Towaga: Among Shadows is an arcade shooter. You are the last light warrior of your tribe. Travel through 47 phases to relight the five temples, defeat two minor bosses, and finally defeat the big boss.

Each phase is about 3 minutes long and there are three types of side-view battlefields:

• ziggurat - you are stationary on top of a ziggurat, about in the center of the screen. Bad guys come from the four corners and you shoot them down.
• plains - you are stationary at the bottom center of the screen. Bad guys come from left and right and sometimes from the upper corners.
• sky - you are flying the sky and bad guys come from all directions. Use left joystick to move and right to shoot. The sky has boundaries that cause you damage if you fly into them.

This game plays very well with a controller. Usually you're shooting with the right joystick, triggering your equipped spell with either trigger, and recovering from stun with A button. In sky levels you add left joystick for movement.

You collect shards which you use to upgrade your character.

• More beam power
• Wider beams
• More hit points
• Faster hit point recovery
• More mana points (to trigger spells)
• Faster mana point recovery

Your main weapon never changes. You will unlock spells and you equip one at a time. Each spell can also be upgraded.

• Damage nearby enemies
• Freeze nearby enemies
• Slow nearby enemies
• And there are five other spells. I only used Freeze.

You can also unlock outfits and each one gives you a specific bonus.

After the main 47 phases there is a part 2 campaign with 20 more phases. There are two survival modes for ziggurat and sky. There is a multiplayer battle mode (I think). But only the campaigns are interesting and even though new monsters are added the gameplay starts to stale. Luckily it's a shortish game, 10 to 20 hours, and you can switch from hard to normal mode and back at any time.

It's an entertaining light joystick arcade game and once you're done with it you can move on to other Apple Arcade games.