£3.99 .. That’s the asking price here. £3.99, Placing this squarely in the same price bracket as Microsoft’s “Must-Have Windows Phone Games” – games like Hydro Thunder Go and Plants Vs Zombies. Clearly, Dmitry Timofeev has great confidence in his game to release it at such a price-point, and the game certainly sounds intriguing, billed in charmingly broken English as “an atomic mix of such genres as Hardcore 2D shooter, brick breaker and aero-hockey”.

And it has to be said, you’re certainly getting value for your money – there are fifty levels to complete, each taking a good few minutes to complete, assuming you succeed on your first go. Which you generally won’t, because the game is unforgiving to say the least.

Imagine playing Breakout (or Arkanoid, for gamers of a certain generation), only instead of a flat paddle to bounce the ball, you have a large round air-hockey mallet, with full movement across all of the playing field. Only, this mallet is actually some sort of vehicle, and if you accidentally touch any of the bricks: bang. You crashed. Game over. Oh, and on top of that, there are enemies rushing towards you constantly – get close enough and they’ll shoot you, sapping your health bar and freezing you in place for a time. This is where the “Hardcore 2D shooter” element comes in, as you’re obliged to gun down the enemies before they get too close.

Only, where the average 2D shooter sees you piloting a small craft through waves of enemies, carefully avoiding and shooting them as you see fit, this is an altogether more sluggish affair. For one thing, there are no ‘waves’ of enemies here; rather, enemies constantly come out of spawn points in the ground and head inexorably towards you. Your only option is to keep your massive vehicle out of range of the enemy while your guns auto-target the nearest ones, sending out a constant stream of bullets and whittling down the horde.

Helping you along are several power-ups, which drop from select bricks when destroyed by the ball you’re inexplicably bouncing towards them. Aside from the traditional “super-ball” powerup which allows it to plough through bricks without bouncing, you have several which upgrade your weapons – either improving your automatic firepower, or adding activated weapons which can block spawn points or deal massive area of effect damage.

If this all sounds like it might add an interesting flavour to the mix, you’re right! Unfortunately, ‘interesting’ doesn’t always mean ‘good’. The game is a bit of a mess. The weapons and enemies add little more than noise and annoyance to the mix – as you have no direct control over your aim, your only interaction with them (aside from avoidance) is picking up the odd power-up. Watching your tank mow down constant little enemy soldiers is therefore an unsatisfying experience. Hell, more than that, it’s actually quite unpleasant: in most shmups you play a small, plucky character fighting against the odds. Here you’re a massive tank mowing down reams of cannon fodder. It’s not quite as uplifting an experience.

The size of your vehicle is problematic for another reason too: it makes the game, once you remove the enemies from the equation, far too hard to lose. The ball is quite slow, and your vehicle moves very quickly: it’s hard to miss the ball. But at the same time, it’s actually very hard to direct the ball precisely: the size and shape of your tank make judging angles a lot harder than the traditional paddle affords.

This is compounded by levels that go on far beyond their welcome: levels are routinely filled with bricks that will take many hits to destroy, meaning the end game is near-impossible to lose (thanks to the slow ball and massive vehicle), but takes an absolute age to win. Which, combined with the possibility for sudden death should your capacitive screen glitch and have your vehicle hurtle into a nearby brick or enemy in the early stages of a level, makes for a tedious and frustrating game.

So much so, that I never felt the urge to buy the full game. You see, the trial comes with thirty of the fifty levels unlocked – and quite honestly, after getting to the fourth, I knew I never wanted to play this again. It’s not often I’ll give up on a game so quickly – particularly when reviewing it – but there were simply no redeeming features here. The game is just no fun. This is a real shame, because for all its game design faults, the game appears to have been quite the labour of love, and I get the feeling Dmitry has made pretty much exactly what he set out to achieve – unfortunately, what he set out to achieve was, in this instance, not particularly inspiring.

A while back I described Chain Reaction as reminding me of old Public Domain games on the Atari ST. This is much the same. Only, where Chain Reaction reminded me of the pleasant, simple games you used to get on a disk that you would fire up and play on an occasional whim, GB&W reminds me of one of those overwrought, noisy titles that you’d forget about after a single try. And at least those had the decency to come with a bunch of other titles, and not to try and charge you £3.99 for the privilege.

GB&W Gameplay Video

GB&W Screenshots

Version Under Review : 1.3.0.0

Website : GB&W

There is a trial version available and the full version is available for $GB&W, the trial is limited by the number of levels available to play.

Our Rating for GB&W

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