Any game that features Marie Curie delivering the line “Eat science, fishstick” is always going to pique our interest. Tesla Force doesn’t just feature badass science ladies dropping action movie-quality one liners though, it also offers up some of the best twin-stick shooting we’ve seen on mobile for a while.
After you accidentally open a rift in space and time that unleashes a horde of horrors, its up to you to set things right. By shooting them all. The game is split up into small missions – collect these, defend that, fix those, that sort of thing. All the while trying not to get overwhelmed by swarms of tentacled mutants, giant spiders and shambling reanimated corpses.
There are roguelite elements here as well. As you fight you’ll unlock new powers and skills, making you faster, stronger and generally more, er, killing-er. Deadly. That’s the word we were looking for. When you die you lose some of these, but you can build new equipment to start off your next run more powerful.
There’s also a ticking death clock that’s always in play. This makes the monsters more powerful after a certain amount of time, adding an increasing level of difficulty to the already challenging experience.
Tesla Force is a joy to look at, all flashing fire bullets and creeping waves of flobbering creatures ripped from your nightmares. The controls are pretty good too, although there are a couple of buttons that are difficult to reach. You can tweak their position though, and choose between twin-stick or auto-aim to make things a bit easier.
Oh, and there’s a stompy mech you can build if you pick up enough pieces that can rain all sorts of hot death on the spawn of the Cthulhu. And nukes you can set off. And fire bullets and fire-rate boosts you can pick up. Everything is geared to creating a chaos that always feels a split second away from running out of your control.
Tesla Force works brilliantly on mobile, managing to capture everything that makes the home version so great in a pocket-sized package. It’s hard not to get tangled up in its moreish repetition of slaughter, and it’s hard to think of stronger praise for a twin-stick roguelite shooter than that.
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