Bit Pilot

Price: £0.59p

• CONCEPT: 6/10
• GRAPHICS: 7/10
• SOUND: 10/10
• CONTROLS: 9/10
• LASTING APPEAL: 7/10

Man alive I love this game, its exciting, fast and ridiculously addictive. Now that’s just my opinion, it may not be everybody’s cup of tea but who blinks at 59p?

Bit Pilot is old school, evocative of an unarmed version of Asteroids and direct from the age of you get one go and you go till you die … again and again … all day long in fact, as if there was nothing else to live for … there isn’t.

In Bit Pilot you dodgem / collectem in order to increase your score, dodge asteroids, of which there are several variants, and collect pills that either increase your shield (with no limit as far as I can tell) or your score. Even in death you are greeted with an amusing phrase such as “sad face” or “smashtronaught” followed by your score. A game often doesn’t last longer than a couple of minutes making it unforgivably easy to give it “just one more go”, the drug reference of the pills becoming increasingly satirical as you play on.

Controls are great and wont take more than a few seconds to get used to. Swiping powers your ship in the direction of your swipe, use two fingers for increased acceleration and swipe the opposite direction too put on the brakes, that’s your lot but gameplay isn’t everything BP offers and there are some pretty nice unlockables, in the form of alternate in-game music and wallpapers for your iPhone, that release as you build your accumulative score.

Bit Pilot is a great twist on an old genre, it offers brilliant gameplay and great music by Sabre Pulse, get it now while its still possible to be ranked number 1 in the Universe … currently me! … trust me, it was painstaking!

Jon