Practicing your archery skills or aspiring to join Robin Hood and his Merry Men couldn’t be easier with the iPhone game Sherwood Forest Archery!
Sherwood Forest Archery is an iPhone game that is all about archery. From the various targets to the trophies that players can receive, the game takes you on an adventure to become the next Robin Hood.
Features 1/2
The game features 30 levels which are broken down into 10 different stages, each with three levels of difficulty. Each stage has an Easy, Medium and Hard difficulty. Depending on the difficulty chosen, the targets that arrows are shot at become smaller and smaller.
The game includes various targets in each of the 10 stages. Some of the targets include wooden animals, moving targets, splitting arrows and using fire arrows to ignite a fire bundle. The more challenging targets, such as the fire bundle, also include a brief animation to go along with a successful hit.
After completing the Medium and Hard difficulties in each stage, the game rewards players with virtual trophies that are kept in an Archery Trophy Room. Taking a look at the images below, you can see my Golden Arrow trophy for pulling a Robin Hood and splitting an arrow with another arrow.
However, after players are done all 30 levels, there is nothing left to do. Using a single 35 minute play-through, I almost beat all 30 levels. So after completion, there is not much game play left. The game will definitely benefit from implementing some type of multiplayer feature in the future or leaderboard integration that can track user scores of various tasks such as simply shooting arrows at a target and having the scores recorded.
Overall, the game is fun and definitely provides some solid entertainment, but it is very short and it is very easy to complete the entire game within an hour or two of straight playing. A multiplayer or leaderboard feature would have added more value to the game, but I do recommend keeping an eye on this game for future updates.
Controls & Navigation 1/2
The game makes use of the iPhone accelerometer controls by tilting the device for direction. However, the game seems to require a constant need for calibration.
In my uses, I had to invert the controls every time I wanted the arrow to move down or up and to refresh the change, I had to exit the app. This is definitely not user friendly, as players end up spending more time in the settings menu than actual game play. Eventually the calibration worked out, but the initial set up was very painful. (Tested on a 16GB iPhone 3GS)
Menu navigation is somewhat difficult as the “back” button is very small and difficult to see. Text within the menus is small and in medieval handwriting, which makes it difficult to read.
Sounds & Visuals 0.5/1
The game includes some great medieval music clips when you successfully complete a level but the sound file seems to abruptly end instead of quietly fading out. The available sound effects are good which include sounds for arrows hitting their targets or when the archer is ready to fire but the sound effects, like the music, tend to have a rough edge to them.
The game play visuals are alright but arrows have the tendency to go “through” objects during game play. Also, some targets become very pixelated at close range. This is something that can most definitely be improved upon.
The player does receive some neat animations for some archery tasks such as using a fire arrow to ignite a fire bundle. Players also get a great view of the flying arrow as it flies towards its target.
Sherwood Forest Archery is scored a 2.5 out of 5.
Sherwood Forest Archery is available on the iTunes App Store for $1.99.
