Watermelon! is a gallery shooting game with a very bizarre choice of ammo... slices of watermelon. Well, watermelon peel; there’s no reason to waste that juicy deliciousness! Anyway the basic story is that robots are invading the earth and you play as this little yellow man who is attempting to single-handedly defeat them.

There are three types of robot in the game: the little monkey-like ones that run around and fire projectiles at you, the springy ones that bounce up and down unleashing a wave of blue bullets every so often, and lastly the egg shaped ones that roll about, then scorch you with their laser beams. Each of these enemies has clearly been carefully designed with their various attacks in mind, and together they’re a powerful force. Luckily you’re ready to fight back with an unlimited supply of tasty melon to knock them over and slip them up!

Tilting your device moves your character and swiping throws a fresh piece of melon towards the evil robots. These controls work pretty well, and the fact that they aren’t precision perfect doesn’t matter since you don’t have to hit the robots directly (they can just slip on the watermelon). In fact slipping up robots is a huge advantage because three slips sends them flying towards the moon. The only downside to this is the annoying “OH YEAH!” slow-mo screen that pops up, pausing the game for about three seconds. This interrupts the flow of the gameplay and we really hope the developers will change this in an update.

As well as slipping enemies up, up, up to the moon, there are a few more variations in the gameplay. For example in some levels the wind direction will change causing your watermelon to curve when you throw it, making some shots tricky and others impressive. Of course you can also curve the watermelon yourself by swiping left or right if you want to pull off those sweet moves. You can also replenish some of your health bar by collecting hearts that paper-thin characters (similar to yourself) drop, just make sure you don’t hit them! Of course the game has a wide variety of levels too, twelve of them to be exact. Each one increases the difficulty level so you start off with a pretty easy ride and eventually move to absolutely insane trip.

Watermelon! has a clean and crazy art style, similar to MUST.EAT.BIRDS’. All the characters are imaginative and look fantastic when they’re shooting the hell out of you. The backgrounds are also very unique with a cityscape, a desolate desert and a lush green forest, each presented in a simplistic fashion. Although what we really liked were the animations, such as your character quickly munching the watermelon and the background elements that shake just before an enemy pops out.

Nevertheless, despite the game’s terrific style and mostly exciting gameplay, we can’t fully recommend it. This is largely due to the lack of iPhone integration, specifically save state. The game never saves you progress and only allows you to start from a different level at certain points, this is hugely irritating at times and unfortunately affects the gameplay. We also found that we couldn’t listen to our own music instead of the incredibly memorable (and rather addictive) soundtrack. For 59p it is definitely worth a purchase if you enjoy the genre, but otherwise the negative points could really out-weigh the great gameplay if you aren’t extremely keen.

Media gallery

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Why not try...

---

• 

  N.Y.Zombies

• 

  Orbital Bombardment

• 

  Rabid Gophers

• 

  Battle Bears