Who hasn’t played those fun little fighter games in the arcade where you fly around and shoot everything in sight? Hopefully you have, because if you haven’t then you’ve really missed out on life. iFighter is the iPhone implementation of this classic arcade game, obviously using the iPhone “tilt” sensitivity instead of keys to move your plane around. They’ve made a few significant improvements over the arcade game, and the game is solidly playable overall, but there are definite areas that could use improvement in future updates. However, most of my gripes are relatively simple things; the game is fundamentally sound.

For those of you unfamiliar with this genre of game, the premise is simple: you start off with a small fighter. Everything you see is either an item to power you up or heal you, or a bad guy to shoot at. Throughout the levels you can pick up various upgrades that give your iFighter additional abilities, including bombs, wingmen to help you, and more powerful guns.

The options are extremely flexible, which is one of it’s best features. Besides the default “tilt” movement feature talked about above, you can go into the Settings menu to change it to all sorts of different movement options. Plus, you can turn on or off auto-fire, give yourself a name, change game difficulty, send high scores, and calibrate the tilt feature. The gameplay itself is fun and engaging. Who doesn’t like flying around shooting everything you see, right?

For experienced gamers, fear not! This game is a CHALLENGE. I may not be a gaming master, but I do consider myself pretty well-versed in this particular genre, and I struggled quite a bit on Medium difficulty. If you’re looking for a game that will test your pilot/fighter gaming skills to the max, look no further, I’m still struggling to get past Mission 2.

There are a few gameplay shortcomings in this game, however, that prevent it from getting full marks. Most of them are simple programming nitpicks I have, but they make the experience less fun for each replay. First off, while being able to withstand more than a single hit is a nice improvement over it’s arcade counterpart, only having 1 life is troublesome, especially when dying causes you to restart the level completely (not to mention when you’re in the middle of a boss fight). Furthermore, the selection of weapon upgrades is limited considering the possibilities that the iPhone is capable of supporting.

Besides that, a basic storyline and a save feature would be golden and give this game a far higher replay value; having to completely start over each time takes the fun out of the game after a few times through.

In the end, though, the game is a good one. At $0.99 it’s well worth it for any gamer. Most certainly iWorth It. Take a look at some screenshots:

iFighter for iPhone