Hands on with Aerox on iPhone

Accelerometer controls naturally lend themselves to the control of a ball, and the proliferation of tilt to roll games on the iPhone and iPad are testament to this.

Standing out in this sea of varyingly attractive marbles is a tough task, but one superficial solution is to look gorgeous. Aerox is, without doubt, the belle of the ball.

Despite Synoptical Studios’s evident technical prowess, however, some poorly thought out options placement and the occasional bug mar the slick package at this stage in its production.

Sporting a look somewhere between WipEout Pure’s Sol 2 course and something from TrackMania (cotton wool clouds, azure blue skies, and delicate grey surfaces), the game is immediately refreshing.

3GS owners can enjoy additional effects including improved shadows, a 60fps framerate, and a metal ball that reflects the levels in realtime. All very impressive stuff.

The superficial among us will no doubt be happy with the bragging rights afforded by such a technically impressive game alone. But thankfully, Aerox’s vacant beauty is backed up by some solid platforming and puzzle mechanics too.

The three dimensional levels are a pleasure to navigate, and everything is handled by tilting the phone. Tilting forward or back makes you go forward or backward, whilst left and right make you go…well, you get the idea.

The camera also pans with any left or right movement, but Synoptical Studios has thoughtfully included the option to swipe the screen if you need to move the viewpoint to one you don’t wish to travel in.

The physics feel a little odd at first. The way your ball floats dreamily across gaps is somewhat at odds with the fact that it’s made of metal.

But this floatiness is key to the game's limited success. Combined with the various ramps, jump pads, and gravitational drums which push or pull you, it encourages ever more daring manoeuvres and a sense of near bird-like freedom.

Unfortunately, the aesthetically identical nature of all 30 levels which make up the game does start to make you wish for the occasional new texture by the end.

More worryingly, the tilt controls, whilst responsive, can only be calibrated after a level has started.

The default position for centred seems to be with the iPhone flat, so if you happen to be holding the handset at an angle when you begin, you’ll roll straight off the back of the starting platform and be mid-plummet by the time you’ve hit the options button to realign.

There is no penalty for this, but it’s an annoying oversight in the face of such slick presentation elsewhere. Playing with the device tilted also seems to produce less responsive backward movement, meaning a lot of cricks for players who have to look down on their playfield.

Our preview code occasionally left the ball static after any change was made to the calibration – we could still move the camera around, and see the tilt meter responding, but the ball remained steadfastly in place. Hopefully this occasional bout of locked-in syndrome will not be included in the final release.

Whilst a little more graphical variety would be nice, future updates may well provide other worlds to explore. If the control and crashing issues are fixed, Synoptical Studios may just have the ‘bosser’ that every one wants in their collection.