Fire Fu is an arcade action game where you swipe your finger across the screen to summon streams of flames to burn up silly dragons and other goofy-looking monsters. It’s available for most mobile devices, but reviewed on iPad here.

When you start, you’ll have about a minute to defeat as many flying critters as you can for points. Watch out for power-ups that can give you a few more seconds on the clock or double your points.  Just be careful and try not to burn any bombs, as you’ll lose 50 points if you do.  Keep an eye on a meter on the top left,  when it runs out you’ll need to remove your finger from the screen to fill up your flames again.  At the end of the game you’ll enter a bonus stage for one last boost of points, then the game tallies up your score and saves the highest one.

As you play, you can earn points which you can use to unlock and buy potions to carry with you as you play. You can also unlock boss characters with points, which adds new enemies for you to toast as you play.  Simply tap on the right bottom corner of the screen to activate a potion.  Some of the potions will freeze time for a moment, or make your flames wider, or summon a meteor shower to help you zap enemies, among other things.

The game has a few problems, though. When you swipe to make a flame, it lingers around for a little bit, and if a bomb happens to hit it, it’ll explode.  This makes avoiding bombs almost impossible.  And while the game does a good job of teaching you the very basics, they don’t explain what each potion does, what the power-ups do, and what you’re supposed to be doing in the bonus stages.  While most things are easy to figure out just by playing, it couldn’t have been too much trouble to explain certain aspects a bit better.  But if you want a simple arcade experience when you need to kill a minute or two, Fire Fu may fit the bill.  And best of all, no in-game purchases that I could find!

Kid Factor:

When you burn up the silly looking enemies with fire, they just crackle up and disappear in cartoony fashion, so the violence is pretty minimal. Reading skill is helpful for some of the text, but most of the game is pretty easy to figure out just by playing.

Tags: Game Reviews