If you’re out on the pavement trying to hail a taxi, the last thing you expect is the vehicle to fall out of the sky. Yet, that’s exactly what happens in The Incident, a fun universal application that feels right at home on the iPhone but struggles a little on the bigger device. This is mostly because the control scheme (tilting to move left and right, tapping to jump and shaking to get yourself out of a bad spot) doesn’t gel with the larger bulk of the device and holding an iPad up for a long period of time is uncomfortable. So in addition to redrawing the artwork the developer should have included some kind of virtual control scheme instead; the game’s save state is limited to iOS 4 only, too.

That means it’s probably best that you play the game on an iPhone or iPod touch with iOS 4 to enjoy all the benefits of the smaller footprint of those devices. You need to stay as nimble as possible too, because the random sky debris comes thick and fast; dog kennels, flat screen televisions, stone statues, an assortment of various signs, fridges, desks, and even more vehicles besides the taxi. In fact there’s so much junk that it would be impossible to list it all here, and that’s the beauty of the game; there’s new objects to be discovered every few seconds.

Dodging junk gets surprisingly hard, and the game walks a fine line between player skill and sheer dumb luck. Because objects fall randomly they’re not always uniformly distributed, so the mass may rise up on one side without you as your jump is too puny to reach anything higher than a fridge. This can’t be escaped from unlike getting trapped under a load of debris which can be rectified with a shake. Additionally, cursed balloons rise from the bottom and in later levels rise in formation, almost inevitably leading to a situation between a rock and a hard place; do you hit the object falling on top of you or dodge it and run into your death?

With patience you’ll eventually get there; as well as making use of all the good stuff that rises up from the bottom that includes coins (10 will be exchanged for a 1up), extra life, temporary adjustments to your life bar and a hard hat that protects against a few direct impacts. Thankfully the game also scatters checkpoints around fairly liberally, depicted as streamers that when crossed allow you to begin again from that height.

Interestingly, The Incident is more about the long term goal of reaching outer space rather than seeing about how far you can get in one go. We’re glad the developer went this route because it can take some time to get up to level 4 from level 3.

The only real negative about the game is that it can get repetitive, especially if you find yourself stuck on a particular section. Whilst the chiptune music is really good it is short; there’s only one song too which means you hear the loop point more often than you’d like; if you get stuck and die over and over the music is restarted every time you lose all of your life bar which can start to grate. However the retro graphics are excellent, making the game feel like a real blast from the past. We especially like the trophy room which shows you the height at which you were crushed by ten particular objects.

It’s a shame that the control scheme on the iPad isn’t a good fit for that device, because otherwise we’d be recommending this game as a great example of universal apps in action. Don’t get it because it can be played on your iPad; enjoy it for your iPhone and consider the £1.19 a good value for the small screen version alone. At least until the developer hopefully updates it.

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Pocketball, C

Review by Tom Grimes, November 30, 2009

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