App Review: Platypus

Price: $4.99



I am a huge fan of side-scrolling shooter games. I've played more than I can imagine to count on my computer. Sliding my mouse up and down, back and forth, shooting all the bad guys and picking up random power-ups for better guns or shields. Platypus is no exception to the rule of fun. Keep reading for my full take on this game!

Platypus has great graphics, they are very cartoony, but not in an annoying and ugly way. Considering everything in this game is made out of clay, it had to be a tad on the cartoony side, and believe me it works! It's hilarious to watch all the enemy ships splat as if you smashed them with a hammer. Controls are easy too. You have the option to use tilt controls, or touch controls, but honestly if tilt is an option why wouldn't you? Gameplay itself is simple. Your platypus ship flies itself you simply decide whether it rises or falls, and when it speeds up or slows down. Shooting is also something your ship does continuously, making it easy to focus on flying since the guns are always firing. You can however turn off firing if the need arises, more on that later. As you fly through each area enemy ships will fly towards you from the right side of the screen, each one you destroy will give you points (and a cute splat explosion). Everytime you reach a new interval of 10,000 points you will gain an extra life (10,000, 20,000, 30,000 you get the point). Be careful though when shooting, because if you run into an enemy ship, it will destroy them but it will destroy you, too. Kamikazes can't live long enough to be heroes and save the wordl!

There are five types of enemies in my eyes. The first type are your normal type, they simply fly towards you and shoot every once in a while, very very easy to destroy no problems. The second type are exactly like the first type, but orange. The orange enemies will travel in a tight-knit group and if you destroy all of them you will receive a star, if you pick up the star it is equal to an upgrade to your guns. The third type of enemy are the MOST annoying, mines floating via balloon. There are a few stages where you will come across these a lot! You have two methods to destroy these mines, the first is to shoot the balloon it is floating from and it will simply fall back to the ground away from your ship, the second method is to shoot the mine, in which case it will blow and a massive amount of small schrapnel will fly towards your ship. The schrapnel from these mines is increasingly hard to avoid the more action there is on the screen. Fourth and foremost there are "mini-bosses". Mini-bosses are larger than normal enemies and won't leave the screen until you destroy them. They take much more damage and fire back a lot faster. Once destroyed however, they will release fruit! Bundles of bananas or grapes, when you collect these you get points (points = extra lives remember), so grabbing these is always a good idea. The final type of enemy is the boss enemy. As you can imagine this enemy takes a lot of damage and fires on you just as much.

The game itself isn't extremely difficult, it has it's moments of toughness but normally you have enough lives to make it through things. There are a few features I think could be added to make this game really stand out in the "side-scrolling shooter" world. First of all, more areas. Everyone likes their games to last forever, so more levels is something people would always ask for, and honestly I wouldn't be surprised if the developer had this in mind anyways. Secondly, I would love to see the ability to pick between three ships to start with. Maybe one that is extremely powerful, but weak on armor, one extremely armored but not as powerful, and the normal mid-range craft. That would give the pros the ability to test themselves with the weak armored ship to see how well they could do, and give beginners a few more hits before being destroyed to get a better grasp on how to play. One final thing I would like to see is more upgrades. It would be nice if the ship could take more than one hit before being destroyed, and give us the ability to pick up hearts to increase our ships health, and shields to increase our shields. In between each level we could be given credits or money based on how well we did in the previous level that we could use to purchase upgrades for our guns or shields, or even new parts for our ship making it faster or more agile.

All in all Platypus is an extremely fun game! It's one that I would recommend even to younger children since everything is made of clay there isn't any explosions (and you can even see little men parachuting from the mini-bosses when you destroy them, so no one actually dies). I look forward to updates to this game and it is definetly one that is going to remain on my iPhone for a long time to come instead of just locked away in iTunes somewhere.

Tips & Tricks
Just thought I would list off a few things I learned playing this game to give everyone a little bit of an edge!
1. Each time you get a star powerup, be sure to shoot it a few times before you pick it up. Each time you shoot it it spins and becomes a different color. Each color upgrades your gun a different way.
2. When you upgrade your gun, you only have a specific amount of ammo. If enemies aren't on the screen yet, turn off your guns as to not waste the ammo.
3. Focus more on bosses and mini-bosses. These units give upgrades, fruit, and lots of points. The little ships aren't as important as these.
4. Don't kill yourself trying to catch that last ship just before it escapes from the screen, 9 times out of 10 you will just end up colliding with it and losing a life, it isn't worth it.
5. When you destroy a mini-boss and the fruit comes, shoot the fruit before you grab it. A bunch of bananas will give you 250, but each individual banana gives 100. Most of the time you will get more points from a group of individual fruits than you would have grabbing the bunch.

Rating: 4.5/5

If you own this game yourself leave your thoughts and comments below. Let us know what you think!

Download Platypus HERE.