Developer/Publisher: Press Start Studio/Bulkypix
Genre: Action
Price: $2.99 (Available at Launch for $0.99)
Acquired: Pre-Release Review Copy Provided (identical to App Store release)
Verdict: Game is beautiful to look at, and fun in short bursts, but can get repetitive over time
Pros: Oh my, this game is incredibly drawn and animated – it must be seen to be believed. Game is violent zombie-killing fun in short bursts.
Cons: Limited variety of enemies; game gets repetitive in large doses; movement controls can be tricky with jumping

I have often pondered as I review games, what value does the graphical presentation have? Can a game’s beauty increase the inherent quality of the game? Could a game’s graphics make a flawed game better? I struggled with the answer to this question while playing Twin Blades.

The first thing when playing Twin Blades that you will notice is that this game is beautiful. The still art looks fantastic, yes, and the game is quite colorful, but in motion, this game is even better. The nun protagonist and all the zombies she kills are so fluidly animated unlike anything else on the iPhone – it’s exceptionally professional, and impressive not just for the iPhone but for 2D games as a whole. You have to see this game in motion, and I’ve recorded an attempt to show this off:

The actual gameplay is a 2D hack ‘n slash game like Inkvaders or Sparta, where waves of enemies come at you, and you kill them, collecting their hearts as currency to spend on upgrades at between-level shops. You have 2 attacks: a large sickle, and a projectile weapon. Your sickle has you spin around (so you can attack enemies just behind you), and can be used to refill your energy bar, which is depleted by using your projectile attack. At the start, you only have a basic gun to use, but you can spend your zombie hearts on other weapons like a machine gun, flame thrower, and my personal favorite: the one that makes a huge explosion, whose weapon icon is noted by the huge explosion.

Yeah, the one with the explosion is the one I recommend. They'll all kill efficiently enough, though. Hooray for zombie murder!

The controls for the game are basic – you have icons on the right side to use your sickle, fire your weapon, and change your weapon, and on the left side is an on-screen analog stick. You can move left and right, and can jump up by moving the stick up, which is something that bothers me in games that take this option. Jumping by pressing up on a d-pad is annoying, because it makes it difficult to jump straight up without moving left and right, or accidentally jumping when you don’t want to. This happens in this game occasionally, due to the nature of this control method. The controls themselves are decent, not spectacular, sometimes you will have movement issues due to the small size of the movement stick, but it was hardly a game-breaking issue for me.

Twin Blades is fun, but as with other games in this hack ‘n slash genre , can get repetitive after a period of time. There’s just not a lot of variety – the environments are impressively drawn, but they repeat themselves as they go on. There just isn’t a lot of variety to the game, either. It’s run, kill zombies, repeat until you die (in the game, presumably) – there’s not much more beyond it. You may reach a point where you just get bored by the one-track gameplay, which is this game’s big flaw – it gets boring after a while. More enemy types would be a great addition, as just killing the same zombie after a while gets to be a bit boring.

This game has its flaws, but it’s also inordinately beautiful, and that seems to excuse some of its issues – with its great graphics, it’s certainly fun to visually experience, and that does add value to the game. On its own, the game is decent – but the surrounding package adds value and quality to it. I have wondered if a good-looking game can add to the actual quality of the game – I think that the game needs to have the base goodness to it in order for the outlying elements to add some degree of quality to it. In this case, I feel it is the truth. Twin Blades is a joy to behold, and not bad to play despite its repetitiveness.