Hijinks Reviews: Helsing’s Fire

Publisher: Clickgamer Technologies Ltd
Platform: iPhone, iPod touch, iPad
Cost: $0.99 [iTunes Link]
Released: Jul 10, 2010
Version Reviewed: 1.0

I purchased Helsing’s Fire on the recommendation of my friend, Bob Sacamano (I told you about him in my last iPod game review). We were sitting around, shooting the breeze, and he mentioned this new game he was interested in trying. So we both downloaded it and gave it a whirl, and both came away with the same reaction, we’ll get into it a bit after the jump.

The idea of this game is to place a torch somewhere on the screen so that the light it emits hits all the various bad guys on the screen. This is made difficult by a variety of barriers placed throughout the level. As the game moves along, you must use a certain colored tonic to eliminate certain colored baddies. As far as I’ve played, there really doesn’t seem to be much more to the game other than that. You seem to collect more money the quicker you solve each area, but I haven’t yet reached the point where your amount of money really seems to matter, so I’m really not sure what good that does for you.

Portions of this game were challenging, just figuring out how to get the light shed in just the right areas was difficult to maneuver. The game is put together very well, it runs smoothly, and looks nice, but as far as I’ve gotten, it’s far too easy. It might completely screw up a game like this, but I think a better idea would’ve been for the baddies to move slowly out of the screen, or at least to have a time limit imposed to add a little challenge. This is basically what the ‘Survival Mode’ does, but it’s almost too hard that way… they’ve probably put a lot more thought into it than I have, so I’ll trust their judgement.

In their synopsis they claim that this is the kind of game that you ‘just have to play 1 more level’, and that’s the mark of a good game. The good news is that once you’ve beaten the game (which is only 3 stages long, with 30 levels per stage), you can play through it again and it’s completely randomized, so the game will never be the same 2 times in a row. I have to point out that even though the game boasts of 90 levels, each level only really takes about 30 seconds, so it’s not the deepest of games. But, and I keep coming back to this, what this game does, it does very well so I’d have no qualms recommending this to my friends they way Bob Sacamano brought it to me. Go get it.

Learning Curve: Easy
Fun Factor: 4 out of 5
Replayability: 3.5 out of 5

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