In this review will take a look at AR Space War, a fun augmented reality (AR) shooter for iOS developed using ARKit.
I almost thought about skipping this review because why spend time writing a whole review if I can’t let my viewers know where they can download it. The thing is that I insisted on finding its location on the App Store because it can easily go unnoticed due to the awful App Store search engine. If I spent almost two hours searching for it, even with the right keyword and couldn’t find it, how can other people find it?
Thanks to an amazing Twitter follower, I was able to locate the app and I’ll be able to tell you where you can download it. This was tiring, but the important thing is that I can now share my review of this game with you.
Gameplay
AR Space Wars (Full name:: “AR Space Wars – Fun Shooter 3D”) is 360-degree third-person augmented reality shooter. The game has 8 worlds, each one consists of 8 levels. You control a spaceship. In each level, you have to defeat waves of enemies until you clear them all out.
Let’s check out some gameplay! (Trust me, you have to watch it “feel” the game).
It’s up to you to move around the environment, dodging incoming projectiles and lasers and destroy all aliens. The player needs to physically move around and move his iPhone or iPad to prevent his ship getting hit by those projectiles. To destroy an alien, you need to position the crosshair on the target. The game automatically locks and shoots at the target. The targets move in the 3D space, so you need to follow them and make sure the crosshair stays on the target until it is eliminated. It’s really a very convenient and enjoyable gameplay mechanic in AR.
You also have two bombs that do AOE damage and can take several targets at the same time. Make sure you don’t waste them on single targets—keep them and use it only when you encounter a large group of enemies close together.
At the end of each wave, there is a boss fight. A boss is like an alien spaceship that is just has a higher health pool, it’s more evasive and releases more projectiles. Sometimes it’s more than just one enemy, so you’ll have to deal with several high damaging alien spaceships at the same time.
Your spaceship has a shield, if it goes down to zero it’s game over. At the bottom left corner, there is a radar that shows you where the enemy units are located. The colors changes based on their altitude. Enemies can spawn at all direction, although in the first worlds, they mostly come from the front and later stages they start moving in all directions.
Daily Missions, Unlockable Ships, and Difficulty
The game features several spaceships. you start with the “Seeker”. Each ship has different firepower, shield capacity, and bomb capacity. To unlock the other spaceships you will have to start a 7-day free trial. This plan automatically renews after 7-day free trial for $7.99/week. It brings daily new challenges, unlock all ships, it removes the ads and you can cancel it anytime.
I am personally against this type monetization practice because people can forget to cancel it. Furthermore, a $7.99 a week (as of the time of writing), is an unreasonable price in my opinion, but it’s up to you whether you want to use it or not. Just make sure you read the terms of service so you know what you are getting into.
If you are a subscribed user, you can take on different daily challenges that refresh every day. You have four challenges: Rookie, Pilot, Ace, and Starbuck with increased difficulty. I haven’t paid for the subscription service, so I haven’t tried those daily challenges.
In terms of difficulty. The game is challenging. It’s not too hard but definitely not too easy, something in the middle. I did fail several times and still not able to finish all the 8 worlds. You can’t just stand still in this game, you have to physically move your body and the device in order to avoid getting hit. The game increases in difficulty as you progress through the worlds and levels. After some time it becomes like a cosmic dance and you really enjoy moving around, aiming and locking on enemies and watch them blow up.
Graphics and Visual Effects
Each world paints the world with a different color, giving the world a different tint. I like it because it makes the glow of the explosions more prominent and makes it easier to identify the small ships in a real-world scene with lots of distracting objects.
In my opinion, one of the main attractions of this game is the beautiful explosion visual effects. Now, it’s not as impressive as the visual effects in ghosthuntAR: Survival game, but this what makes us enjoy shooting those spaceships down. The explosion effects remind me of the orange explosion effect when I discover a legendary card in Hearthstone when opening a pack. There are different types explosion effects, all look really good. You can check out the gameplay video at the top to see it in action. I deliberately added some short clips so you can see how beautiful those explosions look in-game.
The developer mentioned that the game is like space invaders in AR (“The first game like Space Invaders for Augmented Reality”), but in my opinion, it’s not. If you want to see what Space Invaders game looks in AR, you should check my review of Alien Invaders AR.
AR Experience
AR Space Wars is an Augmented Reality game, but it allows players to choose whether they want to see a camera stream as the background or shoot between several opaque backgrounds. I played both and definitely preferred playing and enjoying the game with the camera stream that projects a real-world scene.
Just look at the part of the gameplay YouTube video where I shoot down an enemy from the sky, it looks amazing. It doesn’t come even close in the standard background.
You can play this game everywhere you are, but just keep in mind that you’ll need some open space in order to be able to move around the environment and evade incoming projectiles lad lasers. In one of the levels, I actually four like five meters to the side in order to avoid getting hit by the continuous projectiles. I am not saying that this is the game area that you should be playing at. You could as well just move right and left and crouch to bypass the projectiles, but it is less fun playing like that.
Conclusion
When I first saw the game on the App Store, I thought o myself that this is just yet another boring AR shooter but it turned out to be very good.
The game was really fun and I enjoyed every minute of it. It’s very satisfying shooting down enemies and watching them blow up, the game is challenging, encourages physical movement, you have boss fights, lots of levels, enemies can fly over your head and all around you, the locking and auto-shoot feels really good and gratifying and the music is repetitive but perfectly matches the rhythm of the game.
Of course, if you decide to subscribe, you get to try out different ships and enjoy daily challenges.
I am glad that I found about this game. I still think that this game could have been a lot better with power-ups, a larger variety of enemy’s spaceships, more interesting galactic objects (e.g. planets) in the scene, etc. The game felt quite repetitive due to the lack of variety of scenes and enemies. Overall, it’s a fun ARKit third-person shooter with unique 3-DoF controls and addictive gameplay mechanics—Recommended.
You can download the game from the App Store here. Have fun!
P.S. Peter, I just wanted to thank you again for helping me out with locating the original location of the app on the App Store, Thank you.