Liberty Wings for iPhone Review

Our rating:

By: DR Software Kft

Version #: 1.01

Date Released:

Developer: By Digital Reality

Price: $0.99

User Rating:

Loading...

Download App

Scrolling shooters are a hard genre to master. Not only as there seventeen billion scrolling shooters for every platform from the the iOS to the Texas Instruments Graphic Calculator. Each game follows a similar pattern so its hard to stand out in the crowd. Digital Reality must have understood this when they went to work on Liberty Wings for the iOS. Instead of trying to revolutionize the scrolling shooter genre, they simply took the basics that we have all comes to know and love, and changed the perspective…for each level.

Liberty Wings is a WWII style shooter where you pilot a US plane against hoards of Axis planes, tanks, and ships. When I started Liberty Wings initially I did not read anything about it, so it was odd that the menu was oriented in landscape, but the game immediately instructs you to turn the iPhone to portrait perform the level starts. As first levels go, it wasn’t that impressive. The graphics were tolerable, and the controls were fine. The shots were a bit too exact which made it hard to hit smaller coons on ships or on the ground. The gameplay is fairly easy and the upgrades were well spaced out. I had no problem reaching the finished with a full bar of health. The boss of the level was actually easier than the level itself, and by the end of it was I ready to take a nap.

It was actually a day later when I played Liberty Wings again, and I was ready to play one more boring level, before writing this game off as a mundane 1942 clone. I knew something was up when the game told me to instead move to landscape. Level two was instead a top-down multiscroller dogfight similar to Wingnuts on OS X. In this level it wasn’t about getting to the end, but you had three missions to accomplish. You also had the ability to bomb, and sink the ships below you. This gameplay was significantly more fun that the prior level. The air was filled with a large number of planes and the initial onslaught was frantic. Once the primary objective was completed you can choose to stay and complete the other two, or move on.

Level three impressed me again with change to a side scrolling bomber mission. The controls are simple and while they do not offer much in the way of fine grain controls, they are perfect for the arcade action this game excels at. Liberty Wings is a refreshing take on this type of game, and the only real complaint besides a boring initial levels the lack of content. Liberty Wings costs $.99 but that only gives you three levels. To play the remaining nine levels you must pay an additional $1.99. While I am all for giving demoes that use the in-app purchase to unlock the full game, I think this game would have been better served being free with a 2.99 unlock to access the rest of the game. As it is Liberty Wings feels like a demo that you have to play for and that just doesn’t sit well with me.

We rate this app 3 out of 5 stars.