Fresh off of their fantastic quirky action-RPG Fastar!, Cat in a Box games are returning to the game that kicked off their App Store career with Blue Defense: Second Wave. The original game was a well-received shooter that had you defending a blue planet of approximately 6.7 billion people from invading red forces, using the accelerometer to tilt left and right to change your direction of fire. Second Wave follows roughly along the same line of thinking, but with graphical and gameplay enhancements.
One of the big additions to the game is the ability to set up points that you can fire at - by either dragging a finger to where you want to shoot at, or by double tapping to lock where you want to fire. Each target you set, up to 10, reduces the power of your main stream of fire, so you don't want to just set a bunch of targets and not worry about it as it will make your main firing stream that much less effective. Also helping you out is a new planetary laser beam, activated by dragging out from your planet in the direction you want to fire, but you only get to use this three times per game, so use them wisely.
The game still makes you play in each possible orientation of your device, but the transitions from wave to wave are smoother, as the game just simply adapts your view as each wave comes in, without any popups: it's all smooth gameplay transitions from wave to wave. Sadly, the count of humans doesn't recover as time goes on, so all damage must be treated as permanent. The game lacks any kind of music or sound effects in this pre-release version, and much could change when the final version comes out, but the game as it currently stands shows promise towards making this be a worthy sequel to the original, when it launches in the near future, hopefully by the end of September.
