Armored Firestorm lacks the needed interest to justify buying or playing. It's not outright terrible, just empty of real value.
For play, you have a machine gun that needs cooling time and a big cannon on fixed cooldown that doubles as a crude boost, and no other abilities. Movement is extremely drifty, as in any adjustment takes longer to be relevant than most anything you'd be adjusting to. You can't see very far either.
Enemies are uninteresting and mainly pester you with endless sprays of bullets that you rely on your shield to get through. Visuals are poor, including tall objects that block the camera entirely and obstacles you need to move around but that you can't see. The first level is extremely dark and full of dark objects that get in your way (notice in the screen shots that enemies are [i]also[/i] mostly dark, and yes, that is as bad as you'd think for a dark level). Menus require you to dpad around getting the highlight onto the control you want to manipulate (eg, the 'next' or 'previous' buttons when trying to select levels). Sound is barely there and you may as well mute it for all it contributes.
The entire game is five fixed levels that basically spawn increasing droves of the same very few enemies. You pick your level and start a run there until you die there. The only goal is survive and score. I didn't notice any scoring mechanics or other elements to add interest.
One level is all big sliding tiles that leave holes you can fall through, and offers some notable and cute novelty value navigating around shifting holes and enemies. Unfortunately, you can only see a few tiles away, so you can't plan your drifty movement in the warning window you get for slides, and falling penalizes your score more each time, so the level works against itself as much as it might add to the game. Still, credit for that level being more amusing and adding some real play interest where the other levels are mainly just timed hazard spots and poor visibility. That idea could have been developed into something quite fun.
There are upgrades which you can mostly guess. You get them by leveling up in the run, which forcibly halts play for you to pick from three options and then throws you back in where you were (I hate when games do this). A couple add some small texture, but they don't add much so it doesn't really matter that levels always start a little more boring (it matters more that enemy spawning is pretty boring at the beginning too, as you wait for the game to ramp up interest). The only cross-run progression is unlocking the levels (via score targets on the previous level) and some decoration unlocks for your tank. I'd consider the lack of cross-run progression a feature, but some find it a negative.
All in all, it just doesn't bring what I expect in a game. It's cheap, which is a pass to some, but what does that really matter? If I ask it why I should spend my gaming time with it, it still has no answer.
