Review: Trisector
Modern iOS shoot-em-up done right
Arcade shoot-em-ups – games where you control a character or vehicle in an attempt to shoot down swarms of enemies while dodging impossibly large clouds of bullets – are a well represented and beloved genre on iOS. Even among the subset of games with MFi controller support, this is a well represented genre of game
What makes Trisector stand about among the rest is how appropriately iOS-centric it is. Trisector takes the shoot-em-up – a difficult genre to play, even with a controller – and eliminates many of the pitfalls other games in the genre often bring over from their original releases. Trisector manages to maintain a level of gameplay difficulty that will challenge veteran shooter fans, while providing a less daunting framework for newer players.
Trisector adds a modern iOS level selection system, as opposed to the limited lives common in arcade ports. It adds an (optional) auto-adjusting difficulty slider, where the strength of the enemies is balanced to the places you’re getting stuck. It incorporates a modern presentation with full widescreen at an extremely smooth framerate. All of these add up – the challenge of the game comes from the game itself, rather than from presentation issues.
Controller support in Trisector is well implemented – as I’d hope it would be, since I was one of the beta testers for it. Throughout the course of a few betas, we were able to polish out most of the controller issues that plague many other games.
Standard and Extended layouts are fully supported, the menus are completely controllable, the screen doesn’t fall asleep if left alone, button options are self explanatory and not hidden, control sensitivity is adjustable – basically, everything you’d want from a fully controller-supported game is represented here, and implemented well.
Fans of the shoot-em-up genre who are looking for something more than the same old classics should absolutely give Trisector a look. It takes the classic formula and uses it as a starting point to carve out its own identity.