It’s also very quick to play, because there are no complicated angles, wind or resource management. All you need to do is tap on the screen where you want the cannonball to land, and BOOM, away it goes.
You’ve even got a historically inaccurate rate of fire that lets you tap-tap-tap away without having to worry about your poor swabs reloading the cannons.
So what we have here is a simple to play target game. The skill is one known to any gunner, and that’s the offset. With all your targets moving across the screen at different speeds, you’ll need to aim in front of them to ensure they drift into the path of the cannonball as it reaches them.
It might sound simple but it’s actually a smart way of doing a game like this. There is a skill here, and it does take a little bit of playing to get your eye working so you can hit the targets. And then there’s the accuracy. It’s easy enough to hit one of the opposing galleons sailing across the screen, but that only scores you a handful of points. On each “big” target there is a smaller target worth up to 500 points. Snag this and not only is your high score going to be that much higher, but you can also lob another cannonball over to take out the now cargo-less target.
You have levels of action that see progressively faster ships, and once you reach your limit, your score is saved locally and the top five scores are listed, and you also have the option to check out how your high score compares to those online on a global table.
Is there a lot of game here? Well, yes and no. There’s little more to the gameplay than two minutes of frantic screen tapping, but in terms of enjoyment and challenge there’s a lot packed into that two minutes – and like any reaction-time-based game you can replay it a lot. This is an acquired taste, but it reaches out to a very wide palette.
-- Ewan Spence, Nov 2010.