Rage: Mutant Bash TV Review

It's all about the points, darling.

Rage: Mutant Bash TV is an arcade light gun shooter that you just happen to play on an iPhone. As a new contestant on an ultra-violent game show, you must run through three freak-filled stages in the great wasteland left behind after the apocalypse. Well, you don't exactly run through them. Mutant Bash TV does that for you so you can concentrate on aiming at everything that moves.
Let's be sure about one thing right up-front: Mutant Bash TV is stunning. There is no question that id has the power of the iPhone and iPad dialed in with this shooter. These are not pre-rendered backdrops with monsters pasted on top of them. You rush headlong through full 3D worlds, loaded with impressive detail and plenty of places for the mutants mentioned in the show's title to explode from and launch their attacks.

All you need to do in Mutant Bash TV is survive. There is no story to speak of and the hero goes through nothing resembling development. There is no set-up. No catharsis. Just guns and guts. The touch and tilt controls are perfectly suitable for looking around scenes (as you're automatically wheeled through them), seeking out incoming freaks. The fire button doubles as your grabber, too, so when you see a bonus like extra health, ammo, or Bash Bux (a point bonanza), tap to collect it no matter how far it is from your vantage point. You have a run button that pulls double-duty as dodge, so when a mutant hurls a brick at you, tap the button to slide out of the way and return fire.

You're given just three generic weapons to use against the horde, each suited for different situations. The shotgun excels at knocking down nearby mutants while your assault rifle is good for plugging them at a distance. Your default pistol has unlimited ammo, but is the weakest of the three weapons. I do wish there was some more firepower to play with, although this arsenal gets the job done.

However, Mutant Bash TV borrows a trick from Gears of War: active reload. If you reload before a clip runs completely dry, try tapping reload again when the meter at the top of the screen reaches a highlighted area. If you nail it, your bullets do double damage for several seconds. Once you have this system down – never letting your clip go to zero and always hitting the active reload – you become a killing machine. Without mastery of this skill, you won't last long in Mutant Bash TV's higher difficulty settings.

The touch-tilt controls are well executed.

Hopefully, you like Mutant Bash TV enough to replay over and over on those higher settings because as I mentioned up top, there are only three stages in this game. They can be burned through in about 30 minutes. But that's the point here, really. Mutant Bash TV is all about getting the high score and doing a little better on each run. That's a fine formula, to be sure. But then why doesn't Mutant Bash TV have leaderboards or support Game Center? The whole point of getting high scores is to show them off and the lack of even basic Game Center functionality is a bizarre exclusion.

id has aggressively priced Mutant Bash TV at just 99 cents for the iPhone and 1ドル.99 for the iPad. However, if you buy the iPad version, it also works on your iPhone. It's the exact same game on both the iPhone and iPad, but as you can imagine, the iPad version has a much larger play view.

Verdict

Mutant Bash TV is a stunning game, loaded with over-the-top violence. It has the blood of a mid-nineties arcade light gun game coursing through its veins, something you play over and over to put big scores up on the board. Yet there is no board here. If the amount of real estate to cover in Mutant Bash TV is limited and I’m expected to replay it over and over (which is fine with me), then let me boast about my mutant-slaying prowess to the world, not my dog. She couldn't care less.