Windows Phone Thoughts: Anthelion: The Galactic Alliance

Combat
The first mission involves no shooting or evading, and lets you get a feel for the ship and its controls. But that's boring, so I'll skip ahead to the fun parts! It's during the next two or three missions that players can experience a full three-dimensional dogfight or bombing mission in space.

In my opinion, the control panels and information displays are very intuitive and help conserve precious screen space. When you only have three to four inches of screen, you need every pixel! The radar screen, which is located at the top of the control panel, gives you the location of ally and enemy ships. Fellow Pirates appear in green, enemies in red, and tentative allies in orange (until someone shoots). The center of the radar oval represents targets directly in front of or behind you. Ships in front of players will be bright colors, while those behind turn a dull green, red, or orange.


Figure 7: This enemy ship has been targeted, and I'm about to blow it up.

Players can target an object by placing the cross hairs on it and pressing in on the directional pad. Once targeted, the craft's statistics and image will appear in the center of your control panel, and it will have a white mark on it on your radar display. The distance to that object is given in kilometers or meters directly beneath. Most weapons work best within 2.5 kilometers, but some work well out to 4.0 km.

On the left side of the control panel is weapons information. Players can rotate through the four different weapons bays, and press another button to fire that weapon. The number of remaining missiles is also displayed (EMP Cannons and main guns have infinite ammunition). Holding down on the fire button will make the guns or missiles continue to fire.

On the right side is speed and shield information. Ships can come to a dead stop, which is helpful if you're waiting for the bad guys to appear. Shields are slowly weakened by enemy fire, and eventually parts of your ship will turn red on this display as they are damaged. Shields will fully regenerate after thirty seconds, but damage to your ship cannot be repaired until you return to base.


Figure 8: Arrggh! I've been damaged by a ship 598 meters behind and above me. Looks like Natasha has been hit, too.

During game play a clock keeps track of how long you've been playing. Some missions take three minutes, others take fifteen. To the left of the clock is a space used for the "Jump", "Retreat", and "Home" buttons. "Jumping" is traveling at the speed of light through space ("warp" to Trekkies). In a normal mission you're required to jump from Emerald Cove, the Pirate base, to the battlefield. Once the dirty work is done, you tap "Jump" to get back to base and "Home" to dock.


Figure 9: "Engage!" I mean..."Jump!"

Graphics, Music and Sound
Without a doubt, the most ambitious part of this game is the graphics engine. So how good is it? Very good! Objects move smoothly and normally, and the frame rate only slows down during the largest explosions or battles that involve twenty to fifty ships. Turning off the high resolution graphics does speed up the game, but it's still very playable with engine trails and hi-res models.

The background music borders on a copyright infringement with Star Wars - which means it's good! :lol: Sound effects are well timed and sound authentic (even though space is a vacuum).

Gotchas
I played Anthelion for several hours (:oops:), flew all of the missions, and did not find any serious flaws. Like they say in computer science classes: a well-programmed application with thorough testing has very few flaws.

It would've been nice to have the choice of two or three views during combat. Even though the cockpit view is very effective, I usually prefer a "close behind" camera angle. Multiplayer networked games would also be a plus, but this game is still very new - baby steps.

Where To Buy
Anthelion is available from Handango for $19.95. [Affiliate] There's a free trial available.

Requirements
Anthelion is a hungry game when it comes to free RAM - you'll need at least 8MB of free system RAM allocated to programs to run it. The actual download itself, however, is closer to 4.3 MB.

Conclusions
So does Anthelion really work? Yes it does! Anthelion 1.0 has the honor of being the first fully three-dimensional space shooter game available for the Pocket PC operating system. The graphics look fantastic but yet don't bog down the frame rate, the sound track is excellent, and controlling the ships is simple. This is a revolutionary game, but it lacks the bugs most games would experience. PDAMill has produced another excellent game, and I strongly recommend you download the demo and consider purchasing it.