PewPew

Go get this! PewPew is a fantastic Geometry Wars clone and its... fantastic! It's also free and clearly a game that I'd pay a couple of bucks for. If you're so inclined to support the author there is PewPew 2. But now that I've given away the ending to this review let's jump back to the middle.

PewPew features retro style vector (line) graphics. It offers a nice, quick tutorial to get you started and from there offers four modes of play. It also has a nice, upbeat sound track that can be optionally turned off. The four modes of play are:

• Pandemonium - Destroy the enemies and stay alive to destroy more enemies.
• Dodge this - You've got no weapons so just run away.
• Assault - Another destroy the enemies mode, but with power-ups to collect.
• Chromatic Conflict - You can change the color of your ship by flying over colored pulsars, but can only destroy enemies matching the current color of your ship.

The game is controlled by two onscreen joypads... one controls movement and the other firing. While I'm not a fan of on screen joypads this game does do about as good of a job as a game can with them and I felt comfortable playing it. It would, however, have been nice if the game supported keyboard controls for those of us that have them.

PewPew is also very challenging and does not offer any difficulty levels to change. If you find the game too easy or too difficult then you're out of luck... and it'll most likely be the latter. Personally I like the challenge as it plays just like an old school arcade game. Remember Defender? 30 seconds and Game Over? While PewPew isn't quite that extreme it's got that familiar arcade feel and I love it!

PewPew does offer the ability to progress and earn better ships with more firepower and shields, but I haven't been able to achieve that yet. I really enjoy the Dodge this mode a lot and usually find myself either playing it or Assault. Other things I like are style of graphics and the fact that PewPew plays very smoothly. It's pretty impressive to see my old Droid pushing pixels like this. PewPew also supports App2SD and only consumes about 2 MB of your phone's limited internal storage. 5/5 stars for a job very well done. Unless you're inexplicably abhorred by this type of game I think you'll love it.