Subscribe- Watch gameplay video
- Rating:
- Price: $1.99 (Get It)
- Version: 1.0
- Developer: Spiffyware
Tilt Fighter is a vertical shoot ‘em up game that’s similar to Galaga and Space Invaders. With Tilt Fighter, the game uses the accelerometer to tilt the ship left and right at the bottom of the screen. The ship automatically fires its main weapons, but tapping on the screen fires the secondary weapon. Eventually you’ll get the antimatter bomb, at which point you pinch the screen inward or outward to set the size of the bomb, then release to make it explode, wiping out enemies in its blast radius.
While playing, you can tap the menu button in the top right corner which pauses the game. From there, you can access the menu to either Resume play, quit to the main menu, and turn off sound. In the main menu, you can choose to play the game from one of three difficulty levels, Ensign (Easy), Captain (Medium), or Commander (Hard). You can also see your high scores, submit the score online, and clear high scores.
The concept sounds great, and the screenshots makes the game seem appealing, but the execution is drearily dull. While you can manage to tilt the ship left and right and avoid enemy fire and asteroids, most of the time you’ll get hit no matter what your skill level, because the ship bounces to the left and right, no matter how still your iPhone/iPod Touch is. This may be by design, who knows, but it makes the game feel choppy.
Tilt Fighter isn’t the only space shooter in the App Store not doing so great. StarSmasher also feels incomplete and its fun is short-lived. Metalangel, while just released at the time of writing this review, doesn’t seem to be faring well with gamers so far. Which leads me to believe that space shooters/shoot ‘em up need special attention on the iPhone/iPod Touch. Either that, or all of these games have developers pushing the game out way too soon, hoping to capitalize on unsuspecting gamers looking for a fun shooter.
The graphics in Tilt Fighter are inconsistent and doesn’t feel very fluid, which is exacerbated by the ship’s constantly flicking back and forth to the left and right. In fact, I experienced framerate issues when there were a number of enemy ships and asteroids on the screen. The only bright spot graphically are the backgrounds, giving each level a unique feel.
Sound effects are decent, at best, but nothing really stood out. There is no music, but you can play your own music library while playing Tilt Fighter.
