Review: IronPlane
Score:
39%
Developers SwanAngel promise a lot in the Ovi Store description of their latest game: "[IronPlane] is a arcade shooter where you take control of a advanced aircraft and fight aliens in different worlds." If only they could design an arcade game that's as slick and skilled as their copywriters, they might have a hit on their hands.
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Offering a traditional up the screen arcade-shooter is always going to catch my eye in the Ovi Store. Much like the Flight Control genre, it's partly a quest to find the perfect mobile version of this type of game. And IronPlane is nowhere near the quality needed for me to finish this quest.
I'll always tend to look at a direct control option in any arcade game, so Iron Plane's cursor control is chosen by me before the accelerometer. Which leads to a very uncomfortable gaming experience.
Unlike other virtual joysticks, such as the one perfected by Gameloft, SwanAngel have made a fundamental mistake - it's incredibly digital. You press the up arrow, and you move up, as expected. But if you go for the right button, you'll stop the upward movement and switch to a path 90 degrees away. There's no diagonal capability for your plane, and that really damages the game play to the point of making it feel so wrong.
Okay, so on to the accelerometer and, amazingly, you do have that diagonal option, the analogue nature of tilting your phone is carried through and you have a much wider choice of direction and steering.
Both options rely on having an on-screen fire button, which is in the right hand corner of the screen. Just above them you have secondary weapons (such as the bombs and power ups you can pick up on the screen). I really miss having an auto-fire option, mashing a physical button is fine in an arcade shooter, but tapping the touchscreen over and over again doesn't create the same level of excitement.
That's not surprising, because SwanAngel has made a fundamental mistake in the design of IronPlane. This is meant to be an arcade game, and the one thing that I think everyone can agree on that an arcade game needs is speed. Where is the speed in IronPlane? You lumber around the screen like a hippo with a machine gun. Fighting other hippos.
I could possibly (just) make an argument if you were in a slow plane fighting back huge waves of fast, darting enemy craft - think the defence of Malta in World War 2 with three biplanes against the Axis Air Force - but here the opposing forces have the same crippled speed as you do.
Did anyone in IronPlane actually sit back with the final product and play it while thinking about what end users would make of the game? Could they not see that IronPlane plays even slower than a Trabant trying to drive round the Nurburgring's Nordschleif? That the handling is laboured while tilting and that there are unusable on-screen controls?
I can't find anything that would make me recommend IronPlane. Sorry. The code's competent but what's being offered to users for purchase is poor.
-- Ewan Spence, Aug 2011.
Reviewed by Ewan Spence at