Missile Escape raced onto the Xbox Live Indie marketplace last week. Time to kick the tires, and light the fires, and we’ll see just how well this game turned out.
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Missile Escape offers two modes of gameplay – missions and survival. The concept is easy, you fly a plane using a top-down view, and missiles randomly fly around the screen to try and destroy you. There is no health bar, there are no random power-ups, and you cannot shoot return fire. The game is challenging, and you’ll be destroyed in one hit, and if you’re easily frustrated, consider yourself warned.
In the mission mode, you can progress through 20 levels, and starting with the first, you avoid one missile that randomly flies around the screen. As you progress, each level adds another missile, and because there is no pattern, you have to keep your focus and quickly maneuver around them. If you are destroyed, you can restart that particular level, and you have unlimited lives. After level 8, the game becomes rather frustrating, even on the easy difficulty. You will find yourself restarting the levels very often.
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Survival mode starts off just as the mission mode would. You start by avoiding one missile, and every few seconds, a flashing indicator warns that another missile is being added to the mix. As soon as you’re hit, it’s all over and you start back at the beginning. If you’re extremely good at Missile Escape, you may actually enjoy this mode. But, if you’re like me and become very easily frustrated, you’re going to want to stick to mission mode, where you can at least restart from the point you left off at.
The game offers 3 levels of difficulty, but even the easy mode gets difficult rather quick. Extras include various plane to unlock, which give you a big speed boost, but sometimes this makes the game tougher, rather than easier. There’s a completion tracking system as well, so you’ll always know how much of the game you’ve completed. To unlock all planes, it would seem you have to complete the game on every difficulty in each mode.
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The game supports some decent graphics, with well-defined planes, missiles, and the fiery trails while flying around the screen. There are two background images while playing the game – Atlantic ocean or Pacific ocean. Both look pretty decent, with a dynamic ripple effect, but nothing beyond that. Sound effects are simple with a slight rumble while flying, and the sound of your plane exploding, which becomes familiar quickly. The background music is catchy, but it’s a very short loop, and gets tiresome after a short while.
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Missile Escape is a fun title, but you may find it gets frustrating quickly due to lack of patterns in the missiles, causing you to constantly explode one time after another. On easy mode, the game can be beaten in under 20 minutes, but if you enjoy a challenge, you could spend a couple hours with this title eventually. Missile Escape will only set you back 80 :MSPoints: so head over to the Marketplace and check it out.
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