$3.99 - SGN - 
- v1.5
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Has anyone else been screwed over by quick reviews of high profile games? After reading a few online reviews and app store reviews for F.A.S.T., it sounded like a great game. But after a few hours of gameplay, I almost had to see a chiropractor to fix my neck. The game is basically a very simple jet simulator where the only goal is shooting down other jets with missiles. Although the graphics and sound are great, the rest of the game is not worth it. The main problem is the painful and frustrating accelerometer interface (where you tilt the phone to maneuver your jet) that requires you to move your head around with the iphone to try and see the screen as you try to fly. And as this is a fighter jet game, it requires you to be constantly maneuvering and turning your jet very hard to avoid missiles and follow your target. This not only starts to hurt, but also gets very frustrating and makes you look like an idiot if you try to play this on the subway.
The multiplayer aspect works very well and pairs you up with another player very quickly, but most of the multiplayer games I've played usually finish when one of the players crashes their jet rather than shoots anyone down. As both players wildly turn their planes around, you pretty much just try to out-survive your opponent. It's not as much dogfighting as it is puppyfighting, you just chase your tail around in circles until you get dizzy. The single player game gets boring very quickly as all you ever do is shoot down more and more enemy planes, there's no other types of targets, no land units, no missions, no strategy, just lock and shoot.
There seems to be some sort of disconnect between iPhone developers that need to throw the accelerometer into their games, and the people that will actually play them. Is anyone else getting frustrated with these accelerometer controls? Are on-screen controls that hard to implement? Car racing games figured this out pretty quickly and added a feature that rotated the image to counter the physical rotation of the iPhone, so that you could turn the phone but not have to turn your head with it to see what is going on. Fast paced jet combat simulation is very different as you need to rotate the phone in all directions to pitch and turn, which means you either don't see what is happening on screen, or you twist and turn your neck around to follow the screen (=painful).
In conclusion, can developers please add in an on-screen control option, and can reviewers please try the games out for more than a few minutes before writing a review. Oy.
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