One of the greatest pluses of Apple’s iOS as a gaming platform (alongside its cheap price points and simple delivery system) is the ability to find quixotic little oddities that would struggle to find homes anywhere else. Enter Vetica. A quirky mash-up of typography and shoot-em-up, it’s the kind of title that re-defines the term ‘niche’. The entirety of its design revolves around the ubiquitous Helvetica typeface, a universal font that you probably see several dozen times a day without realising it, and the only one that we imagine was seriously considered for a videogame based on its letterforms. Those that put forth Comic Sans as a better alternative should give Vetica a miss; this is not the game for you.
Whilst you may think that such a game premise would only appeal to iPhone-toting hipster types from the digital advertising world (trust me, I used to be one), the underlying gameplay of Vetica is familiar to anyone who has piloted a spaceship in a shoot-’em-up before, even as far back as the original Space Invaders. Vetica plays it safe with many of the genre’s well-worn tropes – a finite number of lives, upgradeable weapon types, and a varied enemy set that nonetheless always stick to a rigid attack pattern – but puts its own unique spin on them by crafting everything out of its typographic inspiration. Your spacecraft is the A, for example. Your starting bullets are standard full stops, fired automatically, and various upgrades allows you to fire out curly brackets, hyphens and asterisks. The letter P becomes a laser-beam spewing enemy, sharing screen space with butterfly-like conjoined Vs and dive-bombing Ds. There’s a level of innovation here that would put much more high-profile games to shame. The bosses are the inevitable highlight, often made up of a variety of different letterforms and spitting out enough bullets to cause the player to break out in a mild sweat.
Vetica brings new meaning to the phrase ‘mind your Ps and Qs’…
It’s here that Vetica makes its first mis-step. Its insistence on aping the bullet-hell scenarios of its more well-known peers in combination with touch-screen controls makes Vetica fiddly to control, with your guiding finger often obscuring your spacecraft completely. With the streams of bullets requiring millimetre precision to navigate, this can quickly become a problem. The addition of a virtual joystick may have helped alleviate the problem, but we’re aware that none of the iOS games we’ve tried on our Apple devices have successfully incorporated a pleasing one, so Vetica is caught between a rock and a hard place on this front.
The game’s strict adherence to its own ruleset is also to its detriment. All spacecrafts, including your own, are picked out in white. Your own projectiles are rendered in an olive green, and the enemies’ bullets in red. With such a stripped back colour palette, letterforms tend to merge easily, creating a chaotic and messy battleground. A few more colours and gradients would have added a touch of polish to the overly minimalist approach, although this is alleviated somewhat by some judicious use of sparkly particle effects for some bosses. The sound effects are equally utilitarian – feedback when hitting an enemy craft is strangely muted, and the explosions of asterisks that accompany a kill (or death) would benefit from explosions with a little more heft. As it is, it feels as if the sound effects were more of a belated afterthought, rather than treated with the same front-and-centre importance they typically command in this genre.
To focus for too long on these minor presentation details would be missing the point though, which is to celebrate the diverse range of genre mash-ups that the world of iOS gaming is beginning to bring to the general public. Although “shmup” enthusiasts and typophiles will get the most mileage out of Vetica (designer types will get a kick out of achievements with titles such as ‘I Shot The Serif’) anyone with a passing interest in games that don’t follow the beaten path will find fun with this title, and with gaming on Apple platforms as a whole. More of this, please.
Vetica, developed by Speed Noise Movement, is available now for iPhone and iPod touch, priced at £1.19. Link opens iTunes.
