Written by Thomas on Wednesday, July 22, 2009

Review: IUGO’s Star Hogs for iPhone


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One of my absolute favourite games as a kid was Scorched Earth. My dad used to play it around the office and when he brought it home it was oodles of noodles worth of fun. I know Worms is more popular, but I grew up with tanks hurling insults and missiles at each other in bright colours and concentric circles. Star Hogs reminded me a lot of Scorched Earth from the screenshots, so it was off to a great start even before I received my promo code (thanks to Sarah at IUGO) and booted it up. Pig-piloted ships shooting missiles and machine guns and the ability to fly around asteroids, too? I’m game.

Quick Look Video
Ready for some truly amateur video editing? Here goes nothing:

Gameplay
Star Hogs is a tactical, turn-based 2D shooter. You start off in your hangar and have to buy a ship before you can play —  and now that I’m about two or three hours in, I realize I should probably have been more careful in my initial selection. The combat chassis can hold a lot of weapons, the engineering chassis can modify its hull to the fullest extent, and the intelligence chassis specializes in tech upgrades. Each of the three chassis is also in its own speed, durability (shields and armour), and weight class. You don’t really understand the importance of each of the statistics until you get more into the game, but don’t worry — you can always purchase another ship later on.
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As you go through the campaign you’ll unlock more weaponry and equipment and earn more cash for your upgrades. The number of weapon, tech, or hull upgrades you can ultimately equip depends on the type of ship you’re customizing. The ship upgrades seem pretty basic at this point in the game (stage 16 out of 32), but the weapon upgrades are starting to get very interesting. You can swap out your default machine gun and missile launcher for more interesting versions, like homing missiles or a chipper machine gun that destroys cover faster. Once you’re done in the shop, it’s time to [asteroid] field test your ship.
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The first stage is just a vanilla fight between two ships on a flat landscape. Your enemy will yell mild insults and throw missiles alongside them in an attempt to take out your shields and then your armour. However, it’s the second stage where things start to get really interesting. One thing that Star Hogs does — that I’ve never seen in any other shooter of this type — is use an entire planet’s gravitational field as a factor in combat. Since you have to arc your regular missile and measure the amount of power to put behind it, it becomes very tricky very quickly when you have to lob your weapons from one side of a planet to another — and if you’re not careful, you can accidentally spank your tank by hitting it with your own missile after it orbits once around the planet. Take it from me: it’s really embarrassing.
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Battles are fun and frenetic, especially when facing more opponents. Enemies can be across the screen as well as above and below you. There’s not cover on most levels to allow you to just stay put, so you either change positions or make new ones by doing a little bit of explosive landscaping.
Star Hogs’ weapons feel powerful and are a joy to use, and there’s enough of a variety to suit any play style. Long range players can hang back and fire homing missiles, close-range fighters can fly in and plant mines or shoot machine guns, and the fact that you can control multiple ships really lets you get creative with your formations and load-outs.

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The AI puts up a good fight on medium mode, and it actually kicked my ass around so much that I retreated to the easy difficulty. I don’t want to think about what enemies are like on hard. However, if you really want the ultimate challenge in Star Hogs, you’re going to want to take it online. One of the game’s best features is its full wi-fi multiplayer, so you can play with people around the world. There’s a simple lobby system that supports game names and passwords, an online leader board with basic statistics, and all of the battles you wage online affect your single player game and vice versa. I tried a few test matches online, and although the first one was rudely interrupted by a disconnect, the second was as smooth as lard. The lobbies are pretty empty at the moment, but once you find a person to play with, Star Hogs should be a real blast to play online. IUGO says they’re working on in-game text messaging, so you can get to calling people “nublets” as you turn them into giblets.

Controls
All of this combat wouldn’t be fun without the right set of controls, and IUGO definitely delivers in this category. You can move your ship via small d-pad, and you arc and aim your weapon by just tapping on a point on the screen. Powering up your shots is done by holding down on the fire button, and you can use pinch zooming to survey the whole battlefield. One great little touch that IUGO added is the ability to fast forward through enemy AI turns, so you can get right back to your turn and kicking more ass.

If that doesn’t sound very simple, Star Hogs has its own little tutorial to show you the ropes.
Presentation
The one thing that’s a litlte out of place in Star Hogs is the actual theme. Despite all of the pig-related jokes I’ve thrown into this review, I’m not sure why they decided to feature pigs in this game instead of just spaceships and tanks. There aren’t really any pig faces, pig weapons, or pig jokes in the game (aside from one in the description). Why Star Hogs, IUGO?
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Now that that small criticism is out of the way, let’s get down to how this game looks and sounds. I’m not completely blown away by the graphics, but that’s a matter of taste. I really like the stylized landscapes, but I think the ships do look rather low-res since IUGO seemed to have tried for a more realistic look there. This is really only noticeable in stills, though, as Star Hogs features great animation all around. When ships take a direct hit from a missile the shields will visibly fizzle out, and the deaths on exploding ships are very well done. My favourite animation, however, is the one where a ship plummets to its doom. It falls pretty slowly at first, then speeds up, then starts to tail spin as it gets more and more caught up in the planet’s gravitational field. Very cool.

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The sound in the game is similarly well done, and the machine and missile fire don’t disappoink (sorry, had to). I think the most noteworthy addition in this category is the rock tracks that play during levels. You can play your own music during Star Hogs games, but if you don’t you’ll be treated to some cool hard rock tracks that remind me a lot of the music from the Dynasty Warrior series of Playstation games — except it fits a lot better here.
Conclusion
I was impressed with IUGO’s Shaky Summit, but they’ve really pulled out all the stops on this title. From the extensive 32-mission single player campaign to the great global multiplayer support, Star Hogs is worth every piggy — err, penny.
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You can pick up your own copy of Star Hogs for $4.99 on the App Store. There’s also a lite version to try out here.
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