Billy Frontier Review

Billy Frontier is an action arcade game from Pangea Software. According to the game’s description players take on the role of a space cowboy who is charged with ridding his town of Alien invaders. Billy Frontier is an iPhone port of an existing Mac OS game and retails for $5.99 in the iTune App Store. Currently Pangea is running a $2.99 “back to school” promotion on Billy Frontier.

Billy Frontier Gameplay

Billy Forntier is a collection of four mini games each of which can be played in the easy Town setting or the more difficult Swamp location. The four mini games all play very differently and consist of target practice, shootout, duel and stampede. Players can play the games in any order and frequency they desire which makes Billy Frontier more like a mini arcade and less like story driven game. The object of the Billy Frontier is to see how many of the mine games you can complete and how many coins you can collect with your three lives.

Target Practice is played in fixed position first person view. All sorts of objects fly into view and your job is to shoot them down by tapping on them. The bullets lag behind your taps just enough to give players the feeling of leading their target a bit. For a majority of the game the screen will wobble and shake which adds to the difficulty and gives a slight motion sick sensation. Target practice felt really smooth and definitely took some skill to hit targets reliably. Unfortunately, it’s also very repetitive and lacking in any sort of replay value. While it looks great, there’s just not enough to this mini game to make we want to play it anymore then a handful of times.

Dules is a cinimatic reflex game. In the lower middle of the game screen a pattern of circle and triangel shapes will display challenging players to repeat the patter using the two correspding side buttons. When you complete a pattern one light on your meter bar is lit up and another pattern is displayed. You goal is to complete enough patterns to light up the whole meter bar before your enemies shoot you down. As you repeate the patterns the game screen displays a very “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly” type cinimatic with music to match. While the cinematic experience is well done, once you’ve played a duel, theres no real reason to play again. Sure, you can go for a higher score, but why?. There are a ton of game play features Pangea could’ve added to this type of game, but they didn’t. The actual buttons were a tad small, weren’t very “westerny” and seemed to lack some sensativity to tapping.

Stampede is a 3rd person racing type game that pits you against a herd of Kanga-Cows. Unlike most racing games, in Stampede your avatar runs towards you. You have two controls available in stampede. Tilting your iPhone will steer your cowboy left or right and tapping the screen will cause him to jump. As you run you can collect coins for points and peppers to get a burst of speed. You can die in stampede by being run over by the kanga-cows or hitting to many obstacles.

Stampede is yet another example of Billy Frontiers repetitive, boring, featureless and poorly thought out gameplay. I guess in Pangea’s world a stampede is exactly five animals cause that’s all you’ll see in this game. What’s worse is it’s very easy to stall yourself on an obstacle, let the cows run by you and then complete most of the level in solitude, you’ll need to pass the cows at the end or your cowboy will drop dead for no apparent reason. The course and obstacles don’t change in Stampede so, like all of Billy Frontier, one time through is enough. Again, there was a lot Pangea could have done with this type of game but instead it seems they did the bare minimum to make it playable.

Shootout is a pseudo 3rd person shooter. instead of being able to walk around the town shooting Aliens you are taken through scripted areas where your only options are turn and shoot. When you complete an area you tap a foward button to continue on. Game play in Shootout consists of shooting enemies by tapping on them and shooting boxes to replenish your health and ammo. There is a cool little boss encounter at the end of the game which can be easily reached if your good about collecting ammo and health.

It’s important to note that by default there is an option turned on to offset your targeting reticle. This means you will not shoot where you tap . . .sound like fun? It’s not. Of the four games, Shootout probably has the most replay value. Still, the enemies are always in the same spots, you always follow the same path and it’s relatively easy once you’ve figured out that boxes give you more ammo and health. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Pangea could have done a lot with this type of mini game, but they didn’t. Instead this “shootout” is much more like a shooting gallery.

Billy Frontier Graphics

The graphics in Billy Frontier are incredibly well done and stylized. The towns, props and characters are rendered in 3d and simply look amazing on the iPhone. The menu systems look pretty decent except for the horribly awful settings screen. Seriously, what’s up with this thing (see screenshot)? The whole game is styled like this cool spaghetti western and then they throw in this plain blue and white settings screen. It’s really wierd, almost like the game was rushed to the iTunes store with little detailed play testing.

Billy Frontier Sound

The sound in Billy Frontier is very good and matches the game perfectly. I actually left the menu screen music playing during this review. This is one part of the game that’s pretty top notch.

Billy Frontier Price

Pangea says the actual retail price of Billy Frontier is $5.99 even though it’s currently on promotion for half that. I think the promotion price is far more reasonable and would suggest Pangea spend a lot more time on the game play and features before ramping the price back up.

Billy Frontier Summary

Billy Frontier is a great looking and great sounding game. Unfortunately, it’s not a great playing game. All four mini games are incredibly repetitive and shallow. The whole game feels a little restrictive and parts of the production feel rushed. If you’re content with shallow gameplay, you can’t beat Billy Frontier’s setting and sound. If you’re like me and want substantially engaging gameplay, this is not the game for you.

Also. . .how is this guy a space cowboy?

By: Aaron Robbins