In a steampunk industrial-filled world, three apes who can speak and wear clothes decide to retaliate. They hijack a zeppelin and start bombing pollution-causing human structures to take back nature and reclaim their home.  Apestorm: Full Bananas is a 2-D shooting and bombing sidescrolling game downloadable on iOS and Google Play (reviewed on iPad here).

To control your zeppelin, you’ll slide your finger up and down on the left side of the screen to make the aircraft rise and fall. Swipe forward and back on the left to speed up and slow down as well.  Tap on the right side of the screen with your other hand to drop bombs on buildings and other targets.  Time it right so the bombs’ trajectory hits the mark.  Keep doing this until you reach the end of the stage.  Just don’t crash or it’s Game Over!

There are 20 stages in all, and each one has missions for you to complete. You may have to bomb certain targets, get a high score, or avoid bombing areas like trees, which will also reduce your score.  To unlock more stages, you’ll need to have enough bananas, which you get by completing missions.  So you may have to revisit stages to collect bananas from missions you haven’t finished yet.  When you get enough bananas, you can also unlock power-ups that may appear in the stages as well.

This game actually reminds me a lot of an old classic arcade game called Scramble, which is considered to be one of the first horizontally scrolling shooters and a precursor to Gradius. The only main problem I had with the game is that steering your ship felt a little loose and floaty, and having to collect enough bananas to unlock new stages was a little annoying.  But otherwise, it’s an OK game.

Kid Factor:

While you do bomb buildings and other structures, there are only explosions so the violence isn’t very graphic. Reading skill is helpful for some of the text and menus, but not always necessary as much of the game has spoken voice.  Younger gamers may get frustrated at the high difficulty level, though.

Tags: Game Reviews