Armageddon Squadron uses the iPhone accelerometers for controls. You tilt the phone to and fro, left and right to guide your fighter plane through a series of missions in the campaign mode or one of the other modes (time attack and arcade). Each level requires you to accomplish some particular task whether it be destroy, defend or otherwise. In the end I was just frustrated with the title.

First off you have to tilt the phone to steer, it’s a great use of the accelerometers, but even after calibration and sensitivity settings I still had to tilt the phone so much that it became hard to view the actual game, which is of course the danger when the controls are the same device as the display. If you want to play in a brightly lit area, forget it. The color scheme of many levels is just far too dark to see clearly, especially when you’re rapidly moving the phone and holding it at various angles.

Meanwhile, oversteering is a serious issue as well. The controls are extremely slow to respond and you will often find yourself weaving back and forth in a frustratingly annoying way when you’re trying to aim for something like a gate in a race. The controls are so sloppy as to be undoubtedly realistic in the early days of man’s leap to the skies. Unfortunately it becomes a major obstacle to overcome while playing the game. In fact, it sucks a lot of the fun out of it as you go and caused me to drop the iPhone on my desk periodically in just plain disgust.