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SE releases Arkanoid vs Space Invaders on iOS/Android

Camjo-Z

Member
After half an hour of clear sailing I found the first difficulty spike in the game.

How do you reliably beat stage 35 without being insanely good or lucky?

I spent like 7 tries attempting to beat that stage thinking it was impossible even with buffs... then realized the stage objective was to destroy all the blocks rather than the invaders.
 
This is fun, and it strikes me as extremely smart to retool failed gacha games into real games. It seems like a cost-effective, low-risk way to recoup some development costs. Any other games that have followed this route?

Not to my knowledge; sadly companies seem to prefer wiping their own games from the face of the Earth when they underperform. Man, how would I have loved to have a "proper game" version of Transformers Battle Tactics... :(
 

XaosWolf

Member
There's a character to unlock immediately by going into options and tapping the pixel face 10 times.

Games is pretty simple for now but its got some cool mechanics despite that.
 

Zonic

Gives all the fucks
I'm at stage 12 and I'm finding it brain dead easy. Not much fun in that imo.
Try hard mode once you clear a set of stages. You basically have half the time. Also, things will start to pick up after stage 30, & there's 150 of them, so I'm sure by the end, it'll be much higher in difficulty compared to the beginning.
 
It's $3.99 on Android...I snagged it earlier. I am not a mobile gaming fan but I instantly put my Google Opinions credit to work and grabbed it. As a long time Taito fan this is bliss. It's absolutely fantastic and worth the money. No in app purchase bullshit...cool tunes...and very polished. If anything it makes me wish it were on DS.

Grab it.



I dislike mobile gaming with a passion but the game plays fine. You control the Vaus from Arkanoid and it works decent enough with touch. Android version has controller support though too. But yes, I don't like touch myself...
You speak the truth womp. I don't particularly like many mobile games, but this one has me addicted. I am a sucker for both Arkanoid and Space Invaders so this was a no brainer pick up for me. Unfortunately, I don't have an Android compatible controller so I have been "rough housing" it with touch control. After awhile my index finger feels numb or tingly from the constant sliding required in this game.
 
Oh god, stage 63 is madness. All skills are rendered irrelevant because you can't kill anything until you break open their impregnable defenses, and so nothing drops. And by the time you break open those defenses you're out of time.

Make no mistake, this is a puzzle game that challenges you to learn new tactics at every turn. You have to actually start switching your equipped skill depending on the layout of each level. Skills will make the difference between success and failure more than half the time, and some skills are clearly designed to make hard mode levels even possible.

This is the one thing I want out of mobile games: depth.

I spent like 7 tries attempting to beat that stage thinking it was impossible even with buffs... then realized the stage objective was to destroy all the blocks rather than the invaders.

I feel like that didn't actually make it any easier! More than half my shots got blocked by that moving shield, and half the rest missed the blocks completely.

In the end I had to use Gather to get past that.
 

Camjo-Z

Member
I feel like that didn't actually make it any easier! More than half my shots got blocked by that moving shield, and half the rest missed the blocks completely.

In the end I had to use Gather to get past that.

All you really need to do is angle the ball just right once you get it so it bounces off of the top set of blocks repeatedly, and use Bob's skill to take out a good chunk of blocks, particularly the hard-to-reach last ones.
 
All you really need to do is angle the ball just right once you get it so it bounces off of the top set of blocks repeatedly, and use Bob's skill to take out a good chunk of blocks, particularly the hard-to-reach last ones.

It took until getting to stages 70-80 before I finally grasped that a lot of stages can only be cleared by making one or two good banking shots. And the game only gives you enough time to charge up the exact number of attacks you need.

What a tightly designed game.
 

Camjo-Z

Member
It took until getting to stages 70-80 before I finally grasped that a lot of stages can only be cleared by making one or two good banking shots. And the game only gives you enough time to charge up the exact number of attacks you need.

What a tightly designed game.

Yeah, it's this kind of formula that makes me both really enjoy this game and particularly despise the mobile F2P model. In a game like this, you know that when you reach a tough level it's down to you and your skill. The devs gain nothing by gating your progress with difficulty, they just want to challenge you. Had this been riddled with microtransactions, you'd never be able to truly know what their intentions were.
 

Zonic

Gives all the fucks
Holy crap, I think Great Thing has one of the best powers. He'll shoot a bunch of ships from underneath which seriously helps in a decent amount of stages. You unlock him by beating 20 bosses, but it counts if you just keep replaying the first boss stage over & over, so I'd recommend unlocking him that way.
 
It feels like they decided to give you a well-earned break at world 8 before the brick wall that is world 9. I thought the game was getting easier, but that was not the case.

Any ideas for stage 123? I haven't been able to hit the switches at all without already using Attack Mode twice, the second time with Armor Piercing (assuming I don't get screwed out of getting a skill drop). That leaves almost no time to get the core, and Armor Piercing is utterly useless for the core.
 

duckroll

Member
This game is REALLY polished. I'm impressed. Not only are the character skills varied and actually useful for different stage situations, but the stages get more and more tricky. I tried out Hard Mode for the gold medals and... wow it's really hard. Lol.

Great visuals, great music, great gameplay, great price.
 
I beat stage 150. Progress was basically steady for the rest of the game... while worrying about how the hell any of these later stages will even be possible on hard. Shield all the time? That takes away your opportunity to deal enough damage to finish under the time limit!

Beating all stages did not unlock the mystery option in the menu. ...Is this supposed to unlock by beating all stages on hard?
 
I've dug into the first three worlds of hard mode. The variety of challenges here is impressive.

At the basic level, there are levels where you get less time, but that almost always has an elegant solution. More terrifying are the levels where you get more time than on normal, or the levels where it's basically humanly impossible to catch all the bullets. You start contemplating attrition or sacrifice-style gameplay, because otherwise losing all your time is inevitable.

For example, I just finished stage 34 on hard, where I realized Ptolemy may be the most powerful assist (situationally) in the game. With the right setup you can freeze time indefinitely and recharge all the time you lost from damage, and then some.

So many games end by telling you how skilled your character has become. Here is a game where that complement at the end actually rings true for you, the player.
 
How do you deal with the horizontal spreads of 3-5 yellow bullets on hard?

I'm not sure if you're expected to be able to consistently catch them all, or if it's a signal to find another solution before your time gets grinded out.
 
I know, right? I just got 989k in ranked mode with him. Pretty much use him in most stages now

Well, I managed to beat all the bosses on normal and 6 bosses on hard before I had to start grinding repeat bosses for Great Thing.

So, using Great Thing feels like cheating... but the satisfying kind of cheating! And also the kind of cheating where you can't cheat yourself, weirdly enough. He lets you cheese levels where you can get screwed over by bad luck.

He does not get you past barriers of reinforced blocks, and he obviously doesn't come into play in levels where nearly nothing drops at all. On those levels... you will discover why Linka is obscenely powerful and unlocked only when you beat the game.

I just want to say that Stage 65 made me feel extreme rage. When I finally beat it tho... what a feeling.

Lol.

Stage 63 for me. Although it was the last "rage" level until like stage 123.
 
73 seems impossible. I've tried it with different skills and strategies and I'm totally at a loss.

I beat 73 with Iron Fossil. You need one good Attack Mode bounce that catches the ball against the back wall of the cage - activate Ball Booster to take out the blocks behind the switch. The important thing is that the added power from Ball Booster also applies to blocks.

That should let you hit the switch on your second Attack Mode so that you have enough time left to break through the front blocks with smashes.
 

duckroll

Member
I was wondering what you meant by activating the skill, then I realized I never went into the controls to see that there's a manual skill option. LOL. This is soooooooo much more useful for some characters! I think auto is more useful for the ones which you want activated immediately tho, like the UFO ones. Anyway, being able to manual activate the Attack Mode skills made that beatable. Thanks. :p
 

Elija2

Member
How do you deal with the horizontal spreads of 3-5 yellow bullets on hard?

I'm not sure if you're expected to be able to consistently catch them all, or if it's a signal to find another solution before your time gets grinded out.

It helps to know that you can touch bullets with any part of your ship to send them back, even the bottom of it, making it easy to catch bullets that have gone past you.
 
I was wondering what you meant by activating the skill, then I realized I never went into the controls to see that there's a manual skill option. LOL. This is soooooooo much more useful for some characters! I think auto is more useful for the ones which you want activated immediately tho, like the UFO ones. Anyway, being able to manual activate the Attack Mode skills made that beatable. Thanks. :p

Holy crap, I can't imagine playing it that way. The levels coming up...

Actually, I might turn auto back on for some levels. The ones where you need a shield up ASAP.

It helps to know that you can touch bullets with any part of your ship to send them back, even the bottom of it, making it easy to catch bullets that have gone past you.

Even knowing that, eventually you have 5-shot spreads that span the whole screen.

I think a diagonal swipe is working out better for those than a sideways swipe. (This game would be unplayable without touch controls.)
 
Any trick for when a shot gets mixed with a power down? Or do I just take the L?

Take the power down if it's indestructible blocks or invaders. Those don't really matter.

Take the time hit if it's slow or paralysis. A lot of times missing one or two shots does not matter at all on hard, but those two can make you miss many more shots.

If it's shrink, then it depends on how dense the bullets are on your stage.
 
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