Ex-Bungie chief says making new mobile shooter was almost as tough as creating the first Halo

In the shooter, when you make contact with the aliens, the fighting starts. To shoot an alien, you touch it on the screen. Your character aims, and a reticule appears on the creature. You hold it down to fire and use your finger to follow the alien as it tries to dodge or hide. If you hit the alien enough times, you kill it. You do this over and over until you clear a section in about two minutes. A short firefight enables you to set it aside and go on with your life, in case you don’t want to spend hours playing a single game session.

Above: Time to run.

Image Credit: Industrial Toys

You use some of the many guns in different ways. You can pinch the screen, as if you were viewing a photo, to zoom in on a target with a sniper rifle. You tap the head to try to get a headshot. The more headshots you get, the greater the points you rack up. If you press two fingers on the screen, you lay down a shield to protect your character.

The action is fast. But you don’t move your character, as you do in other tablet shooting games like The Drowning. Instead, you stay put until you shoot all of the aliens in front of you, and then you move to another location. You do control the direction the camera faces, but you’re immobile while you’re shooting.

But it’s not a turkey shoot like in the old House of the Dead games from Sega. The enemies move when you target them. But you can try to follow the character by moving your finger to match where the character runs. Some of the alien bosses take a lot of damage, leaving you exposed to attacks from other aliens.

You can pull out tricks, like a levitation power that makes the aliens float in the air. You can pick them off until the power wears off. The mechanics are simple, and they don’t require you to do things that are just too hard to do on a touchscreen.

The game will debut with a large chunk of the story, but Industrial Toys will keep coming up with content over time. The game’s modes make the title replayable, too. In hardcore mode, you have to get more than 30 headshots in a round. In psychotic mode, you have to play flawlessly.

In multiplayer mode, you can send challenges to friends and share your results of missions. You can modify a level and issue a challenge for a friend to play it at your direction. For instance, you may have to play with no shields. In one kind of tests, you may get three chances to clear a level. If four people are in one, the winner takes all. If you win, you nab the jackpot of resources that are at stake.

You can use your reward currency from playing to upgrade your gear. You can also purchase a different kind of currency to buy premium gear. You aren’t required to pay real money to win or beat friends. Industrial Toys has invested heavily in the communications features, like chat, so that it can build a community worthy of a major shooter game.

Midnight Star offers all sorts of rewards that it designed to give you a smile and keep you engaged. You unlock features on guns and level them up, just like a character. You can eventually get goodies like a shotgun that can chain lightning bolts together.