Five Minutes Before (The End of the World) review
:: ROUGH FLIGHTPrice: $1.99
Version: 1.0
App Reviewed on: iPhone 5
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What would you do in the five minutes before the end of the world? Would you just sit back and watch it all burn? Or would you fly a rescue craft and pick up as many people as possible before the bombs went off?
Technically, it makes more sense to do the former. After all, if the world is ending, where can you possibly hope to find safety? The only theoretical option is the Moon, and that place has that small "no atmosphere" problem.
But Five Minutes Before (The End of the World) by Odenis Studio isn't a game about going gently into the dark of the night. You're determined to survive, and to rescue as many people as possible before it all goes wrong.
Time, the apocalypse, or the controls - which is your biggest enemy?
Five Minutes Before is a flying / physics game. You pilot a drone craft capable of picking up potential survivors and delivering them somewhere safe - wherever that happens to be.
There's an element of time-management here as well: You have five minutes to pick up all the evacuees in an area, but your craft's battery is pretty inefficient, so you have to land on the city's helipads to recharge.
When you land, you're given a choice: Evacuate with your current cache of survivors (however small), or keep going in hopes of saving everyone in the area before the deadline.
It's a tough choice, because the aircraft you use in Five Minutes Before is purposefully hard to control. One side of the screen controls the throttle; the other steers the ship. It's extremely easy to go way off the rails and wind up lost in the wild blue yonder, miles away from useful targets of any kind.
You must take your time if you want to rack up any kind of a score in Five Minutes Before- but time is obviously not on your side.
The bottom line
Five Minutes Before definitely isn't for everyone. Mastering your craft requires repetition and patience, and no doubt some players will drop out in the first few minutes. Those that remain will find a pretty rewarding experience though.
Still, the game could definitely use an improved radar. As it is, relying on visual cues to find survivors is tricky, and wastes a great deal of battery power.
If a world-ending challenge doesn't sound like the kind of thing you want to deal with, don't bother with Five Minutes Before. If you live for rough physics games though, definitely try saving a few souls.