#ysnet

Another Apple Arcade title that caught my eye was this rail shooter. It seems to mash up two Sega classics: Space Harrier (flying person with a gun) and Panzer Dragoon (the lock-on shooting mechanic). Directed by Yu Suzuki through his company Ys Net, otherwise known for Shenmue 3, it certainly has that Sega pedigree! (He also directed the original Space Harrier you see, although he wasn't involved with Panzer Dragoon.)

The game kind of throws you in initially, so you might think it's a simple arcadey experience. Only after failing your first run does it reveal its broader scope (although the game itself doesn't shy away from oddly quoting Suzuki himself saying that the arcade mode is the real game and everything else is just extra). By defeating enemies in the main mode you gradually accumulate stars which unlock nodes in an "Adventure" map. These give you all sorts of things: extra max health, new weapons, charges for a slowdown ability, new cosmetic gear, etc.

This is how Air Twister artificially encourages a player to do extra runs of the main game's 12 stages, although I had fun trying out the different weapons by retackling the short campaign. Also unlockable are new modes of play, only most of them seem especially superfluous, not to mention expensive in stars since you only unlock individual stages at a time for these modes.

As for the game itself, it's pretty decent. Rail shooters like this often have trouble effectively depicting the depth of incoming projectiles to help the player avoid them, and this one certainly has that problem. As someone who grew up on Lylat Wars the enemy placements and formations seem a bit standard as well, and the basic combat lacks that visceral impact. The graphics have quite good fidelity but this seems to have come at the cost of model and texture pop-in, as well as occasional frame stuttering, which you really don't want with an action game like this.

Promotion for the game boasts of its touch and swipe controls, which I didn't test at all. I just used a controller for a more traditional experience, which the upcoming console port would seem to confirm is going to win out as the default scheme. Perhaps as a consequence of designing around direct touch control, there is no crosshair to help out controller players which makes lining up your lock-ons more difficult... or maybe that's part of its Space Harrier legacy, which also lacked this feature. Planet Harriers had a crosshair, pout pout.

An interesting feature of this game is that it represents a collaboration with Dutch music artist Valensia. His heavily Queen-inspired prog rock songs (a mix of old hits and newly composed tracks for this game) grant a very novel "rock opera" feel to the game experience. I don't tend to like lyrical songs in my video games, and they didn't really try to time the action to the music, but even so it's pretty cool to prominently feature this kind of music in a game.

Like many Apple Arcade games, this has the uncomfortable feel of hybridisation between console and mobile game design. It has daily and weekly goals, premium currencies, and even the dreaded timed events. The latter ran for just a month at a time last year (three in total) and their exclusive cosmetics are now inaccessible. I loathe this practice, and they seem to have stopped it, presumably while focusing on the console port. The app icon still hasn't even been changed away from a seasonal event which has been over for eight months. Baffling.