What’s that retro game on the App Store? Oh, it’s Holiday Havoc! Holiday Havoc is Underground Pixel‘s first app, and it doesn’t show! This game is simple yet slightly challenging. It’s so easy to learn and suitable for young kids about 5 and up. The game will require some fast thinking, somewhat like Major Mayhem, you can’t shoot friendly people! In this case, these “friendly people” are elves that bring young kids their presents. Don’t want to shoot those do you?

The game goes as there are nutcrackers and evil teddy bears trying to steal Santa’s presents. You, Santa, shoot disintegrating snowballs at the evil creatures, but make sure you don’t shoot the elves! There are power ups to have turn snow balls into ice balls which freezes elves if you accidentally hit them and gives you unlimited shots for a short period of time. You have three lives if you shoot an elf, but if a nutcracker or teddy bear gets the present (and leaves the screen), you lose instantly.

The game’s graphics is pixel’d and 8-bit-ish. They aren’t truly 8-bit (they’re bit higher), but it will still be nostalgic to retro lovers. Holiday Havoc does support HD retina display (however it doesn’t support native iPad display). The music has a nice chipmunk styled beat while retaining the old-school feel. As soon as you press ‘play’ it goes all out into a battle theme.
Woah, I just got an achievement! While I was writing this review, I set the game on pause so I could carefully listen to the music and I got the ‘procrastinator’ achievement. Nice! These achievements add replay value to the game, and I love achievements.

While I can’t picture myself playing the game for more than 10 minutes at a time, but I still take out the game every once in a while when I get bored, it’s still a fun game. There are leaderboards where you can compare your score with your friends. I won’t even look towards being in the top due to all those ‘jailbreakers’ who use iFile to cheat on their score. It gets a bit annoying after a seeing every game flooded with cheated scores, but on this game, it seems that all the scores are real! Thank you for not jailbreaking. Back on topic, the leaderboards are useful when seeing who can get the highest scores within your friends.

Overall, the game is great time passer and I recommend it to retro lovers. I recommend to keep the app as well, since it’s a nice app to let your kids (or younger siblings) play. Can’t wait for next Christmas!

For more information on Holiday Havoc visit their official website. The iOS version can be found at the App Store for iPhone for $0.99.