Review: Pangea Software Billy Frontier

Jeremy Horwitz
By Jeremy Horwitz - Editor-in-Chief
Review: Pangea Software Billy Frontier

The Wild West is a natural setting for exciting games, and Billy Frontier ($6) by Pangea has a B-movie twist on that theme: what if the cowboy hero, Billy Frontier, was also fighting aliens? That would be interesting, right?


Review: Pangea Software Billy Frontier
Review: Pangea Software Billy Frontier

Not so much. Like Cro-Mag Rally before it, Billy Frontier is an example of a game with a good 3-D engine and some ugly characters, here a bunch of out-of-place green aliens, orange bulls, and other oddities that take away from what is otherwise a decent “four games in one” title. There are two types of 3-D shooting scenes, which are like Konami’s classic Lethal Enforcers first-person shooting games except that your bullets and aim seem to be really poor, even after you turn off the game’s default “don’t shoot where I touch” controls. Then there are three-person duel scenes, where you either properly input a series of triangle-circle commands with on-screen buttons or get shot in a triangular showdown with two aliens.

And finally, there are “stampede” scenes where you race down a path, avoiding a stampede of alien bulls. There are two scenes per type of mini-game, one set in a swamp, and the other in an old West town.

Review: Pangea Software Billy Frontier

Review: Pangea Software Billy Frontier

Simply put, Billy Frontier isn’t much fun. The first-person town and swamp shootouts lack for the excitement found in pretty much any of the first-person gun games that were once popular in arcades; they’re interesting only in that you can sometimes press a button to move forward or rotate around in the level, and break boxes to find more ammo. Duels are straightforward and boring: either enter all of the button presses correctly or die.

And the stampedes, which use the accelerometer for movement of Billy, are only vaguely fun—you can collect coins as you run towards the screen, and chili peppers to speed him up. It’s not tough to outrun the bulls, or to beat the various levels.

Review: Pangea Software Billy Frontier

Review: Pangea Software Billy Frontier

The game’s most exciting mode? Target practice, where you shoot at a variety of character and object models that are tossed onto the screen at random, with the screen occasionally shaking to throw off your aim. The sheer number of targets gives you a lot to shoot at, which is cool. Unfortunately, as with the other shooting mode, bullets don’t reliably hit the targets you fire at; there’s also no real background art here to speak of.

Jeremy Horwitz
By Jeremy Horwitz Editor-in-Chief
Jeremy Horwitz was the Editor-in-Chief at iLounge. He has written over 5,000 articles and reviews for the website and is one of the most respected members of the Apple media. Horwitz has been following Apple since the release of the original iPod in 2001. He was one of the first reviewers to receive a pre-release unit of the device, and his review helped put iLounge on the map as a go-to source for Apple news.