't get to work was the multiplayer mode. It works over Wi-Fi, in co-op fashion, but when we tried to connect, the game couldn't find any other games. It's possible that players may have to be on the same network but, either way, it's a great idea.
Siberian Strike doesn't do anything revolutionary within the genre, but it's one of the best games of its type on iPhone. We award it with two thumbs up and four stars. |
