EZ Fighter by ez4phone | Price: Free | Recommendation: Don’t Get It
How much can one complain about something that is free? Well, if that free something begins to make a negative impact on something that wasn’t free then I think there are grounds to complain but I digress...
I stumbled across EZ Fighter in the App Store...it was the screenshots that got me. They reminded me of something so I downloaded it. Excited to play, I tapped its icon to get started. Screen fades to black so I hit the menu button where I am returned to my main screen. I try again and the splash screen with a spinning status wheel is displayed...progress.
EZ Fighter is a 2 dimensional fighter plane game where you have to eliminate targets to get to the next level. The fighter automatically fires the guns for you so all you have to do is navigate around directing your fire at targets and avoid being hit by the enemy. There is a bomb button that blows everything up on the screen when things get too hairy. You earn points by destroying the enemy and collecting various tokens on the screen. The tokens can also provide you with increased fire power.
The settings are simple enough: Volume and G-Sensor (vibration). There are two levels of difficulty. The first level (default) is using your finger to direct your aircraft around the screen. The second is selected by turning on the Accelerometer setting from the Setting screen. With this option you have to move your iPhone around to move the plane on the screen...definitely harder. EZ Fighter keeps track of the 8 highest scores.
The game play is quite good and is a bit addictive. Although, the enemy targets always come at you in the exact same pattern so after awhile it can become a bit monotonous and predictable. The graphics are decent and I do like the sound especially with ear buds in. As for the accompanying music turn it off...after playing the game with it on I suddenly found myself in a bad mood...quite annoying.
My biggest complaint which really ruined my experience and feeling for this game is the constant freezing...This game put my iPhone in a catatonic stupor that required 2 hard reboots to bring it back to life. Every other time I start this game it freezes. It even froze after I completed the first level which was a bummer as it lost my game after a double restart. I went to the company and support site but sadly it did not have an English version so I was not able to determine if this was a known bug with a fix forthcoming.
Although I must confess there is part of me that likes this app.
Mainly because it takes me be back to a time when I used to roam the local arcade with a pocket full of quarters; earnings from my paper route. I did get hooked on a game very similar to EZ Fighter and plugged that machine with quarters like an old lady at a penny slot machine in Reno. As with EZ-Fighter I never got the high scores on that arcade game but they provided me with a few minutes of escape. So in that respect EZ Fighter is a mild success in that it is entertaining when it is not being annoying...
Unfortunately for EZ Fighter, sentimentality does not win out here…the frustration of freezes and crashes is not worth the 11.9 mb of space it takes up on my iPhone. I would rather let my kids download, yet another, Puppy Picture Randomizer...at least they don’t put the Vulcan Death Grip on my iPhone.
Pros
- Free
- It is good for a quick fix when you have some time to kill
Cons
- Continuous freezing and subsequent hard resets
- Predictable - enemy targets follow the same pattern each time
- Music is annoying
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