Critical Wave resembles a mash-up of two previously covered games; the technological aesthetic of Circuit_Strike.One meets the fast paced, hectic gameplay (and auto pause feature) of Meteor Blitz. It’s more of the same dual stick shooter goodness that we’ve come to love from the platform, and certainly from the screenshots and trailer video it looks like an intense experience.

Your arsenal consists of two main weapons; a rapid firing cannon which shoots bullets that explode on contact and a slower laser that passes through enemies and hits multiple targets; you can toggle between these two at a whim. There’s also a special weapon that has a meter just above the right thumb-stick, tapping that activates several rockets which select targets automatically, and you can even buy a fourth weapon that acts like a bomb to remove a handful of enemies from the screen by double tapping on the right thumb-stick. The shop allows you to upgrade one ability at a time once you’ve killed enough enemies to activate it, and its entirely up to you what you choose to enhance.

Having multiple weapons is useless if there’s nothing on the screen to annihilate; luckily there is a whole swarm of geometric shapes out to hunt you down. They range from simple squares just floating about in space to triangles that will hunt you down, circles that employ a shield on a quarter of their radii and boss forms that combine many of these simple shapes together to form a larger entity. Indeed, the main boss isn’t one to give up easily as each time you face it there’s additional weapons and it is usually bigger than the last time. The game also employs some other hazards too; traversing the boundaries of the screen spawns defenders that try and block it off so that you’re not crossing the borders constantly, and mines appear at random on the map—leave them there and they will tear a chunk out of the map, rendering it impassable.

Playing the game is a lot of fun, doubly so because of the health system that rewards smart play and punishes blind travelling into laser beams. It’s constantly recharging and appears as a small circle around your ship if it takes a blow, but be warned that it can only save you from running into smaller enemies and taking low to medium laser fire. Whilst the game doesn’t save your progress exactly from where you were last (see Meteor Blitz) it will save from the last boss that you managed to defeat, which is better than nothing.

As you can tell from the media gallery below, Critical Wave is a striking looking game that demonstrates a good understanding of visual effects and graphical fidelity. There’s all sorts of presentational effects thrown in to enhance the experience, such as the rippling circuit board background, the dimming of the screen to highlight a boss, even the game’s statistics are displayed in real time at the bottom of the playing field. Whilst it isn’t as outstanding as its inspiration its certainly amazing in its own right.

So overall, we’re pretty impressed with this title. It’s a great little time waster, and you really can’t go wrong with the sale price of 59p. Go grab it, now!

Media gallery

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