Game Review: N.O.V.A.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again — Gameloft makes their money by copying other franchises and bringing it to the iPhone. Not that that’s a bad thing — they only steal from the best — but the provenance of many of their titles is obvious. They have a Diablo clone, a Cooking Mama clone, a Soul Calibur clone, and N.O.V.A. is a Halo clone. N.O.V.A.: Near Orbital Vanguard Alliance ($4.99, link) puts you in the armored boots of a super-soldier defending against alien attack. Just about everything from this game hearkens back to Halo. The weapons, the interface, the enemies, you even have a holographic AI assistant strongly reminiscent of Cortana. Even though derivative, it’s still excellent fun, and one of the best FPSs for the iPhone.
Quickly thrown on to an overrun ship, N.O.V.A. takes you through jungles, deserts and alien landscapes, killing off waver after wave of enemy. You start with the standard pistol and machine gun, then rapidly graduate on to shotguns, sniper rifles, and then on to energy guns and more. There are a number of different enemy types, and while they might not be particularly hard to outwit, they all attack in very different ways. Some hang back to pepper you with machine gun fire and grenades, some large ones charge you, and pick you up, forcing you to kill them with just your pistol. At certain points in the game, you can hack into crates to get extra ammo, with a gameplay style strongly reminiscent of Bioshocks ooze hacking, except in N.O.V.A., it’s a laser grid.
When dealing with FPS games for handhelds, interface deserves special mention. The default control configuration on N.O.V.A. is the same as ngmoco’s Eliminate. Virtual d-pad to move, drag on the screen to look, with buttons for fire, jump, reload and other such activities. N.O.V.A. gains some points for including two other variations, which some users might find better. The fact of the matter is, they’re all mediocre answers for a major problem — how to elegantly control an FPS on the iPhone. Even basic maneuvers like circle-strafing are tricky to do, and anything involving platforming is near impossible.
The graphics are good for the iPhone,, I was very impressed by how rarely my 3G stuttered at the stress the game put on it, though it drained my battery like nobody’s business. N.O.V.A. has made a couple of small concessions to the size of the screen on the iPhone, like all ammo pickups glow blue, making it easy to see them from across an open plain, even on a small screen. You also don’t have to worry about health, as the game borrows the regenerating health trick, made so popular by Halo.
I did hit a couple of glitches while playing the game. Occasionally I would hit an invisible wall for no reason, and at one point, the arrow indicating where I was meant to go pointed in the wrong direction. There were also some issues with hitboxes, but nothing insurmountable.
N.O.V.A. also has an impressive level of multiplayer capabilities, enabling you to play online or locally over wi-fi or bluetooth.
Conclusion
N.O.V.A.: Near Orbital Vanguard Alliance ($4.99, link) is extremely derivative, but very fun for it. It’s an exciting shoot-em-up that’ll leave you wanting to frag some more aliens. While the controls are problematic, I’ve yet to see an FPS for the iPhone that deals with that eloquently, so it’s a reality we’ll have to live with. If you’re on the fence about trying N.O.V.A., there is a free trial version as well. We highly recommend the game, and give it an 9.0 out of 10
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