ManaSoft's FirePower is making a bit of a surprise entrance on the Pocket PC. Fans of arcade shoot-em-ups from yesteryear will find a lot to love with FirePower, but newcomers and casual fans won't be left out. Not only are the graphics a dead match for the Neo-Geo days, the gameplay maintains an impressive level of depth above and beyond most arcade shooters.
The gameplay of Firepower is deceptively simple. Under the pick up and play shooter is all the depth serious fans of the genre would hope to find. Destroying background items and waves of enemies will reward you medals, which in turn rewards score, and at enough score grants extra lives. Four main stages along with four sub-stages make for quite a long experience, so you'll need every last one. The two choices of ship change gameplay drastically between easy and hard, as each controls quite differently. It's a quite clever way of making the game both accessible to all and challenging to old pros.
Enemy AI is quite impressive throughout. Almost nothing in the game is a simple static sprite, everything moves, flies, rolls, and attacks with realistic accuracy. Tanks get knocked back by the force of their shots, planes fly in formation, and lasers charge before firing it's all very impressive. Bullet patterns and enemy waves are varied, challenging, but never cheap.
The controls are sure to give a few people trouble, but once I practiced with them for a bit they fit perfectly. Stylus control is possible, but I really don't recommend it. The hardware game controls are actually quite perfectly suited. Firing is done via an autofire toggle to free your hand for movement, super attacks are a single button press, and movement is very, very accurate.
"Oh Lawd! Them Graphics Are Da Bomb!"
FirePower's graphics never fail to be both eye catching and highly functional. The multiple layers of scrolling make the game feel both extremely fluid and exceptionally detailed. The sprites all feature an abundant amount of high quality animation and the color schemes blend wonderfully together. It can be a little difficult to keep track of enemy fire at times, but with practice it's not a big deal. Firepower also features an enjoyable, if somewhat simple, arcade like soundtrack and very well suited sound effects throughout.
I thoroughly enjoyed FirePower from the first mission to the last, and every replay in between. There's plenty to keep fans playing, and plenty to enjoy. If I had one complaint, it would simply be that a level based save would have been great for the Pocket PC. Each level takes upward of ten minutes, and with no save and continue later feature it's rather all or nothing. Either you play the entire game, or quit and lose your progress. Hardly enough to take anything away from this great shooter though.
Graphics: 8.0
Sound: 7.5
Controls: 7.5 (it was hard on my ppc)
Gameplay: 8.6
Overall: 7.9
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