Phoenix 2 9+

This is a greate game, I strongly reccomend.
To the devs please add a way to play offline because I would love to play away from home

Phoenix 2 is a raiden style game with a bad case of lack of replayability. I’m a fan of the raiden style games but this one has issues that other reviewers ignore and the developers should be keen to fix.

The first issue comes from lack of in game currency. The game literally drip feeds you with almost nothing, maybe 400 a day. Maybe enough for one upgrade. Not only that you’ll be unable to earn anymore should you complete the missions for atleast 24hrs. The goal of this is to generate the profits by severely limiting how much progress you can make. I would like to play more but this limiting design decision kills that. The level ups don’t add much and feel like a waste of time. A easy fix would be to make it so you earn a amount of currency based on time played and invaders destroyed. Would allow people to play as much as they want and would bring this review up from a 2 to a 3.

Second issue is the ships. Generally speaking they really seem to be significant disparity in how useful some are. Specifically the first ship you get, it’s combination of equipment is so far the best and most useful of any ship i have unlocked so far. This is mainly due to the crazy bullet hell nature of the game. I think it’s a problem when the first ship in the game basically out performs everything after including more “rare” ships. Whether that will remain the case I can’t say because I haven’t played all ships.

Graphically, the game is pretty good but It’s not the best in category(sky force reloaded easily beats it and lightning fighter 2 do better in terms of ships). The effects for the player ship weapons and abilities being the best example of this(the enemy weapons not so much). This is probably the best aspect of the game.

Music is one track, it’s a good track but why the developers couldn’t come up with more than one song for missions I don’t know. Adding variety helps with design and reduces the repetitiveness, this loses points for the game.

Overall, Phoenix 2 is a game that has some promise, but is mired by some poor decisions that heavily bring it down. Thus it gets a review score of 2/5 stars for me.

Pros:

-good graphics, with solid particle effects.
-number of ships to play.

Cons:

-only one song in the whole game, while good, pushes a feeling of repetitiveness.
-progression limited. You can only play so much before the hitting a wall. Must wait 24hrs at least before you can make more progress.
-most ships are inferior to the starting ship in general.
-bit too much bullet hell, could be toned down a notch or three(or have selectable difficulty).
-ships graphics are 2d compared to other games with 3d.
-lacks missions, resulting in little to do after you’ve completed them. Maybe give new missions once you get 100% instead of a 24hr wait.

Incredible game, nice graphics and smooth gameplay, along with a large variety of ships. One thing I would like to suggest would to make the earnings more fair. You earn little in comparison to the price of an upgrade or ship. Also things get ridiculously expensive, such as near ultimate upgrades or apex forms. If you earned about 500 credits per complete level (still divided by waves), or increase the ad credit to 250, that would be nice.