This ain’t the highway to the danger zone.
In AirFight HD you circle an endless stretch of featureless ocean to fight rarely glimpsed jets bent on your destruction. Maybe that’s an accurate picture of modern aerial combat, but it doesn’t make for a good time with your iPad.
Accelerometer-controlled flying works well, but there’s nowhere to go: shooting gray planes for points and orange planes to advance levels feels the same, and both just respawn endlessly until you run out of lives or patience. Admittedly, tracking a bogie on radar, then hovering your crosshairs over it to lock on and launch missiles is satisfying, but only for the first few kills.
And forget using your poky machine guns –– they can hardly keep up with AirFight’s tiny, fast-moving fighters. Multiple difficulty levels and two-player deathmatches over local Wi-Fi aren’t enough to make us miss an in-flight movie for this one.
The bottom line. The sky’s not the only limit in AirFight HD.
iPad running iOS 4.2 or later
Simple flight controls. Local Wi-Fi multiplayer.
No variety to gameplay. Barely-there environment and lackluster graphics.
