Developed by No Monkeys and published by Noodlecake, Fired Up! is a very simple arcade game that easily hooks you up on your first attempt to play it. With one touch control and uncomplicated mechanics, the gameplay is something anyone can understand without the need of complex tutorials. The game is about a building that is on fire, with flames coming out the windows and people inside about to die. You are the firefighter assigned to put out the flames and save the residents.
By tapping the screen, a water jet comes out of the hose that you are holding, which makes you sort of fly. Gravity is not really an ally here, so you need to tap and hold in order to maintain yourself in the air. Because the hose is not really firm, you go from side to side, trying to use the water jets to put out the flames in each window and earning points as you do so. An exclamation point appears whenever there is a resident on a specific window. When you save a certain number of residents (the number appears on the top left of the screen), a helicopter pours water, helping you with some of the flames.
Every now and then, you can see coins in the windows and you can collect them in order to unlock different looking residents. On the initial screen, you have an option to check how many different residents you have already saved — although I didn’t really see a reason why we would want to know this.
The game is endless, but you lose every time you touch a flame — and sometimes there are so many of them that it is almost impossible to escape. The orange flames are the ones that can be put out, while the blue ones you find at the bottom (after you have gone some floors up) can’t be extinguished.
In terms of graphics, the game doesn’t disappoint; it has some cheerful set of colors and the characters are intentionally squared up, which make them funny to look at. The music is okay, but it gets really annoying after you’ve heard it over and over again — either way, you can just turn it off and continue to enjoy the ride.
There was only one thing that I didn’t quite like: the ads. I know that almost all mobile games nowadays have ads, but the places they have chosen to locate them really infuriates me. There is one ad in particular that was placed at the bottom of the game that could easily lead me to uninstall the game. Because we need to tap the screen constantly, I had accidentally tapped the ad several times and the App Store would come up.
Besides that, Fired Up! is a really cool game that, interestingly enough, has no In-App Purchases. Also, it has Game Center leaderboards and achievements so you can spend long hours trying to complete all the challenges and beat people in the world ranking. Additionally, a pack of stickers is available for you to use on iMessage in iOS 10. It can be downloaded for free in the App Store (link below) and it is available for both iPhone and iPad.
