Tailspin

Five minutes of fun flying

Reviewed by DFox from orangefoxgames.com

Tailspin by U Got Games is at best a decent attempt at the top-down shooter genre, and that depends on how lenient you are with the word “decent”.

The main idea of the game is that you are a warplane who flies around the screen from a top-down perspective while shooting at enemy fighters. The arrow keys are used to move, and the “f” key is to fire.

The gameplay in the game is good, but it gets really repetitive. The plane control is responsive, and the flying does feel surprisingly natural. There are no upgrades that you can get for your fighter, and you just use the same bullets the whole time. No speed upgrades, plane upgrades, or anything to build on the initial gameplay options. The graphics in the game are pretty good, but there aren’t too many of them. The backgrounds are simple, but part of the problem is that each level only has one static background because each level is only one screen and going off the screen just brings you back on the other side. The only advantage that element has is it requires a little more skill because you are able to use it to your advantage against enemies. The sound in the game is adequate, but that doesn’t make up for not having any music during the actual game.

The game offers one mode of play, which is a level-based progressive mode. In each level, a few waves of enemies come at you, and after you eliminate all of them, you fight a “boss”. There are a number of problems with the level system. First, I found very little deviation between levels. Each level had a different background, some different planes, but the actually gameplay was basically the same. The only way the enemies improved was by becoming faster. At some points, enemy planes moved so fast that their flying looked painfully unnatural. But the tragic flaw in the level system had to do with the difficulty. The levels became terribly difficult after advancing only a few. Now, I see no problem with making levels difficult, but when you have such simplistic gameplay with no upgrades, the game gets incredibly boring after trying to beat the exact same thing ten times. At the beginning of each level, you receive a level code that allows you to jump right back to it at any time via the main menu. That was a good idea, but it was overshadowed by a huge annoyance. You get three lives, and after you lose those three lives you have to go back to the main menu and enter the level code again. This was completely pointless because you can just jump back to the level anyway.

If you just base this game on its actually gameplay, it’s pretty good because of the fairly natural flying and responsive controls. That factor is quickly overshadowed by the repetitiveness and lack of deviation which cause the game to become boring ever so quickly. The replay value simply isn’t there because the difficulty level wears the game out to the point where it becomes boring on the first few levels. With some powerups and a more extensive set of enemies, this game could have been great and offered tons of replay value.


Click here to play Tailspin






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