From the creator of PicoPicoFighters comes another decidedly old-school shooter, this time even closely aping a well-known game that's regarded as a classic at least in Hiromitsu Yamaguchis home country Japan. Apart from a few minor differences, UFO Attack is about as close as you will ever get to playing Xevious on an iPhone unless Namco decides to port the original some day, of course.

UFO Attack's seamlessly connected stages take you through lush landscapes filled with trees or rocks (they're not really discernible), muddy roads and rivers all presented in extremely bright colors, which might not please everyone, but it does manage to create a unique twist on Xevious' visuals.

Enemies are split into two major groups: Airborne and ground-based. The first category boasts over a dozen different geometric figures like stars and circles zig-zagging, flying straight down or moving at an arc while firing their red bullets at you. Ground targets on the other hand are immobile turrets or equally immobile and also harmless blocks. Like in Xevious your ship has two means of attack, a fast firing vulcan gun and slow firing rockets with limited reach targeting ground enemies only. Here, however, the vulcan gun not only hits flying targets, but ground-based enemies as well, although the rockets still dish out considerably more damage.

Other only marginally important differences between the two games are the addition of indestructible obstacles blocking your path and the addition of generic power-ups such as speed-ups and an increase in fire power. For whatever reason, the original's nice variety in ground targets spanning everything from small turrets to huge bases comprised of numerous parts is gone, while it is still possible to reveal hidden ground targets by blindly attacking their position.

UFO Attack has the potential of being a nice time-waster, but as every so often the experience is marred by its controls. Generally spoken, relative touch controls are best-suited for iOS shooters, closely followed by direct controls. Virtual pad controls usually still do an admirable job and motion controls make you question the developer's sanity. Yamaguchi has already shown how to implement good touch controls with PicoPicoFighters, so it's all the more sad to see him using (bad) virtual pad controls here, instead. Not only doesn't the game automatically center the pad at your finger tip, it foremost doesn't allow swiping your finger over the pad. You need to lift your finger and tap on one of the four ends of the pad whenever you want to move in the corresponding direction, like if you had four independent buttons. This also leads to your ship jumping from space to space rather than fluently moving across the screen.

SFC's origin on mobile phones and as a flash game should be enough of an indicator to tell you that it's a rather shallow and unpolished game. In over 45 short stages all set in the same, barren space setting, it remains your task to fly upwards, shoot as many enemies as possible, dodge bullets and pick up various items. Standard shooter fare so far and it's wrapped into drab design, questionable controls, a general lack of diversion and a frustrating game over system.

The aliens have an ugly plastic look to them and suffer from looking all to similar to each other throughout the game. Enemy bullets are tiny little blobs and explosions are as poor as they come. It's always great when a developer offers different control systems for the player to choose from, but in SFC both schemes are always present, getting in the way of each other. The lower end of the screen is reserved for four direction buttons – that don't work nearly as well as a connected D-pad would – and your ship can alternatively be steered using relative touch controls. Now, if you're using the latter system, you will often accidentally touch the direction buttons, because you try to fly low and because other (i.e. better) shooters would use a designated bottom-bar for you to keep the finger off the battlefield. This leads to the next issue: Your finger will often block your view on the action, as you cannot place it at the bottom. What's more, bigger enemies, bosses and asteroid fields add little in terms of variety and once you've lost all lives, it's back to the beginning of the game, so good luck keeping your temper in case you've been up to stage 44. The pop-ups advertising the game's sequel also obviously don't help SFC at all.

Probably the best thing about SFC – aside from being free – is its weapon system. Occasionally enemies drop highly limited amounts of homing missiles, laser shots or electro shots, all of them being triggered via the bottom-right button. Defeating ten aliens on the other hand randomly rewards you with one of three other kinds of special weapons, triggered with the bottom-left button: A cluster shot, a vertically moving row of spears or ten spears flying in from the left and right. These rather rare special weapons add a much-needed, small layer of tactics as you need to store them wisely for dire situations. Still, there are so many better vertical shooters on the App Store, making it pretty hard to really recommend SFC to anybody.

The remake Space Falcon Reloaded is covered in the "restrictive shooters" section, as it limits your ship to steering left and right.

This Chinese one-man-show is quite an oddity in how it handles its free lite version. Where other developers usually limit their lite versions to a fraction of the full game's levels or merely add ads without changing the actual contents, Ace Shooter is nice enough to be a better game in its lite iteration than in its full form. Both are exactly the same except for the lite version limiting your hit points to 333 instead of 999. Since any enemy or bullet contact only deduces a single hit point and the game would already be easy enough without such a generous life system, 999 hit points render suicide nigh impossible, let alone dieing unintentionally. Even though there is no way to restore any hit points throughout the 48 levels, this is an utterly and completely ridiculous design choice and the lite version at least slightly remedies it.

While every stage proudly introduces a new enemy type, they all share the fate of being nothing but cannon fodder and credit dispensers. Downed foes leaves behind yellow orbs, displaying a slowly decreasing number, indicating the amount of cash earned for picking it up. This cash can be invested in upgrades and a smart bomb at any time, by simply tapping the desired item at the bottom of the screen. Unless you completely avoid picking up the orbs, however, you'll be overpowered from about one minute into the game onwards. The strongest upgrade (four supporting ships independently chasing down enemies) costs only 500 points and it lasts for roughly an entire stage, so when I already had about 6,800 points left after stage six, despite constantly using the upgrade, this says a lot about the game's lack of balance.

On eight occasions you'll also be pitted against bosses, that might look intimidating due to their increased rate of fire, but then you remember your nearly infinite hit point supply, and simply fire away. Ace Shooter is as poorly designed a shooter as they come, but if you're looking for a meditatively easy shooting journey – possibly fighting insomnia late at night in bed – it could be worth a look.

Ever wondered what happened to the smaller enemies that at some point in time must have existed in the world of Phoenix and Phoenix HD? They took refuge in Firi Games' other shooter, Flare Elite, where they are forced to spend their lives in shame, deep within the mighty shadow of Phoenix' glory.

Metaphors aside, Flare Elite is an utterly sub-par mess of a game you wouldn't believe to have been created by the same guys responsible for Phoenix, if it wasn't for many sound effects being recycled. These and the original retro soundtrack consisting of four passable tracks are about the only positive aspects to find here, while the positive impression the sound leaves is already marred by bland, uninspired and repetitive visuals. While the background in Phoenix would also repeat constantly and the variety of enemies also wasn't all that big to begin with, they were at least carefully designed with tons of neat little details, and beautiful explosions and lighting would further improve the visuals. None of this can be found in Flare Elite.

The game foregoes the approach of asking the player to derive his motivation from achieving a high-score in favor of, uhm... There really isn't much substituting this. Your journey is split up into thirteen stages that are filled with incredibly boring (and ugly) spaceships and turrets, and enemies are repeated constantly, making it hard to even play beyond the first level, simply out of boredom turning into pure rage. You'll eventually unlock new weapons and an upgrade shop for said weapons, but no shooter can survive on weapons alone, if the receiving end of your weapons don't deliver, which is the case here.

Firi Games were seemingly quite proud of some unusual design choices, regardless of the overall lack of quality. For starters, all missions are connected via a "star map". So you choose a level from an ugly, empty map. Whoa, big deal. A simple menu would have the same visual appeal as THIS map, plus, it would require less dragging and searching for certain stages. Another ham-fisted attempt at innovation is the energy/health system: Your ship's energy meter is constantly depleting, as well as decreasing when your ship is hit by enemy attacks, and you need to replenish it by collecting orbs, which are left behind by defeated foes. This system adds nothing to the experience, it seems to only have been included for one simple reason: Hiding the awkward controls.

They are described as being unique to this game and I don't doubt it. But if nobody would copy a control system, despite many similar games appearing on the same device, that's probably saying something about the quality of said mechanics. Some restrictive shooters on the iPhone are using a slider for steering your ship, which usually works great for motions limited to either the y-axis or x-axis. In Flare Elite, however, you need to use two sliders at the same time, one for moving horizontally and one for vertical movements. It's like rubbing your belly and hitting your forehead at the same time, just not as much fun as that. What I ended up doing, was placing my thumbs on both sliders and then move both of them wherever I wanted to head for, rather than using the sliders the way they were intended to. While this comes somewhat close to relative touch controls, it means having two fingers obscuring the action instead of just one, and you constantly need to reposition your fingers. Luckily, the energy system means you'll rarely run out of energy anyways.