Bit Pilot (iPhone)

Review by Ben Briggs, March 05, 2010

iPhone integration (About)

Save state: No
iPod music: No
Status bar: No

Version: 1.0
Price as reviewed: 59p
by Zach Gage

We managed to get some insightful thoughts from Zach Gage after reviewing Unify. For his new game Bit Pilot this excerpt from the interview is particularly apt:

I’m a little obsessed with trying to make apps that explore what the iPhone can really do. It’s such an innovative piece of technology in so many ways that I think it’s surprising how few games really try and build mechanics around its attributes...Because of this obsession it was really important to me that the controls in Unify felt perfect and natural, and this took a lot of tweaking...having perfect controls goes a long way in making such an unintuitive thing intuitive.
Zach Gage

Bit Pilot eschews the virtual control wheels or accelerometer based schemes that many similar games use, preferring instead to use a highly responsive touch control that has probably undergone a similar iterative process. You swipe the screen in the direction you want to go, and swipe in the opposite direction to slow down—using two fingers instead of one yields a much faster burst of speed. You’ll pick it up in all of 30 seconds and will be zipping about the screen with ease.

You can’t fire in this game, merely dodge out of the way as asteroids hurtle towards your small pixel ship. Luckily you have a small hexagonal shield that can take damage from rocks, but not from the deadly laser beams that appear on the later stages. Power ups drift by and give you the chance to add another shield to your craft or boost your score by a thousand, and there is quite a lot of strategy to getting either of these if you factor in the risk of propelling yourself at full speed to cover half the map.

Utilising achievements or scoring to unlock in-game rewards seems to be a common feature in games these days. Tilt to Live has it, and Bit Pilot has it; in the form of unlocking music and wallpapers whenever your cumulative score reaches a certain level. It’s a very good way to get you to replay the game, and as the high scoring is done with OpenFeint you can see who else is playing and challenge them to best your high score.

Not only do we love the retro meets modern stylings of Bit Pilot, it is also a complete package. It comes with some fantastic chip-tune music that can be selected in the main menu, a variety of comical texts that you get when you die—our favourites are “Smashtronaut” and “Sad Face”—and best of all it’s only 59p. There’s a lot to love here; from the fluid controls to the speedy gameplay it feels like Squareball just met Space Miner. We heartily recommend this one.