Tilt to Live (iPhone)
iPhone integration (About)
- Save state: No
- iPod music: Yes
- Status bar: No
App Store Links: Purchase
- Version: 1.0
- Price as reviewed: £1.19
- by One Man Left
It isn’t often that you can’t put a game down in order to write a review, but that’s exactly the predicament we found ourselves in when experiencing Tilt to Live. Incredibly like Starball in many ways, this title by One Man Left has a different approach. It is an all out war between you and the army of vengeful red dots that come at you in hordes, and you have a deadly arsenal of weaponry to take them out.
Cleverly, the most powerful of these are tucked away in achievements—score big or meet another certain condition and you may get a new ability. They range from homing missile clusters, to ice bombs, nukes, offensive shields, vortexes and more, and there is always three of them dotted around the screen waiting for you to reach them and use. The shields are inevitably the most useful as they can get you out of tricky spots, but the best strategy is usually just to go for all of the power ups and use them as aggressively as possible.
Unique to this game is a calibration option that provides three default control schemes that should satisfy most positions that you’d like to hold your device in. If not, there is a custom calibration feature, but we didn’t find it necessary. The controls really are perfect—there isn‘t one single downside to them as far as we can make out. Tilt to play, tap to pause. And it’s precisely this kind of simple scheme that makes the game so accessible—coupled with the achievement system and you have plenty of reason to replay; even if you don’t care about that social networking feature you can still have a blast.
Eventually you come across the main tactic of the game; in the green shield power up lies a nuclear blast which triggers when you hit an enemy; plus this shield doesn’t fade or go away, making it the perfect time bomb to extend your combo. You learn to attack the dots instead of merely avoiding them, skyrocketing your combo meter; vortexes tend to help a lot even if they can suck you and power ups in with dots. Big combos lead to bigger scores and eventually you’ll be clocking hundreds of thousands with ease.
Overall, we’ve had a lot of fun playing Tilt to Live, and that’s mostly because of it’s excellent control scheme, great sound design and fun, addictive gameplay. You’ll definitely want one more go, and we’d certainly recommend it at its low price of £1.19.
Grade: B, Great
Tackling tough achievements earns you rewards; but playing Tilt to Live is a reward unto itself. We can’t put it down.
