So... I've been playing a lot of 9mm tonight.
Firstly the good points - the gunplay is fairly decent and the game mostly feels ok to play. I use the double pistols a lot and they are quite fun to shoot.
Bad points though... pretty much everything else. The story and presentation are almost offensively bad. I was playing this with my wife looking over my shoulder and after a few minutes she asked "This game is kinda racist, right?" and tbh I don't disagree. So many offensive stereotypes that it becomes funny and then goes through that back out into stupid. The voice acting doesn't help either, where every latino character sounds like some kind of conservative propaganda or something, or like they're ripped from an 80s action movie. The mexicans are all "hey ese" and the black guy is all "yo homes", it's icky.
The graphics are pig ugly too, after an hour or so I realised that the visuals in screenshots are really just smoke and mirrors - the game uses the same N64-era low poly models and environments as other Gameloft games, it just dresses it up in blown out 'HDR' textures. The character models are hilarious bordering on terrifying.
The thing that gets me is that underneath all the offensive stereotypes and stupid story is that there is actually a mildly fun if half-baked game. A talented team could have made something tongue in cheek and mental with the exact same ingredients, whereas this is trying so hard to be street and to impress some 12 year olds that it can't even be called a parody of itself.
That said, I'm going to finish it.
One more mention of Roboto though, that game is the fucking shit. I so wish it had worked properly on the iPhone, it would probably be one of the best platformers on the system if it did. As it is, it's just one of the best on the iPad. It's perfect for speedrunning, it has a neat gravity gimmick and each world has an element that changes up the game pretty well. I'm up to the third world so far and I'm having a blast, although it is getting quite hard.
I've given Xtreme Wheels a good shake today too and it's not half bad for a Trials clone. The controls are a little odd (no forward/back arrows, just a slider) and the difficulty ramps up a little quickly but it sure is Trials on my iPad. Pretty much exactly what I wanted.
