TouchArcade Rating:

In December of last year, Celsius Game Studios released Red Nova [99¢], a frantic arcade-style space shooter. The emphasis in Red Nova is on survival, as you play a lone pilot who must defend an endless onslaught of enemies in order to draw attention away from your home ship the Red Nova, thus enabling it to escape. It’s an absolutely perfect premise for this type of game since you know from the beginning that your chances of survival are nil and you can comfortably focus on destroying as many ships as you can before meeting your demise. A unique and responsive control system complements the experience, and Red Nova is a breath of fresh air in an overly saturated space shooter genre.

Today, the first major update has hit for Red Nova and it addresses the chief complaint from our original review which is the game’s brutal difficulty. I understand that I’m on a suicide mission in the game and should expect to die, but even on the lowest difficulty setting I would get obliterated in a matter of seconds. I don’t want to totally knock the difficulty though, as it was the kind that invited you to practice and improve, which I slowly but surely did. Still, the inclusion of the new Easy mode is a welcome addition. In Easy mode enemies will do less damage and you will do more damage, and their starting spawn rate is lower too. I fired up Easy mode to try it out and more than doubled my previous high score from Normal mode. The difficulty in Red Nova seems much more balanced now with the availability of a fourth difficulty setting.

The other big addition in this update is a brand new ship called the FX-22 Gungnir starfighter. This blue beauty is heavily armored with a high top speed, but the acceleration isn’t so great so it’s not as nimble as the other craft. That brings me to another strong point to Red Nova which is that the four available ships all feel unique from one another, with different strengths and weaknesses and each with their own type of handling. It makes playing the game using each one a lot of fun. I don’t really have a “favorite” ship as I like to use them all, and the new ship fits right in with the current fleet.

If you already have a copy of Red Nova, shoot on over to the App Store and grab this latest update. People who were having a hard time dealing with the difficulty will enjoy the new Easy mode, and everybody should enjoy the new playable ship. If you haven’t yet checked out Red Nova, it’s 99¢ of pure awesome and is an easy recommendation for fans of arcade shooters.