Balloons Down iOS game is casual AR shooter where the player needs to defend his base from hot air balloons trying to land in his base. Hot Air Balloons will spawn and descend towards your base from the sky, sometimes close to your base, sometimes further away.
Whatever you do, don’t let any balloon land on your base. The moment the hot air balloon touches the floor of your base you lose the game. To shoot a balloon, just tap on it, that’s it, and a rocket will be launched towards it and destroy it.
Balloons Down reminded me of another game that I’ve played called Crazy Monsters Strike AR. I actually loved the presentation of Çrazy Monsters Strike AR’ game more because you need to shoot down funny looking monsters descending towards the floor using parachutes.
That being said, seeing colorful hot air balloons flying in your living room is quite a nice sight as well. The game itself is very challenging. The idea is to try to survive as long as you can and work towards breaking your own highscore. Unfortunately, the game doesn’t employ any global leaderboard and I do hope this feature will be added in a future update. If you are already working hard to try to break your own record, it’s nice to see how you stand up against other global players.
The game has three bases to choose from, but as of the time of writing this review, only one, the desert, is available. The others are locked with the words “Coming soon”. I actually don’t know what’s the benefit of having a different looking base because my eyes were focusing on the balloons in the sky. Unless the developer has more surprises for us like beautiful grpahics effects of snow and such.
I also think that it would be even better if there was a wind effect in this game, making the game look and play more interesting than just make them follow a certain path.
Once you reach a certain amount of score or is it a certain amount of eliminations, you’ll level up and receive an atomic bomb ability. Once you trigger it, it will detonate after a few seconds and instantly eliminate all the balloons on the map. I’ll use it only if necessary.
Balloons Down game doesn’t have any ammo constraints, you can shoot rockets without any limit and without needing to reload. I actually liked that, because I can just tap on the screen like crazy and see lots of rockets flying out into the sky, it’s pretty cool. The use of shadows is important for this game. Players are able to detect where a balloon is going to land by looking at the shadows that are projected on the area of the base.
The gameplay feels nice and responsive but after playing it for some time, it just felt boring because of the lack of dynamics and progression in the game. I think that maybe adding a weapon progression system, same like GhosthuntAR: Survival can help improve the experience. Maybe add some nice weather effects that affect the movement of the balloons or adding an option to defend ground like in Zombie Gunship Revenant AR. I will also make it so the base isn’t destroyed immediately when a ballon intersects with it. I would make a health for the base. Now, imagine you have a balloon that drops bombs and deals a lot of damage, you will prioritize it. That added dynamics could elevate the gameplay experience in my opinion.
Conclusion
Balloons Down is a fun and challenging little shooter that can be played both indoors and outdoors as it requires very little space due to its vertical oriented gameplay. The sound effects are nice and I liked the base details. That being said, the game is maybe too simplistic and lacks certain dynamics that would have made it more fun to play in the long terms. There even no global leaderboard for a game that its main goal is to for players to break their own score.
I also find the game to be quite dark for some reason even though I played it in a well-lit environment.
The developer mentioned that more features are coming soon and I surely think that this game needs it. The game is free on the App Store so why not you give it a try.