Tag: Etolis: Arena »

After the rush that came at the end of last year, 2011 has been relatively slow with the game releases. This pause is coming to its end, as Chillingo has started ramping up their release schedule here in 2011. After starting the year up with the likes of Infinity Field, Chillingo's first games of February are a couple of games that are not quite from the same family tree: Etolis: Arena and Mummy's Treasure.

Etolis: Arena is a dual-stick shooter, developed by Facet Studios. You play as a space marine, who must try to escape from his imprisonment by an evil alien bug horde, by surviving a variety enemy waves. The game features a variety of weapons for you to use, and different game modes. There's Dronez mode, where you use small weapons to take out the enemy waves that keep taking you out. As well, there are modes that make you use specific weapons to take out enemies, each one creatively entitled Rockets mode, and Hammers mode, as they make you use rockets and hammers, respectively.

Next up, from FizzPow Games, is Mummy's Treasure. This one involves far less violence than Etolis: Arena does, being a puzzle game. Your goal is to collect all the treasure in a given level, while removing all the mummy and skeleton heads. Of course, it's not that simple - if it were, it wouldn't be a puzzle game. Gravity is often topsy-turvy in the pyramids of Mummy's Treasure, and you'll have to think quick in some levels, as some levels are designed to where you'll need to use your reflexes and quick timing to complete your goal.

While there might not be much in common between the two games, there is at least one thing. Both games come with support for the iPhone 4 and iPod touch 4th Generation's Retina Display, and are unviersal apps, supporting the iPad natively as well. See? Squishing dead bugs and collecting ancient treasure aren't so different after all. Both of these disparate experiences are now available from the App Store.

Dual stick shooters, like tower defense games, word puzzles, physics puzzles, match-3 puzzles, and line drawing games are a dime a dozen these days. Plop a Rambo-like guy down onto the screen and let him go around killing anything and everything, and there you have it, a winning dual stick shooter. Well, you had a winning dual stick shooter. After the Minigore craze died down, so did the monotonous genre.

Etolis aims to end the monotony by changing the formula: they're putting the game in a space/Halo-like setting and adding some environmental segments to aid the gameplay. By "environmental segments," I mean walls, something that not many dual stick shooters go for. Instead of the drab square map with arbitrary borders, the "arenas" in Etolis rope you in with walls and holes and such, making the game seem more like a real shooter than a gimmicky dual stick killfest.

Etolis also offers a Gladiator type of story, where you, the brave UFA (United Frontal Alliance) soldier gets captured while saving escaping civilians. Instead of being killed though, you are assigned to fight in the arena for the Queen's entertainment.

With the gladiator arena type setting, it is up to you to kill wave upon wave of enemies with a whole slew of weapons and special abilities to work with. Judging on the action in the preview movie, I'd say that that Etolis could possibly be good enough to revive this slumping genre, but we'll all get to be the judge of that upon launch.

Expect Etolis to launch sometime in mid October to late November.