Ama-Hina

Ama-Hina App for iPhone
     Are you strong enough to survive a horde of zombies?  Could you fight them off with a sword?... What about with your bare fists?  Well now you can!  This game features fierce school girls who face a horde of zombies head on, with no fear!
     The name Ama-Hina is a shortened form of Amaneku and Hinata.  The names of the two characters you can play.  But there are other non-playable characters in the game.  Not only are there several different zombies, but they have newely added a devil girl named Kozel who will fire a large gun at you.  Fight off her attacks and battle onward!
     When you first start the game up you will see a fun introduction animation sequence.  I really enjoyed the music for this sequence (Also, if you leave the launch screen going too long, the intro plays over again).  It reminded me a lot of the Persona games.  After the intro you'll see the launch screen (Right Screen Capture).  From here you have a few options.
     Twitter: Takes you to the official Twitter page for CELLNAVI (English).
     Info: Gives you a brief list of who was involved with the game.  As well as the game version number.
     Ranking: Takes you to the high scores list.  You select by level (Urban, Rainy Day or Hell).  Choose the stage you want the high scores for and you'll see all of your best scores for that level.  You can even click the "World" tab to see the best scores for that level in the world!  How do you compare against the best players?
     Settings: This is for the controls on the game.  Default controls are left tap for jumping, right tap for attacking.  If you are not comfortable with this set up, you can click the "Change" icon in the upper right corner of the settings screen to change them.
     Play: This is the important part.  this is what you download the app for, right?  It certainly wasn't to play with the settings and visit the Twitter page.  Once you click Start you are taken to the character select screen.  Initially you'll only have access to Hinata.  You have to unlock Amaneku by laying through the game a bit.
     Once you select your character you move on to the level selection.  Again, initially only one level will be available to play.  This is the "Urban" stage.  Below are two screen shots from the Urban stage, being played with Hinata.  You can click the images to view the larger version of the screen captures, if you like.

     You may notice that in the second capture the monsters look pretty tough.  I'll get to that in a moment.

     While playing you'll have no control over your character, other than jumping and attacking.  She will continue to run forward on her own.  If she stumbles over an obstacle or is hit by an enemy, she'll lose speed.  Also, jumping decreases her speed.  However, if she does not hit anything for a long time her speed will increase to an unsafe point.  You don't want to be moving too fast.  You wont have enough time to react when an enemy appears in front of you.  3 hits from the enemy and your hearts are gone.  You'll fall and lie on the ground lifeless.  Game over.

     The upper right shows your distance.  The further you go, the better.  Your distance is essentially your score.  Sometimes you can get power ups and extra hearts from defeating enemies or attacking red bins. The red bins can also be used to defeat the enemy  They seem to be highly explosive.  If you strike them 3 times they will roll forward, exploding on the first thing they come to.  If the first thing they come to is enough bin, you'll get a domino affect, and that bin will now roll forward.

     Every now and again, among the zombie scum you will find a larger demon monster.  These creatures take more hits to defeat.  Also, if you get a particular distance on a level, you can come across Kozel, which you can see in the second screen capture above for the Urban stage.  She is very dangerous!  proceed with caution.  You can try to dodge her shots or attack them.

     Once you get to at least 500 meters in Urban, you'll unlock the "Heavy Rain" stage.  I unlocked this after my first play.  So it should not be difficult for you.  The screen to the right is from the heavy rain stage.

     Unlike the Urban level, in Heavy rain you are timed.  When you smash bins you can now get either life, power ups or time.  Once the time runs out, it's game over.
     Once you go 300 meters in heavy rain, the path to Hell is unlocked.
     Hell is a level that looks like the city has mostly been destroyed.  It is also timed.  The enemies are stronger and the speed is faster.  I have not posted images from this stage in the review to give you something to look forward to.  But I will give you some advice.  Jump on the buses rather than tripping past them.  You'll lose less speed.  Jumping while attacking an enemy does more damage.  this is especially useful against the larger monsters.
     Amaneku is unlocked after a certain amount of game play, I believe.  It doesn't take long.  After an hour of playing I had unlocked everything in the game.  Below you can see some shots of Amaneku fighting.

     You may notice that the second screen shot looks different from usual.  The character is large on the screen and there is a blue border effect.  Remember those power ups I mentioned earlier?  When you swipe your finger across the screen you'll do a power up move.  now, sometimes this can be difficult to time.  I had a hard time getting it to work when I wanted it to.  You'll have 3 of these at the beginning of a level, but you can pick up more from the bins and such.  It creates a sequence where the character is large on the screen and does a super move animation that does heavy damage to the enemy/enemies it strikes.  You might want to save these for the large monsters.

     In case you are curious about the differences between the characters, as far as game play goes.  Hinata does less damage, but her attacks are faster.  Amaneku does more damage but has a slower attack.  Keep that in mind when you select them for different stages.

     I really enjoyed this game.  It's simple but still challenging.  I like the available characters.  I would love to see them introduce more playable characters one day.  Perhaps you could play a zombie to fight the zombies... or play as the devil girl?  Either way, it was a really fun game.  I'm glad I got the opportunity to play it!  I think that if you like school girls, side scrollers or zombie battling, it's worth the download.  it's also available for Android.  But it'll cost more (2.87USD).
Rating: 5/5

• $1.99
• Category: Games
• Updated: Dec 07, 2011
• Version: 2.0
• Size: 34.1 MB
• Languages: English, Chinese, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish
• Seller: CELLNAVI
• © CELLNAVI

Rated 9+ for the following:

• Infrequent/Mild Cartoon or Fantasy Violence
• Infrequent/Mild Horror/Fear Themes