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Game Review: Pollushot by Greg Lobanov (iPhone, iPad and Android)


Pollushot gameplay – this player has obviously had a bit of practise!

Available for brief period a fortnight ago Greg Lobanov’s Pollushot was officially published by YoYo Games at the end of last week.

Pirates vessels spewing pollution into the world must be taken out, by means of a player-controlled slingshot.

With such a premise you could mistakently think that this game was one of the entries into a YoYoGames.com competition but in fact the game was made specifically for publishing by YoYo according to Greg’s blog.

You start playing by using a finger to move your slingshot into position to catch purple balls which fall from the top of the screen at regular intervals. Tap to lock your movement and then draw back your slingshot and fire the ball at a selection of space pirate enemies which fly in from the top of the screen. Inflicting damage to a baddie results in a colourful debris being released which can be caught and fired back whereupon they cause more damage.

Occasionally I would unintentionally stop my slingshot and have to fire it from an undesirable location. It is worth noting you can’t fire down the screen.

Combo score multiplier bonuses are earned when you successively shoot pirates with the debris collected from the result of previous shots, so collecting fallen junk is the way to go. However, if you fail to catch any debris you never have to wait long for another purple ball to appear which can be caught to restart the attack process.

When you first play you have to be patient waiting for a safe moment to appear whilst you dodge incoming threats. The pirates threaten you with a variety of weapons including spinning orbiting blades and by firing bullets and lasers towards your position. If you do get hit by these you can tap to choose where you respawn, hopefully avoiding any rapid repeated deaths.

Most of the pirates require multiple shots to kill, so it’s best to start by focusing your efforts on disabling some of their weaponary until you have a route for your shots to enter into the heart of the ship.

Over time movement becomes intuitive and it is possible to build up large combo bonuses and quickly dispose of pirates.

Two control options are available, the sensible A and the hyper-sensitive option B which I couldn’t figure out how to use effectively.

There are 3 games worlds. One, City, is unlocked when the game begins. Access to the Reactor and Oil Fields levels can be gained once you have played games with scores totalling up to a certain number of points.

A collection of game achievements can be won. Greg is currently third in the OpenFeint leaderboard with YoYo Games’ Sandy Duncan in fifth place.

Backed by orchestral music Pollushot is a fun original and fast-paced arcade game. Well worth a play I’d say.

Pollushot is on sale at the Apple App Store and Android Marketplace for $0.99 (£0.61).

Pollushot by YoYo Games
A video of Greg working on the game back in February:

What do you think?

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