The game begins with you manning a simple, somewhat slow fixed wing aircraft, capable of firing only a single machine gun. Round to round you are presented with additional and varied enemy types to take down, each with their own attacking style, agility and armor. Through use of a virtual analog stick you control only the pitch of your plan, able to send it into loop-the-loops and other complex maneuvers as you wrestle for the most advantageous position in which to fire. You unleash your bullets by tapping on the right-hand side of the screen.

These straight-forward controls complement the frantic nature of the game; a fact that ramps up in no time as you find yourself facing an overwhelming number of enemy combatants, particularly in the latter rounds of each level. In order to master MiniSquadron, you have to become intimately familiar with your plane’s speed, turning circle and weapon of choice, as you’ll find yourself dodging a hail of fire from tens of other planes almost simultaneously while trying to whittle them down one-by-one. The combat really is MiniSquadron’s high water mark; an all-out romp that action fans should warm to  immediately.

MiniSquadron rewards your progress and feats with plane unlocks; each plane different to the next, with its own speed, armor and turning attributes. Additionally, planes that you unlock will possess one of several weapons, which start off as just additional guns, but later take the form of the cluster bomb for example, requiring a completely new approach to your aerial acrobatics to get the most out of. A range of in-game power-ups also bolster your arsenal, with quick burst omnipotent weaponry such as the Big Laser providing some of the more memorable experiences, in a throwback to the over-the-top Street Fighter super attacks.

The game is presented in its own charming, cartoony fashion, with smoke trails, weapons and plane damage effects looking particularly terrific. The variety (and eccentricity) of planes to unlock is impressive; with panda-faced planes to UFOs being awarded for completing certain requirements each level.

The 8 worlds to tackle are each accompanied by well-recognised classical compositions. Unfortunately, the current version does not support use of your own music; so if you do have something against classical music you’re out of luck until the developer pushes through an update- something that is being looked into according to posts on our discussion forum.

MiniSquadron also offers local WiFi play, which whilst a nice addition, seems a little out of place for a game that shines far more when heavily populated by combatants. If you can manage to get a few friends together though, there’s no doubt that there is a heap of competitive fun to be had here. MiniSquadron does seem far more suited to online play however, and its absence is notable seeing as how that was the hallmark of games on which it is based.

All in all however, MiniSquadron can be thoroughly recommended both to those who wish to take a trip down memory lane and to those who are new to the 2D dog-fighting genre. It is a well-rounded package that can be breezed through in a couple of hours, but offers you replayability as you unlock and learn to master the many different planes composing your sizable squadron. The game is also seeing overwhelmingly positive impressions in from our discussion forums.

AppStore Link: MiniSquadron, $2.99

Konami has tried pretty hard to duplicate as much of Mario Kart as they can, with shells replaced with missiles, mushrooms replaced with a generic speed boost item, the lightning bolt replaced with an item that turns everyone in to pigs, and other fairly blatant copies of Mario Kart power-ups. Instead of the highly recognizable Nintendo lineup or characters, Krazy Kart Racing features a slightly more obscure cast of Konami characters such as Sparkster (from the SNES game of the same name), Robbie Rabbit (the mascot from an amusement park found in Silent Hill), and the frog from Frogger along with seven others.

The controls work well and feature both tilt steering and touch controls. I've found myself preferring touch controls, but tilt worked fine as well. Acceleration is handled automatically, and there are virtual buttons on screen to brake and use whatever power-up you've managed to pick up.

16 tracks are included, based on themes of the games the characters are from. For instance, Power Stadium is a baseball diamond shaped track to go along with the baseball player racer from Power Touch Pros and there's a Antarctic themed track to go with the penguin racer from Penguin Adventure. These tracks can be played in grand prix, time attack, and free run modes as well as with friends or random people online in the included internet multiplayer modes.

Online multiplayer works without any kind of registration. You simply enter your name, connect to one of the game servers, and from there you can either create or join a game room with other players. Any track that you have unlocked in single player is playable online with up to five other players and/or bots. Aside from the standard race mode, there are two battle modes, chicken and bomb chaser. In chicken, players accelerate down a straight track and slam on their brakes before reaching the end and flying off in to the pool of water below.

In bomb chaser, one player has the bomb and drives around a circular arena attempting to run in to other players to give them the bomb. Whoever has the bomb drives significantly faster than the other players, so it can get kind of hectic at times, but neither battle mode is very interesting and pales in comparison to Mario Kart. Performance online is surprisingly good, although there was a bit of lag when playing in a full game with bots, it was still completely playable. The online system seems a bit buggy still as I experienced a few instances where games wouldn't launch, game rooms becoming unresponsive and it not releasing my username. Once you're actually connected, however, the gameplay seemed to work fine. We mostly tested on Wi-Fi though 3G worked as well.

This video shows the multiplayer modes as well as single player using touch control:

[ Full HD version | Low Bandwidth version ]

Our early impressions of Krazy Kart Racing is that it's a fun kart racer, and while it's currently the closest thing to Mario Kart available on the App Store, it's still hard to compare to the original. There already is a menu item in game for downloadable content, so it should be interesting to see what Konami has in store with that. If Krazy Kart's online community takes off, I could see myself spending a serious amount of time racing over the internet. We'll spend some more time with this title this weekend, and we are still looking forward to Gameloft's Shrek Kart which is due next month.

Note: Krazy Kart Racing is not currently available from the US App Store, but has appeared in international stores. With any luck it should appear for download in the US shortly, though there have been instances (such as Silent Hill) where the U.S. release lagged as long as a week after the international release.

App Store Link: Krazy Kart Racing (EU), $7.99 (Only available in some regions)

At its core, Mino is the same line-clearing game you've been playing for years with two basic single-player game modes, standard and glacier. Standard mode offers a straightforward version of Tetris but with the addition of the "slow" button at the top of the screen. As you clear lines the bar on the right side of the play field slowly fills up which controls how long you can have the "slow" mode enabled. It's kind of a cheesy feature, but it has saved me from a few game overs in my time with the game.

Meanwhile, Glacier mode works has you dealing with near-constant intrusions of garbage rows of random blocks to clear at the bottom of the screen. There is also a "freeze" button that can be used to briefly stop these additional lines from spawning.

The bread and butter of Mino is in the multiplayer which can be played either over the cellular network or WiFi. Multiplayer pits you against up to four other people. As your opponents clear lines, garbage rows of random blocks are sent to your board (and vice versa). So your play directly affects other people's boards. While you can play with up to four other people, finding that many people online looking for games at once can be challenging. A newly release multi-player enabled Lite version, however, may improve that. When you do actually find a good game, it's just as fun as you would expect and the chat room you can brag in between games only adds to the enjoyment.

I could go on explaining this game, but I'd really recommend watching this demo video released by the developer which details every feature of Mino:

Obviously in a game like this, online community is everything. When I asked the developers if they felt gamers had anything to worry about with Mino being pulled from the App Store (and its community along with it) like most other games similar to EA's Tetris, this is what they had to say:

Xio Interactive is dedicated to protecting the online Mino community from any threats, legal or otherwise. We are prepared to use any and every resource at our disposal to ensure that Mino and Mino Lite remain on the app store, and that our game servers remain running at all times, including substantial monetary and personnel resources. Our customers can rest easy with the assurance that we are here to stay.

Either way, Xio Interactive also has a surprisingly full featured lite edition available. Mino Lite [App Store] has both the standard single player mode and you can play 30 matches of online play. So if you like these kinds of games, at least give Mino Lite a try.

App Store Link: Mino, $2.99 – Mino Lite, Free

Chess With Friends has become remarkably popular among Chess players, since it's both free and offers a modern spin on correspondence chess. Words With Friends takes this same formula and offers four different multiplayer game modes.

You can either search for users to play with using your contact list, or search by user name. If you don't know anyone with the game yet, you can play a random opponent. Finally, Words With Friends also has a mode for local play if you want to play against a friend using a single device.

Like Chess With Friends you can have multiple games going at once with both friends and random internet players. While push notifications aren't supported yet, you can either just launch the app to see if it's your turn yet, or enable email/SMS notifications. A recent tweet by Newtoy mentions push notifications coming soon for Chess With Friends, so I'd assume the same treatment will be coming soon for Words With Friends.

Either way, both games are free and supported via in-game advertising and Words With Friends has a premium version for 99¢ that you can buy if you want to support the developer and/or don't like looking at ads. If you like Chess or Scrabble, both games are a ton of fun.

App Store Links:

• Words With Friends Free, Free
• Words With Friends, 99¢
• Chess With Friends, Free

Xpressed has knocked my socks off with UniWar [App Store]. The game is by no means perfect, but for the current promotional price of 99¢, it’s impossible to pass up if you’re even remotely interested in turn based strategy games.

UniWar tips its hat at both the StarCraft and Advance Wars series with three playable races that each have slightly different advantages and disadvantages while waging a turn based war on a hex grid.

The game features a brief tutorial in the 21 map single player campaign that seems to cover everything new players to the genre need to know. (Although it would be nice if these levels could be skipped as they’re fairly remedial to veterans of similar games.) The touch controls are extremely simple and work well aside from a few accidental fat fingered moves here and there that often can’t be undone.  UniWar also seemlessly switches from portrait to landscape mode depending on which way you’re holding the device. I experienced less fat fingering while playing in landscape mode, but it would be nice to be able to lock your screen orientation.

Feedback on our forums has been mixed when it comes to the non-adjustable difficulty of single player campaign and solo maps against an AI opponent.  Personally, I felt the AI was a little too predictable and on the easy side, but please consider this is coming from someone with a vast history of turn based strategy experience.  Others have felt it’s too hard or just right, so what you think of the included AI will greatly depend on your familiarity with the genre.

Outside of the campaign maps, UniWar also comes with solo mode to play individual maps against an AI opponent. Unfortunately, all but the first map comes locked and you can’t choose the next map until you’ve completed the previous. There are 53 maps to choose from in online play, so it really doesn’t make sense to me why you wouldn’t have access to the same set of maps for playing single player skirmishes. This inconsistency also exists in the single device two-player mode. I love that you can play against a friend using one device, but it has really left me scratching my head trying to figure out why you can’t play the same maps that you can online. By doing this, Xpressed is leaving people who are buying the game specifically for local multiplayer out in the cold until they’ve gone through and unlocked everything in single player.

Despite my criticisms with single player and local versus mode, the online multiplayer has earned UniWar complete tenure on my iPhone. Unless the online community dies off, I really can’t see myself ever getting bored of playing over the Internet. Online play with up to 8 players can be done either anonymously or by registering a username. Registering provides online statistics, a friends list, and email notifications. There’s really no reason not to as once you play your first online game you’ll be hooked.

Email notifications? Yes! One of the coolest things about UniWar’s multiplayer is that you can be playing up to twenty games at a time. Xpressed’s servers email you when it’s your turn in a game. After launching UniWar, hit “Current Games”, and make your moves in any that are waiting for you to take your turn. At this point, the email notifications seem like a stopgap solution until Apple releases the 3.0 firmware with the associated push notification service, and it works pretty well.  If you have an unlimited SMS package for your phone, you can even get crazy and use your carrier’s email to SMS gateway for instant alerts when it’s your turn.

One thing that’s kind of annoying about the email notifications is right now toggling them on and off seems to be bugged and Xpressed doesn’t queue up alerts to send multiple notifications in the same email. This morning when I was testing out playing several games at once, my inbox was quite literally exploding with emails from 5 concurrent games. I can’t imagine playing 20. It would be nice if there were a setting to throttle the alerts to come in batches every few minutes. Another thing I’d love to see is if these emails included links you could click which launch the app with the correct game open similar to how apps like Tweetie [App Store] can be launched using tweetie:// URL’s. Email invitations or friend list invites could also potentially be sent to people who have the game using the same URL scheme.

While these enhancements would be nice, the most pressing change the notification service needs is to not send emails when you’re actively connected to a game waiting for the other person to take their turn. If you’re playing a game with someone else with no wait in between turns, Xpressed still sends you email notifications. It’s really pretty silly, and after playing a few games I’ve had to white list their email addresses as there was nothing I could to convince my mail client that the notifications weren’t spam otherwise.

All of my complaints, however, can easily be washed away by the fact that UniWar is currently priced at only 99¢. What you get for your dollar is downright ridiculous and with a little refinement the game will easily command a $5 or $10 price tag. The developer has even mentioned on our forums plans to eventually release a free map editor as well.

If they can deliver some solid updates, UniWar is going to be the iPhone online gaming gold standard.  As I said before, if you’re even remotely interested in the genre you really can’t pass this game up.

The developers of Crash Bandicoot Nitro Kart have released a new racing title to the App Store called Raging Thunder [App Store]. The $7.99 title claims to be a "coin-op style racing game" and boasts having "the most breathtaking 3D graphics on the iPhone yet."

Features listed by the developer include:

• WiFi multiplayer
• State-of-the art 3D graphics
• Boost, draft and tackling physics
• Customizable controls

There is a lot of competition amongst racers in the App Store. We had felt that Nitro Kart offered the best "kart racing" experience on the iPhone, so we'll be interested to see their take on a more traditional racer. Raging Thunder has existed for some time in Jailbroken form.

Amongst the other racers currently available, we favored Asphalt 4 Elite Racing over GTS World Racing, Pole Position Remix, and Moto Chaser (formerly Moto Racer). Another notable upcoming title is Need For Speed: Undercover.

We'll provide a full review once we have spent some time with this title.

The most recent Scrabble update has introduced Wi-Fi networking as well as improved game stability and sound quality.

Scrabble is popular word game in which players form words from individual lettered tiles. Words are formed in horizontal or vertical rows with scoring based on which letters are used.

The iPhone version of Scrabble has been reasonably well reviewed, so the discounted price and Wi-Fi option may provide some additional incentive for readers to make the jump.

The game features three levels of difficulty, but even at the "Easy" setting the game is quite hard and the "Pro" level is apparently designed for robots.  However, due to the fluid gameplay and pleasant retro-future feel of this title, I feel compelled to keep at it in hopes of eventually getting a few consecutive victorious matches under my belt.  An "Easier" setting would be welcome, though.

Vector Pong has a feel reminsicent of the 80s classic Shufflepuck Cafe (which, incidentally, exists for the jailbroken iPhone as remake tuxPuck) and provides the player with the same satisfying sense of "WHACK!" with each successful deflection of an incoming volley.  Despite the game's difficulty, it's a lot of fun and seems well priced at $1.99.

Game Details

Name: Vector Pong
Developer: Gyrocade
App Store Link: Buy
Price: $1.99
Compatibility: iPhone and iPod Touch