COLONY WARS on iPHONE?
The game stars you as a pilot for hire that must fly a handful of missions for the Terran Federation against the evil Voskk Empire aliens. You learn the rules and controls of the game while getting acclimated to your fighter's control and weapons systems.
The game contains a large galaxy to explore divided into 4 quadrants which each contain around 16 sectors - which themselves contain 4 or 5 zones of combat (planets or space stations) which in turn offer you 3 - 6 missions to choose from.
While the scale of the game is unheard of on a cell phone - or for that matter, most console games, the problem is that the mission variety is small. All of the missions fall into 1 of 4 categories. Either you must destroy a specific ship; escort a handful of cruisers to a waypoint; destroy a group of mines/ junk; or capture a capital ship by disabling its defense grid.
Colony Wars on the Playstation had similar missions, but their was greater variety, better visuals and a deeper control scheme.
The ipod/phone makes use of tilt & touch control to fly the ship. At first it isn't very decent because there is no "roll" or "yaw" - only turn & bank - but if you try to use the onscreen control scheme you'll soon realize that its so inept that the tilt&touch feels as tight as a mouse and kyboard by comparison.
The mission variety is limited, yes, but fortunately the game offers plenty of scattered weapon upgrades and new ships to purchase which adds to replay value.
At first the Vossk fighters are ridiculously hard to deal with because of their superior cornering, but once you upgrade to better weapons, you'll be able to destroy them at long range so as not to have to dog fight them.
AI is pretty good. In fact, at times the AI is ridiculously difficult to deal with. The enemy always come straight for you, ignoring your wingmen - only ignoring you to attack convoy ships you are escorting. This can be a problem in timed middios where you have just 3 minutes or so to reach 4 waypoints. Once they get behind you, they eat your ship's hull with their cannons - they almost never miss. The only sure fire way to deal with them is to get them on approach.
As for Graphics - this game is like having Playstation quality graphics on your iPhone. They never cease to amaze me how well detailed they are and fortunately they don't push the iPhone's CPU too hard - although this game will deplete your battery life quickly.
I like the game but they need to add more variety to missions and possibly more of a storyline.
This game's basic design and engine is really really good. A Babylon 5 game like this would be really awesome.