Slovakian developer Art in Games describes itself as "one of Europe's hottest outsourcing companies", but they have only developed one original game to date, which also happens to be their only iOS title. While AirAttack doesn't innovate in any way, it's still quite a pity to see it not being followed up by another shooter. It's that polished. On the other hand, the developer focusing on a single game also gives them the time and means to further supply fans of said game. In October 2011 for example, AirAttack received retina display support, two additional missions (adding up to a total of ten), two new planes, a new gameplay mode and GameCenter support. 17 months after its initial release, no less.

The setting first appears to be as generic as can be: It's WW II and you're being sent deep into German territory to blow up anything with an Iron Cross on it, and then some. Planes, tanks, turrets, a few boats driving down a river, some small civilian houses that leave behind coins after being hit with bombs that are only required for thesenon-hostile ground targets. Nothing special until the first rapid-fire airship known to mankind makes an appearance as well as a futuristic looking fortress. Stage two, however, completely ups the ante with huge tesla towers that only leave small passageways and small timeframes to push forward, and an impressively fast-moving airship boasting multiple cannons and turbines.

The art design is totally over the top, constantly fluctuating between stuff you'd see in history books and glorious sci-fi, much like what Psykio's Strikers 1945 series does. It's further supported by crisp 3D graphics boasting more little details than you could possibly count. The first stage's river for example realistically flows and whenever an enemy plane is being shot down, it doesn't simply explode, but tumble towards the ground, and if it hits the river, it leaves behind a several-meters-tall splash animated in real-time. Defeated airships also don't just explode or disappear, they start glowing brightly and their outer layer burns off within a fraction of a second, leaving nothing but the metal girders that keep it all together. Music comprises of atmospheric chants and violin-heavy fanfares, setting the right mood of heroism, without treading new ground.

Not only the visual design is greatly varied, gameplay-wise you're also constantly treated to something new, which can to some degree be attributed to your bombs. While all enemies – be they air-bound or ground-based – can be hit using your main weapons, ground enemies like tanks and turrets can also be damaged dropping said bombs, and any non-hostile building actually requires their use. At some point you might see a train attempting to escape over a bridge, so why not bomb the bridge to smithereens? Tesla towers in stage two block your path with electrical discharges, but after safely traversing this area, you are given a chance to bomb the power station that powers these turrets. Oh so satisfying. At some other point a sturdy motor boat speeds ahead, causing the camera to zoom in while you hunt it down. There's hardly a dull moment, although the game is still pretty relaxing most of the time. Fans of a real challenge, however, should try their hands at the survival mode, where even the earliest foes nearly unleash bullet hell on the player. Alternatively you'll find numerous achievements to tackle.

All three playable planes come equipped with a standard machine gun as well as an alternative individual weapon. The standard plane occasionally fires off a lightning gun, while the two new planes can change weapons at any time at the press of a button. One of them has some kind of flame shield where two fireballs circle around the player, but since it's rather hard to aim and severly lacks range, this plane is best ignored. The third plane, though, comes equipped with a powerful flamethrower, which, while obviously also being somewhat limited in terms of range, packs a serious punch and on top of that feels plain great to use. The stages are split up into a couple of sections each, allowing you to enter a flying shop in-between, where your heard-earned coins are exchanged for all kinds of upgrades like stronger machine gun fire, wingmen support, a time-slowing ability or higher bomb drop frequency. In another move to keep the experience from growing stale, some upgrades first need to be unlocked by meeting certain requirements such as destroying a total of 25 turrets.

AirAttack is a brilliant gem, unjustifiably ignored by most. A lot of effort went into pretty much every aspect of the game, resulting in a beautiful, well-sounding, motivating, varied indie surprise hit, that nobody should miss out on for a ridiculously low price of $1. The controls also get the job done excellently, even giving you a choice between direct touch, relative touch, tilt and virtual joypad settings. If there was one thing to criticize, it would be the camera angle. Instead of the standard top-down bird's eye view, the camera is slightly panned like in Nanostray on the DS, for example. Unlike the DS game, though, this isn't much of a problem in AirAttack after a few minutes of getting used to it. Only precise bombing can be a little tough at times, but fortunately upgrading the bombs's radius and frequency goes a long way of solving this issue as well.

After originating as a PSP Mini, A Space Shooter has found many new homes, including the App Store, where it has even become a free download. It really isn't as free as the new title suggests, though, as it's more of an upgradeable lite version. The initial download gives access to only three out of about 30 stages, it lacks many upgrades in the shop, and the survival mode is missing. For the entire experience, you would have to shell out a meagre $1 only, so it's still at least close to being "for free".

What you really get for free is an amazingly off-beat intro that will leave you behind completely confused. There's a new boy in school and he's obviously the perfect cookie cutter geek, so the obligatory class bully starts picking on him right away. The geek wonders just why the other boy could be hating him so much, concluding that he's got to be an alien. Intent on exacting revenge on the alien before he can harm the entire human race, the geek starts working on his guns (the muscle ones), but when he calls the bully out, he gets punched in the face again. Without any indication of a connection, you then see a space ship pilot installing new software and heading for his next mission, only to afterwards being treated to the title screen.

What the kids have to do with anything, I do not know, but they perfectly set the tone for a game that never takes itself too seriously. The "heroes" (he's not exactly the very definition of a shiny hero) one-liners during the missions are repeated a lot too often and they aren't even all that funny the first time around ("you should change your facebook status to dead alien"), but the conversations before boss fights or between stages are sublimely written. Your newly installed AI for example turns out to be a noble English man, censoring your swears, much to your avatar's discontent. When fighting a subordinate of the devil himself, you aren't exactly put off by the offer to instead join his cult, but you'd only be willing to do so if you're going to be its head. Best of all are your constant attempts at hooking up with the snorty and ugly shop owner. Other small detail also add a lot to the game's charm, like the wanted posters of your current enemy having pen marks on them, making the first enemy for example appear like a devil. It just goes to show how childish your avatar really is.

During the stages you always get the impression of sitting inside your ship, looking through the cockpit window, complete with puppy pics on the dashboard. Sure, it doesn't make much sense, considering you're looking right on top of your own ship from within your cockpit, apparently, but the real bummer is how this visual treat further limits the playing field, which is already kept a tad small due to the aspect ratio. A Space Shooter is one of the rare instances where a vertical shooter is played in yoko, i.e. with the device held sideways. Fortunately this isn't as annoying as it could have been, thanks to the enemy placement seemingly taking this issue into consideration, and the possibility to upgrade your ship with credits picked up during stages. The 40+ upgrades cover just about everything from a simple dual-shot blaster to more defensive abilities, such as automatically sucking in credits floating through open space.

The action is fast-paced without overwhelming the player. Levels are nicely designed, making good use of the different enemy types, that either just fly by, position themselves for charging a devastating laser that blocks your path, they explode into small bullets, and so on. If there was something to complain about, it would be the lack of variation in enemy behaviour beyond the first few stages and the lack of control options aside from direct touch controls. Offering relative touch controls shouldn't be that big a problem, one would think. Still, ASS is well worth trying out, particularly since the first few missions can be had for free.

A Doodle Flight obviously is among the plethora of iPhone games relying on the not-so-eye-catching-anymore doodle aesthetics, made popular by Doodle Jump. Where said game at least constantly added new background themes covering just about anything you could think of and then some, here all nine stages are set on the same squared paper. No drawings in the background, just white paper and grey lines. While this proves to be pretty monotonous in no time, the remaining graphics fare a lot better. The player's plane can be drawn on real paper and uploaded into the game via taking a photo (much like Sketch Nation shooter) which is a nice touch and will allow you to meet your quota of drawing a certain amount of male genitalia in video games per week. Enemies consist of shades-wearing suns, crescent moons dangling on strings, multi-colored Kamikaze-fish and white sharks, boring blue planes and such. Enemy variation isn't the greatest of the genre, but it's enough to keep things from getting stale and the combination of nonsense design and crude drawings makes it a lot more interesting than your standard a dime a dozen doodle style.

Stages tend to blend in due to the lack of defining backgrounds or any kind of standout feature apart from simply getting increasingly difficult. So the only thing to truly look forward to are the bosses and thankfully, they don't disappoint. These guys take the general enemy design and crank it up a notch. You will face all kinds of weirdoes like lipstick wearing stars, angels, lollipop licking clouds and penguins, usually featuring two different facial expressions, either cuddly happy or devilishly furious. Possibly best of all, however, is the smart bomb as it unleashes a huge bird-thing, which is drawn even worse than the rest of the game, all while playing a child song. At the other end of the sentiment spectrum lies the final boss. Stage 5 consists of little more than a clown taunting you, telling you he's hiding somebody's photo behind his face, only revealing a small fraction of said pic. On your way to the end of the game your mind will be racing, coming up with theories like the person being David Hasselhoff or whoever, so at least to me it was terribly disappointing and borderline annoying to find out it was some Asian kid the developer calls "ulgy lam" (that's no typo). It's one thing to hide your personal stuff in your game as an Easter egg, but getting everyone's expectations up only to end up with something you can't relate to at all, is off. And I’m not even sure if the kid's inclusion wasn't meant to be an insult rather than a harmless teasing.

A Doodle Flight's gameplay plays it decisively safe void of any experiments. You get your standard wingmen power-ups (in the shape of pencils. Why would pencils fly along pencil-drawn doodles?), shields, bombs and that's it. Scoring is only determined by destroying as many enemies as possible. Still, it manages to be a perfectly fine little game with charming visuals and possibly most important three difficulty settings that really do what thy say on the box. You can either sit back and relax nearly all the way through or enjoy a mostly steady ride with some occasional (boss) bumps or crank it up to insane levels of bullets. It's all in here, making for a good package, definitely worth the $1.

A saying concerning Chinese that's often heard is that they consider copying somebody else's work to be the greatest form of flattery. If this is true to even the smallest degree, then it's safe to say that Mobili Studio must have been enjoying Cave's ESPGaluda series quite a bit. Although it's considerably less of a straight replication than in other cases, it still becomes apparent in many visual and aural details.

Absolute Instant (rudimentarily) tells an interesting story about two rivaling civilizations, the Terrestrians and the Celestials. Ages ago, Eve couldn't resist the temptation of a shiny golden apple, thus opening the literal Pandora's Box, which brought supernatural powers at the cost of humanity and harmony to her people living high up in the skies. Adam, who had refrained from eating the apple, founded the community of the Terrestrians based on mere technology. This, however, has been no match against the Celestials's arcane powers until Adam's people invented the Absolute Instant, an engine that allows for teleportation. Now one of the three best pilots of the country is tasked with retrieving the magical apple from the Celestials to finally turn the tide.

So we've got a wild mix of Christian lore, Greek mythology and the clichéd battle between magic and technology adding up to what could have been the foundation of a story uncommonly deep for a shooter, but in the end this chance is wasted by constraining the story to a cut-scene at the beginning and three extremely short endings depending on which character you've chosen. In one of them the hero uses the apple to bring peace, in another one he disappears with the apple, using it for his own benefits and in the last one the hero tosses it into the air like a toy, only to have it stolen by a Celestial. Not exactly a contender for the Nobel Prize of Literature, but at the very least the story background cleverly introduces Absolute Instant's big gameplay innovation (more on that later on) and it lays the foundation for a brilliant visual style, accompanied by equally great music.

This is where AI resembles ESPGaluda quite a bit. Sure, the three playable characters come across as more of a lovechild of ESP Ra.De. and Gantz than resembling ESPGaluda's winged humanoids, and they board spaceships instead of flying independently, but recurring flying knight's armors and the angel serving as the first boss should already be enough to satisfy your need for luminescent, winged creatures. Also, most enemies blend together technology and an impression of purity by being mostly cream-colored and round-shaped. Fighting these foes takes you through a total of six stages (including a not-so-hidden special stage) each being designed with a different element in mind. You battle your way through wind, earth, water, fire and eventually love...or rather Eden, where for some reason Eve still resides despite having eaten the forbidden fruit. Not only does this teach us all a valuable bible lesson, it also allows for a nice change in background colors, leading up to the rainbow-like colored paradise. Most areas are filled with cathedral-style buildings and generally sublime architecture but depending on the stage they are either built on small, grassy platforms floating in the skies or are surrounded by lava streams. AI might not reach Cave's graphical proficiency, but it still can only be described as beautiful.

Music-wise, AI also follows a path previously tread by ESPGaluda with its electronic sounds ranging from calm and spherical to bass-driven. All tracks are already well composed on their own, but their true beauty lies in how they fit the current stage. During the wind stage you'll hear a dampened score, overshadowed by a melodic wind blowing all the time. The fire stage's music is powerful and literally pumping like a lava stream. The water stage's music sounds like somebody playing a cross between a xylophone and icicles.

Anybody expecting ESPGaluda's time-slowing mechanics to make an appearance is in for a disappointment, as AI plays a bit more traditional, if not generic. Your craft's only weapon (a spreader, a focused shot or a short-ranged flamethrower, depending on your choice) is upgraded only twice, the only other means of attack is a black hole smart bomb that sucks in all enemies and shots for about ten seconds, and scoring is about as basic as can be, with only stars to be picked up after defeating enemies – and these stars are even automatically sucked in. Only waiting for bosses to trigger their most powerful attacks before defeating them in order to milk the most stars out of them adds some light strategy.

There is, however, one (to my knowledge) unique idea to be found here. ESPGaluda II's iOS port already implemented a system only possible on touchscreen devices and so does AI: Touching and dragging the big circle around your ship is used for the flawless relative touch controls, but touching the screen somewhere else instantly beams your ship to that position. This, of course, can't be performed infinitely, as your storage of three teleportation cells has to restore again, although it does so pretty quickly and automatically. While this mechanic can be used to dodge bullet carpets you wouldn't want to face openly, you also shouldn't overuse it, because some attacks absolutely require its use and every boss for example has at least one of these otherwise inescapable attacks. In another nod to the whole four-elements design, you will find yourself trapped inside lightning circles slowly closing in, you'll be frozen inside an ice block or slowed down by sand, or you need to get past tidal waves, streams of fire or tornados. The developers were even nice enough to clearly distinguish between standard bullet-shaped attacks and special, element-coded attacks that require the use of the eponymous technology.

AI looks great, it sounds great and it offers an interesting new gameplay mechanic that works perfectly well and yet the game comes off as a bit of a disappointment. First of all, the characters are too imbalanced. A good shooter is able to offer different characters and make them either all equally balanced or make them cater to different styles of play, like easing score hunts at the cost of making mere survival more difficult, but in AI only Judas (yup, that's the name of the traitor; who would've thought) is really worthwhile. Liz' straight shot is great as well, but her ship's hit zone simply feels off, thus leading to many an unnecessary death, and A.J.'s weapon is just too short-ranged with nothing making up for it.

Worse, though, is the lack of anything you'd want to refer to as “level design”. Ground targets serve as little more than eye-candy, enemies are repeated constantly throughout the whole game, the stages themselves (outside of the bosses) lack any kind of surprises or variety after the first minute of playing, all stages except for the special stage are entirely too easy and uneventful, and enemies just seem to be thrown in without much thought. AI can be labeled as a bullet hell shooter at times, but the time spent in-between the tense boss fights – which always ask for your full attention – quickly deteriorates into little more than a tiresome romp through beautiful landscapes.