Shantae and the Seven Sirens is an action platformer where you play Shantae, a half-genie visiting Paradise Island with her friends. She's here to perform a show with five other half-genies but when the others are kidnapped it's up to Shantae to find and rescue them and eventually save the island from the Empress Siren.

This is a controller-based side-view platform game. Your main weapon is a hair whip, short-ranged but can do a lot of damage. As you beat monsters you can collect monster cards that give you different modifiers (e.g. less expensive rocket attack or faster climbing speed) and you can equip three cards at a time.

Also as you rescue the other half-genies you gain powers. There are four dances to see invisible things, revive plants (and sometimes purify poisoned water), electrify (and activate machinery), earthquake (and move certain obstacles). I like that when you enter a section there is a hint of which dances are useful and when you find the hidden items and collect them you no longer see the hints.

You also gain transformations. Climb up walls as a lizard, tunnel into sand as a drill, swim underwater as a frog, multi-jump as an octopus. As usual with these games there are areas you can't get to until you gain and use a special dance or transformation and there is plenty of hidden stuff in the old areas to pick up when you get the right powers so you can be constantly backtracking.

Alternatively you can play straightforward and follow the map hint to the next section you need to go to. By the way, I like the auto map as it show you each section and indicates exits, shows you the towns, caves, dungeons and teleporters as you find them. Tells you where you are and where you need to go next.

I had a lot of fun playing this game. It played really smoothly on my iPad (iPad Pro I bought in 2017) with very occasional tearing. Bluetooth XBox controller had no lag and you do end up using most of the buttons though only one joystick/d-pad. It took me 100 hours to finish but I backtracked a lot trying to find everything and missed like one nugget (used to buy one-of-a-kind monster cards).

None of the bosses were extremely tough though some had trick you had to figure out to defeat them. I did use a walkthrough a few times when I got stuck but I think I could have figured the bosses out eventually (you often get a new power just before a boss so that new power is key to beating it).

This game is similar to Way of the Turtle but the frustration I had with that game is finding where to go next and navigating without a map (it has a general map that shows you which area you are in versus Shantae's room by room map). With a good auto map Way of the Turtle would be a good second-tier platformer: not as good story and no voice acting (I forgot to mention Shantae is voiced by my favorite voice actress Cristina Vee and there are other speaking parts; not a lot of voice audio overall -- usually a sentence or two in the middle of a long speech -- but nice nonetheless).

This is a very professional platformer game and shows that an iPad can be a great game machine.