I remember watching a Liam Neeson movie about a bunch of oil-men stranded in Alaska after their plane crashed. Now the Alaskan wilds are a nasty to place to be for the unprepared, and in that movie, titled The Grey, they were up against a pack of grey wolves and get picked off one by one. I felt a little bit of that desolation and despair (honestly, I don’t know why) from playing indie developer Kiril Korolkov’s brand new iOS title, Boshi.
This 2D isometric arcade game is set in a winter environment whereby players take on the role of a logger, chopping trees for wood. Just like the movie, you’ll need to contend with the pack of wolves roaming around each level, but unlike Liam Neeson’s character who made a living killing wolves, you are arm with a limited number of flares to scare them off. That goes without saying that you’ll need to make every shot count.
The wolves in Boshi seem to be smart bunch, they can see and hear you with the sound of your footsteps or wood chopping attracting them to your location. It’s normal to actually have one or more running at you at the same time and it’s convenient that the game provides a looking around mode by holding onto the A-button. Speaking about buttons, the controls are actually adjustable, you can move the d-pad and the A & B buttons around.
Boshi comes with 12 stages all of which have a certain amount of trees to cut down and there’s also and endless game mode where you can cut as many trees as you can. Kiril has put in some interesting stuff in the game as well, if you have an Apple TV, you can actually have the game on the big screen while the device (iPhone/iPad/iPod touch) acts as a wireless controller. A bit niche, but interesting nevertheless.
The 2D pixelated graphics do well to convey the winter environment really well and the 8-bit tunes and sound effects add on to the whole experience. The levels themselves remind me of SimCity 2000 :). Nine Over Ten 9/10 rates Boshi at a 4.5 out of 5. Check out this unlikely tale of survival right over at the App Store for just 99 cents: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/boshi/id895168609?ls=1&mt=8
