BulleTrain .22 Review

iPhone App - Designed for the iPhone, compatible with the iPad

Downsized Games sticks it to… er… Elaborate Acquisitions with a blatant knock on their mega corporation “man”-ness.

A bit of background history is needed before you start playing BulleTrain .22. The folks over at Downsized Games were former employees of Pandemic who were laid off when EA bought and dismantled the company, and they don’t seem to be too happy about it. BulleTrain .22, the first app by Downsized games is a direct knock on EA, and many of the game elements are parallel to what happened with the merger.

The story of BulleTrain starts with you as Miles Stone. You owned a business that was shut down by Elaborate Acquisitions (EA) with their super fast bullet trains. Instead of just taking his severance package though, he takes his giant delivery truck to the rails to “hand out pink slips… in BLOOD.”

Once you get into the game though it definitely seems that more was put into the vengeance storyline than the gameplay The game throughout is an on-rails shooter with you shooting bad guys that are shooting you from evil “JR’s” (JR owns Elaborate Acquisitions) bullet train. Think of it as Time Crisis, but on shaky rails and with no way to hide behind things. You shoot and shoot all the bad guys shooting at you, collecting short term weapons upgrades and food (health) along the way, but there’s really not much that happens. There’s no continuing story and no permanent upgrades to find or buy, so every level really is just an extension of the last.

To top it all off, the tapping (to fire) is very imprecise, leaving many bad guys to keep on shooting you after you are 100% sure you’d put 5-10 bullets in them. Fortunately the app lets you do multitouch shooting, but that almost accentuates the pointlessness of the experience. In the end, you’ll realize that you can’t dodge bullets, you can’t fully gauge how well you are aiming, and you’ll never really feel like you have a chance to beat the whole game.

As a commentary piece though, I did get a chuckle.