Star Battalion

Star Battalion – Flight sim of the stars!

Anyone who’s ever thought that a decent dog-fighting flight sim couldn’t ever be played in the palm of your hand, look again! Star Battalion is a fantastic game which not only looks impressive, but does exactly what it should and presses all the right buttons.

Not only does this game have all the fantastic ships with their various attributes; speed, strength and firepower, but it plunges you into the heart of a civil war set in space with you being a star pilot of the resistance, versus just about everyone and everything. This well scripted and entertaining plot turns up quite a few twists and turns on what would otherwise be quite a linear game.

You have various missions to accomplish in a number of locations. Whether it’s playing in an air to ground reconnaissance mission, deep space dog-fighting combat; to engage in frontline attacks or strike back as a more defensive support role, each level will give you a number of scenes which will leave you fighting and feeling lucky if you escape by the skin of your teeth.

One of the best things about this game is that you can play in a third person view or in the cockpit of your spaceship. Flying is done by tilting the device up, down, left or right to point your nose in that direction. Firing weapons is a simple task of tapping the appropriate weapon icon in the bottom right (either laser or missile). Holding the laser button down will select auto-fire and pressing and holding the missile tab will either allow you to get closer to releasing the single missile or deploy more than one missile at the selected target(s).

The aiming of your lasers and missiles are made quite a breeze and should you get a lock on them, your computer will do the rest in terms of shooting into the path of the target. One thing to remember is, as powerful as your rockets are, your opponents can do some good tricks to shake the rocket off their tail. Similarly, you can pull off some impressive tricks either a barrel roll (by swiping across the screen in the desired direction) or an upwards or downwards flip (by swiping up or down on the screen) – these tricks make you able to not just get out of a bandit’s sights, but even turn the tables on them and give you the upper hand!

Ultimately, this is a really slick game which will be a brilliant addition to anyone’s iPod/iPhone and no doubt come as an answer to our prayers for a decent game of this kind. This is accessible to players of all ages and abilities. Should you find this quite easy, you can always pit your skills online or with friends using either Bluetooth or Wi-Fi.

Positives

Hugely entertaining

Impressive sound and graphics (certainly on par with blockbuster titles)

Very engaging and good controls

3^rd person or cockpit view

Negatives

Quite slow to load

Most missions can be completed in 10 minutes or less

Huge programme file

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