Dual stick shooters are commonplace on the App Store, and they take all sorts of forms. The latest one to use this gameplay mechanic is Solomon’s Keep, a grim looking romp through underground dungeons, fighting off various skeletons, ghouls and other creatures. In theme it’s similar to Dungeon Defense, just that the environment is a lot darker—most of the randomly generated rooms are almost pitch black, only your staff poking a circle of light through.

Conceptually the game works really well; a somewhat forgettable story is paired with some fantastic enemies and spell effects, the most notable being a key that you can use as a portal to the outside world where you can buy equipment, items and abilities. Returning to the main world from this door acts as a checkpoint should you lose all of your life—if you haven’t activated it, you’ll respawn from the start of that floor. It is a system that works well, allowing you to retry as many times as you wish should you slip up.

You buy said equipment with gold that is liberally scattered around the area in chests and seldom dropped by enemies; bosses prove to be the most fruitful. In addition, life and mana is dropped from fallen foes, with life being scarcer. Mana is usually in plentiful supply if you have the right abilities including replenishment over time and it definitely helps to increase the mana that you can stockpile. Because there are no mêlée weapons if you run out of mana you can't attack, and later on you may only be able to deal limited damage without the additional abilities that you can add onto spells. There’s three types in the game, but fire proves to be the most effective as you can enhance it with splash damage and embers that drop from the blast, hurting enemies in that nearby radius.

Obtaining these abilities happens every time you level up although it’s annoying that you can only pick three randomly chosen powers that may not be what you wanted. We’d like to see some sort of skill tree where you could assign a set number of points (and re-assign them if you needed to), as there was one stage where we’d keep dieing after a level up because attacks weren’t strong enough to take down enemies.

Other frustrations are commonplace. The game isn’t terribly stable and may crash with a large amount of enemies on screen (exiting via the Home button should leave you right where you left off); the sound often glitches and crackles whilst your iPod music remains at a normal level; the thumb sticks can stick or worse, fail to respond unless you take your thumb off the device and put it back there; but the worst offender is the game over screen which will wipe all of your progress if you hit the main menu button even by accident. There’s no confirmation at all and that is completely unacceptable.

Although we lost all of a couple hours of progress with the game because of this glitch we decided to stick with it and it did reward. We’ve talked before about how well dual sticks work on the iPhone and they work just as well here (bar the unfortunate “sticking”). One other gameplay mechanic we really appreciated was the translucent, floating mini-map that did a fantastic job at guiding, and it can be toggled off if you’d prefer to do some exploring yourself.

On presentation, we can only fault the game for having a rather repetitive quality, with the monochrome environments staying the same from floor to floor. There is a balcony scene but it too takes a brush from the same palette; the only real colour comes from the player, magic attacks and outside the keep—perhaps that’s intentional but the environments would benefit from a greater scope of textures and foreground interest.

Despite its flaws though, the game plays really well. We can see ourselves giving it a wholehearted recommendation if the ability system wasn’t random and if the aforementioned glitches were fixed; right now it just needs more work. Note that the 59p price point is a special introductory offer that’s valid for a couple of weeks yet, just be careful because it isn’t fully finished yet.

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Review by Ben Briggs, December 10, 2009

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