Fly in the air and collect coins...

User Rating: 9 | Machine Gun Jetpack IOS
When I first heard the name of the game Jetpack Joyride, my first impression was one of bemusement.  I had thought that perhaps the developer could have only picked a more generic title if they had gone "Check it out Jetpacks."  Luckily for everyone involved, I didn't just read the title in the App Store, I actually played the game and found it to be a fun one-touch iOS game.The setup for the game is that a man named Barry is frustrated at work, and to burn off some steam he steals two Gatling guns strapped to a backpack and goes for a jetpack joyride.  A joyride in this case means running at top speed through a lab that is filled with traps and coins and occasionally using the jetpack to gain some altitude to respectively avoid and gather these items.  The score in the game is calculated based on how far Barry makes it before his inevitable demise.  In this, some suspension of disbelief is required as the game's online leaderboard shows that the laboratory building is at least 26 kilometers long.  Granted it could be a circle, but as he doesn't lap the corpses of the employees trapped in the middle of the struggle between rocketeer and automated defenses struggle, that seems unlikely.

The basic mechanic is that by pressing on the screen, the jetpack's thruster will engage.  When the throttle is turned off, gravity kicks in to pull Barry back to the lab's steely floor.  There is no control over the x-axis, our joyrider just goes faster and faster until it's game over.  Miss some coins and want to go back? Too bad.  The trick becomes knowing how to hop over some obstacles and when to hover in the middle of the screen by tapping the throttle button.  There are only three basic obstacles: electric fences that form a line to be avoided, red lasers that will appear to take up the entire screen, but will actually only cover the portion of the field indicated by a thinner, warning beam, and missiles which shoot across to take out the jetpack thief after being considerate enough to sound an alarm and put a fat exclamation on the screen to mark its approximate trajectory.  At first all of this is easy to avoid and the coins scattered throughout the map are equally simple to gather.  But, as you can imagine, it gets considerably more difficult as the game's speed increases.It would not be fair to finish the review without mentioning the in game store.  As mentioned before, coins can unlock things but running around in the lab and completing missions is not the only way to get coins.  If you want, you can plunk down actual dollars to get fake, virtual coins.  The game never expressly told me to use this service, but the coin payout for an average run or rank up is such that it would take about an hour to generate the coins necessary to unlock the more expensive items.  It's kind of a shady element to an otherwise great game.  But hey, everyone's doin' it, so I guess that makes it OK.  At least in someone's mind.