Genre: Shooter
Developer: Assyria Game Studio
Players: 1
Retail Price: $3
Availability: iPhone
Bloodstream Raiders was an interesting experience for me. It was the game I took into the hospital with me while my wife was busy not being in labor like she was supposed to be. Instead of playing it, though, I wound up reading most of the time. Eventually I realized my reluctance to play the game was sort of a review in itself, because the game just isn’t very fun.
The premise is that you’re defending a person’s blood from infection, and takes the form of a sort of dual joystick shooter meets sidescrolling spaceship game (like Aegis Wing on XBLA and countless games before it). Enemies float from right to left, and if you don’t kill them it raises the body’s temperature; get too high and you lose. You can pick up bits that raise two different meters, one destroying all the enemies onscreen and the other lowering your temperature. Each level is a part of the body (stomach, liver, etc) that is cleansed at the end.
I appreciate the presentation, beginning with the ’start game’ button being a box to take your ‘thumbprint’ and carrying on through the level schematic. Once I got down to playing, though, the game was just ‘oh I missed that one, and another; you know, I don’t really care.’ I had some trouble with keeping my thumbs in the ‘joystick’ circles, at least at first, but that may be due to my unfamiliarity with the genre on the iPhone (whether or not the genre deserves to be on the platform at all is another article).
There’s nothing overtly bad about Bloodstream Raiders; there just wasn’t anything particularly good about it either. The app store is flush with games, including games that are mechanically nearly identical to this one, and so I think this needs to be classified as some of the chaff amongst the wheat.
