iPhone Games Review

I’ve had my iPhone 3GS for a couple months now, and an iPhone in general for about 2 years.  In that time, I’ve had a lot of games come and go on my phone, but only a couple have I actually kept on my sacred 2nd app screen for future play.  I’ll go over each of these games I’ve chosen to keep, and how they stack up with each other.

Oregon Trail

This game is a pretty faithful reproduction of the Oregon Trail game most of my generation played back in the day, on their Apple IIe’s.  While the graphics have received a major overhaul, the gameplay itself has changed little, and several of the memorable features are right where you expect them to be.

The game has a very cartoonish feel to it, with the characters taking on a very hand-drawn look.  Just like the original, you pick what time of year, how many people, and what supplies youd like to take on your journey.  After that, you set off, and the majority of the game is riding the trail.

While you’re riding, you have a choice of speed settings – slower speeds will use less food and supplies, while going faster will cost you.  This could get monotonous if the whole game was a constant speed battle, but the designers stuck minigames in at just the right time intervals, and the games are perfect for short sessions with the iPhone.  The classic river fording and bear hunting games are there, along with new ones like wagon repair, fishing, and berry picking.  While these games are all pretty basic on their own, as a collection of minigames, Oregon Trail does a pretty good job of keeping one entertained.

Oregon Trail:  3/5

Kolonists/Settlers

One of my favorite board games is Settlers of Catan. The board the game is played on represents the island of Catan, and the different board tiles represent different resources.  The point of the game is to collect these resources to increase your cities and settlements, which in turn gives you victory points needed to win the game.

Kolonists was the first Catan-type game to hit the app store.  Recently, a new Settlers app was released by the designers of Catan.  Both apps are similar, although Kolonists has an important rule change that helps the game pass much more quickly.

In regular Catan, and in the Catan iPhone app, dice are rolled to determine who gets what resources.  Without going into a long explanation, whoever has settlements placed near resources on the board will reap those resources when the number tile on the resources is rolled.  This adds an element of randomness to the game, as one could get lucky and have all the rolls profit for them; on the other hand, one might have a game where nothing they’re interested in is rolled.

In Kolonists, on the other hand, no dice are used.  Instead, each settlement has a “worker” which the player can place on one of the surrounding land tiles.  If a city is on the board, that city gets two workers instead of one.  Every turn, each player is guaranteed to get the resources that they have workers played on.  In this way, it’s much quicker to get through a game, since you know exactly what resources you will be getting.  Besides this rule, Kolonists is essentially identical to Catan.

So which is superior?  Well, personally, i prefer Kolonists for iPhone play, so far.  The graphics are far easier on the eyes – Catan has so much artwork and movement in it’s app that it’s hard to see the board “at a glance” and make quick decisions. In addition, iPhone games aren’t usually something I’m going to be playing for more than a couple minutes.  Kolonists lets me have games in 15-20 minutes, whereas Catan and its dice roll system will take much longer to finish.

As a final note, both of these games have AI players, as well as a “hot seat” mode that allows groups to play by passing the phone around.  However, neither of these apps has internet play; i think that once one of these apps adds online multiplayer support, the choice between the two will be much clearer.

Kolonists: 4/5
Settlers of Catan: 3/5

Flight Control

Flight Control has to be, hands down, one of the best casual games for the iPhone.  The premise is simple:  you are the controller of an airport with 3 (or 4) runways, color-coded according to the type of plane the runway is made for.  As planes and helicopters come under your radar, you must guide them (by drawing a line with your finger) to the correct runway.  This is the simple part;  the difficulty of the game is making sure the planes do not collide.  Flight control offers 3 maps, as well as a speedup button to make each of the maps more difficult.  It’s stupidly addictive, and since a round only takes a few minutes, I can pick it up at anytime.  Probably one of my favorite iPhone apps.

Flight Control: 5/5

SimCity

Ahh, SimCity – another classic game, ported to iPhone. While I think many of the EA games are rough around the edges or dissapointingly limited compared to their PC counterparts, they did a really good job of porting this over to the iPhone.  The gameplay mechanics are similar to SimCity 2000 (the best SimCity of all, IMO), but the graphics definitely look like they’ve been ported from SimCity 3000.  Theyre not bad for an iPhone game, and the user interface has been ported pretty well to a touch schema. One wish is that they’d put a rotate function in for those hard-to-see spots, but i have a feeling that would require too much work to be worth the implementation.  Overall, SimCity is a solid port that I can pick up for a couple of minutes when I want to work on my sprawling metropolis.

SimCity: 4/5

The Sims 3

There was so much promise in this title, and because it was being worked on at the same time as the PC version of Sims 3, I had high hopes for the gameplay.  Unfortunately, I was disappointed.

The actions you can perform with your Sim are spot-on;  they work just like the PC version;  just tap somewhere to bring up a list of actions you can perform on that object.  Unfortunately, thats about where the similarities end.

The first, and most glaring omission from this title is the lack of a build mode.  For me, the build mode in the Sims is at least 50% of the game.  I get to create a house however i’d like and populate it with my favorite items.   There is no build mode.  Not a toned down build mode, not a slightly changed mode, none.

Secondly, there is ONE SIM limit in the game. I can understand why EA might do this from a processing perspective, but i would rather play a choppy game with 3 sims than a smooth game with only one.  The Sims gets boring quick when you can’t multitask multiple family members, and the lack of items in the iPhone version only exacerbates this issue.

In conclusion, The Sims has great graphics for an iPhone game and shows a lot of promise, but these pluses are not enough to makeup for the things that EA left out of this port.

The Sims 3: 2/5

No Responses to “iPhone Games Review”