Woooo...creeeeepy dead baby eyes!

Seeing as Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor (DS) and its cheating god damn AI was pissing me off to no end (read the review here), I decided to step up when Pillowfort said he had a review copy available for iPhone game Dr. Nano as I needed a break.

Designed by Mission Critical Studios for the iPhone, the storyline is a little…puzzling.  You play as Doctor Nano, a doctor who is shrunk down and injected into the blood stream of a human patient in the vein of Fantastic Voyage or Innerspace (hah, get it, vein?  Pun intended!) to work on patients from the inside.  So far, so good.  But somehow, they decided that our good doctor is eight years old.  Wait, wha?  Eight?  Why eight?

Okay, whatever, fine.

But look at those dead baby eyes he’s got.  That’s some creepy shiz-nite.   Blink, Dr. Nano, blink!  Stop staring at the nurses like that, Dr. Nano! Maybe they could have gone little more along the Buzz Lightyear route or even an Einstein knock off, but an eight year old with no eyelids? Dr. Nano is a little creepy and weird looking for a protagonist.

The gameplay is based around the iPhone’s accelerometer.  You start off, floating in a vein in a third person camera behind our good doctor or his nano submarine.  You tilt the iPhone up, you float or propel upwards and so forth.  If you tap on the screen, your sub fires a projectile toward whatever target is in front of you.  Both fingers on the screen stops you in place.  There is a handy accelerator slide on the left slide that you can manually dictate your speed.  Each level, you have a quota of targets within the blood stream to eliminate, from plaque buildup to hook worms. You can’t just float there or bumble along slowly, because you have a limited amount of oxygen and need to keep gathering red blood cells to keep your oxygen levels high.

That's the Dr. Nano nano sub in the center.

I spent the first 10 levels hunched over my iPhone with my elbows on my knees trying to keep the iPhone in the sweet spot to keep Dr. Nano centered.  Only after I accidentally quit the game by pushing the menu button and coming back in did I find the Calibrate function in the pause menu.  Made my life MUCH easier.

The game has several problems that make it rather meh and certainly not worth $3.99.

The game is broken down into 21 levels, each level increasing in difficulty: four primary levels, then one bonus stage.  Seeing as I’ve gotten through 15 of them in one hour without dying once, there’s really not a lot of challenge to the game.  There’s a point system based on kills, how fast you complete the level, etc, but there’s really no point to a score; you don’t upgrade weapons or technology or anything.

The big problem is the frame rate.  The frame rate sometimes slows to an unplayable crawl when multiple objects get on the screen at once.

Another problem is the game’s repetitive nature.  The music and audio is obnoxiously repetitive; main stages have one song, bonus stages has a second song, but that’s it.  There’s also a little digitized voice of Dr. Nano saying “Fire” every second or third time you fire your weapon.  So after an hour of hearing the same 8 measures of music and hearing the thing chirp “Fire” at you again, it wears on you.  While the targets of each level change, the environment is obviously the same.  I mean, I can’t think of how you would change up what the inside of a vein looks like, but there’s no real attempt made.   Missions are repetitive: instead of making you feel like you are inside a patient, trying to heal them from something, you just get an obligatory one screen briefing telling you to kill target X and target Y.  No patient name, no reason why, no backstory, no nothing.  Kill eight of these and six of these, go to the next level.

If Mission Critical Studios is planning on putting another one of these out, they definitely need to go back to the drawing board and look at some of the game mechanics that are making games on big consoles succeed, and then try again.  This could make a compelling Wii game, as Mission Critical is an authorized Nintendo developer, but they would really need to revamp what they’ve got here.