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Air Penguin for iPhone

23.07.2011
Produce an avian-themed iPhone game, and you can expect people to let fly with the comparisons. That would be unfair to , a $1 game for the iPhone and iPod touch from . Yes, the game features birds--penguins, to be precise--and they do seem a little bit miffed about the polar ice caps melting (Perturbed Penguins?). But this is an entirely different kind of casual offering for the iPhone, a scrolling platform game instead of a physics-based puzzler.

Air Penguin also goes for a completely different control scheme. Instead of on-screen buttons or touch controls, Air Penguin relies entirely on the iPhone's built-in accelerometer to control the action. It's this feature that will either delight iPhone gamers or have them angrily pressing down on the Air Penguin logo so that they can remove the game from their devices.

Air Penguin offers two modes of gameplay, with the Story mode front and center. Melting ice caps have separated the titular penguin from his family, and it's up to you to navigate him from ice floe to ice floe across a series of stages.

That's where the tilt controls come into play. The Air Penguin is a body in constant motion, bouncing up and down. You tilt your iPhone forward, backward, and side-to-side to make sure he lands safely. Flick your phone with the enough vigor, and you can make the penguin swerve around obstacles and back to safety.

And that's crucial because Air Penguin throws plenty of obstacles in your path. Sharks will occasionally leap out of the water to gobble you. Swordfish will fly through the air to spear you. Walruses will bang into you as you slide down a sheet of ice like out-of-control NASCAR drivers. Note that you can temporarily disable some of these obstacles by using some of the fish you collect along the way. (You can also buy extra fish via in-app purchases, but that strikes me as decidedly unsporting. Also, I am cheap.) Marine biologists might cringe at the cross-section of wildlife that appears in Air Penguin, but they add a challenging element to what could have been a pretty dull platform game.

The tilt controls also offer a challenging element, though I'm not sure how welcome it will be to every iOS gamer. It can be very difficult to land your penguin with precision. Just the slightest variation in how you tilt your iPhone can turn what normally would be a safe jump into a catastrophic plunge into the icy depths. You can fiddle with the controls' sensitivity in the app's settings, but it's a very tiny slider. I also wish Gamevil had included a button to return the controls to their default sensitivity for those times that I was unhappy with the results of my tinkering.