Mega Man Clone For iPhone Hits The App Store
by Mike Lata
May 18, 2011
Funworks Studio is following Capcom's lead with an iPhone game that resembles the long running Mega Man series. Autoboy, however, isn't based on long levels with lots of difficult platforming to overcome. Instead, the game focuses on boss fights with very short levels in-between.
Like the Mega Man series, Autoboy is also quite challenging. You will be dying constantly in order to defeat these bosses. However, with practice you will start to advance. The strategy is to find a pattern in the bosses' defense and overcome it while firing your blaster.
The blaster is a little different from the old school Mega Man one that had circular beams or shots. In this game it looks more rectangular, but kind of split up, as if two blasts were shot in parallel. The speed of trajectory is similar though.
The main hero in this retro platformer, named after the game's title and who you control, is also a bit different than Mega Man in appearance. He is wearing a red costume instead of the traditional blue one that Mega Man fans are familiar with.
The controls are well done and feel surprisingly intuitive for an iPhone game. The iPhone Mega Man II port that Capcom released a while back, got a lot of flak for subpar virtual controls. Before recent updates, Mega Man II's movement controls involved a circular virtual stick rather than a virtual dpad or arrows. Now, it looks quite different and actually similar to this game. Autoboy uses a virtual dpad that is quite large and hard to miss. It is also located on the bottom left side of the main playing field with two buttons to the right. These buttons are not in the way of the gameplay screen.
Although the playing area is smaller, you won't have to worry about your fingers getting in the way of the action or an enemy's projectiles.
You can grab Autoboy for iPhone on the App Store for $.99.
