Flip Ship Review

Flip Ship from ByteSize Games is what you would get if Ikaruga and Geometry Wars had a baby. You use the color system of Ikaruga set on a flat 2D Geometry Wars like surface. While it does have its issues, Flip Ship is definitely worth a download.

The color system that Ikaruga employed was that you could hit a button and change from black to white and vice versa. Each color would have its advantages and disadvantages against the opposite. In Flip Ship, you choose between two different colors just by tapping the screen. One ship gives you red and yellow color choices. Red means you can only attack red ships and yellow means you can only shoot yellow.

What Flip Ship takes from Geometry Wars aside from the play space, is the point system. You are free to change colors whenever you want but that will reset the score multiplier. So, you want to stay the same color as long as possible before changing to get your score higher and higher.

This is where the game gets interesting. While you’re shooting down the like colors, the opposite color will have ships spawn throughout the level so how are you supposed to kill them? Well, there are a ton of power ups to choose from that make that possible. Certain ones create a blast that encompasses a small portion of the map, another one activates heat seeking missiles that go after the nearest ships so you want to rush to shoot down the like colors so it only goes after the opposites. You’ll grab one that super charges the ship and sends you hurtling super fast in a direction of your choice killing anything in its path and there’s also a force field that will allow you to get hit an extra time.

The core of the game is very solid. Unfortunately, like the first Geometry Wars game, it feels a bit shallow. While the game does include the leaderboard feature and game center achievements, you will only have the single player score attack mode to play around with. No extra modes to fool around with means the amount of time spent on the game isn’t as much as it should be.

Also, I am not a fan of games that only use the gyroscope. Geometry Wars for iOS was smart and allowed the use of virtual analog sticks. Flip Ship only allows you to use the tilt sensor and that means it won’t be as precise as you want the controls to be all the time leading to unnecessary deaths. You can fully customize the tilt sensitivity to any degree you like to help cut down on the cheap deaths but I can’t help but feeling that the game should’ve had an analog stick.

So, Flip Ship is still a super fun game that any fan of Geometry Wars should give a look. While it only has the one mode and the lack of analog control definitely hurt the overall experience, buy this game and hopefully they’ll add those features in the sequel.