Paper Pilot (iPhone) Review

Anannya Sen’s Review

Better than it was in the classroom.

Do you remember being a kid and making a paper plane, then throwing it and watching it hit a few currents as it flew off? If you don't you may have been female, although some of my female friends at primary school could make better planes than I could.

Paper plane takes the same concept and applies it to the iphone with some slick touchscreen controls and of course the motion sensitive aspects of the phone built into the gameplay.

The premise is simple, you have to direct your plane around an indoor environment (consisting of a few different types of room) and collect paper clips. Quite why paper clips, I don't know, but there they are. If you manage to collect all the paper clips on the level, you get a rating based on the time you took. Get enough ratings and you can unlock the additional stages.

For each stage there are essentially two levels, an easy one and harder one. The easier one has less rooms and less paperclips to collect. You can collect them in any order you want so a little bit of experimentation may be required to allow you to decide your best route.

Unlike a real paper plane, this one never seems to hit the ground and the iPhone tilt controls are quite good and responsive. Sometimes a little too responsive. Tilting left and right will make the plane bank that way (look at that use of terminology, I should have been a pilot!) and up and down controls the altitude. There is a speed slider on the left hand side, beware if you set it too fast, fine control obviously becomes much more difficult.

This was probably my one pet gripe about the game. Some stages require a certain number of quick finishes in previous levels (to get high ranking scores). This means you may be looking to shave a few seconds off your time as you push for those high ranks. And starting at a medium speed, sliding the slider to full speed and still controlling the plane at the same time can be very very tricky. They should give you the option of what speed to start at.

Of course, that would make things a bit easier and they are far from being easy in this game. Once you get the hang of the flying aspects you'll look to finish in faster and faster times and the issue above hampers this. It does mean you have to improve on your close control and memorise the route you are looking to take.

The graphics are very nicely rendered, with quite a lot of detail in the backgrounds. Lighting is nice as is the physics of the plane motion. Sound is pretty cool but nothing to write home about with a funky backing tune. Maybe it was my phone but when trying to see the requirements for locked stages at the menu, my game crashed a couple of times. But it only takes a few seconds to reload anyway.

Overall, quite a fun addictive game, although there aren't huge amounts to do or see.