Tilt to Live has an update out that adds a new game mode and weapon for $1, and it is awesome.
The new weapon is a turret: Pick it up, and you turn into a stationary gun emplacement for a short while. This is a brilliant inversion of the game mechanics–Tilt to Live is, at its heart, a twin-stick shooter with only the movement stick. The turret turns it into a shooter with only the weapons stick.
The new game mode is Viva la Turret (in which the only weapon you get is a turret, natch), and it’s brilliant as well. It’s a beautiful game of risk and reward, of knowing when to raise the stakes and when to cash out.
The key to Viva la Turret is the ability to control how long you remain a turret. While each turret pickup only lasts for a short time, collecting additional pickups while in turret mode extends the lifetime of the turret. You can’t move, of course, but shooting the pickups draws them closer to you.
Every time you collect a turret pickup, you emit a shockwave that pushes nearby dots away from you. Push them into a wall, and they die. This is essential when first collecting a turret on a crowded screen–it prevents you from being immediately overwhelmed. It also adds a delicious tension in Viva la Turret, however. You have two approaches to killing dots: You can shoot them, or you can shoot the turret pickup to draw it in and push the dots into a wall. Spend all your time shooting dots, and your turret will expire quickly. Spend all your time shooting the pickup, and you might get swarmed before it reaches you.
There’s no combo counter in Viva la Turret. Instead, dead enemy dots turn into jewels. Picking up jewels builds a point multiplier. There’s a catch, however: You can only pick up jewels while in movement mode, and your multiplier resets every time you leave turret mode. The more enemies you kill with a single turret, the higher your multiplier will be…the next time you enter turret mode. At some point, you need to let your turret expire and collect all the jewels to take advantage of them.
I’ve had great games in which I killed 500+ dots with a single turret…and scored almost nothing, because I died before picking up any jewels. There’s always a temptation to wait just a little bit longer, kill just a few more dots to make the coming combo even larger.
I haven’t been very happy with the new modes added to the game since release (except Code Red, which is the vanilla game without the boring bit at the start), but this one is just amazing. It seems simple–turret weapon, game mode with nothing but turrets–but every aspect of the new gameplay is polished to a lustrous sheen. Absolutely worth the $1.
