One of the enjoyable aspects of gaming on the iPhone is seeing how developers use the various features available, like the accelerometer. Abigale is one such game.

Abigale is a side scrolling shooter with an anime-themed art style and accelerometer based controls. The game itself is pretty decent, if you like the scrolling shooters. Otherwise, you may find it very repetitive. The gameplay is what I would like to focus on, as I see it being the strongest part of the game.

Your character, Abigale, is a magic user that flies around shooting and swinging a giant flail. Tilting the screen around will not only move her, it will also move the flail. This is the interesting part, to me. You see, like all scrolling shooters, there are a ton of projectiles flying around and instead of just dodging them you can swing your flail about — blocking and absorbing them. Absorbing damage with the flail builds up your power and allows the use of your special ability — swinging the flail about really fast. While not too amazing at first, it does have a special bonus… and drawback. To clear stages you must collect crystals from defeated enemies, but killing them with the normal ranged attack doesn’t really provide many crystals as reward. So, you use the special flail ability which grants a lot of crystals per kill — at the expense of defense. While the ability is active the flail will no longer protect against attacks. Getting the timing and actual usage down is the challenge, you have to be close to hit but too close and you’ll run into them — taking damage. It’s quick to learn but hard to master, kinda.

That’s the basics of the game. As far as it being good or not — I really enjoy it and think it’s definitely worth the cost (which isn’t much).