iStunt review

iStunt is a minimalistic 2D physics based snowboarding game for the iPhone from Profusion Studios that will have you literally twisting and turning your iPhone in a blend of realistic and mind bending challenges racing down snow covered hills and mountains in 20 levels.

You are a stunt man who rides a snowboard and must go through some seriously fun challenges to clear a bunch of levels. To control your guy, you just tilt your iPhone left or right. When you’re in mid air, you can adjust his leaning angles and when you’re on snow, you can adjust his stance. To jump, you simply swipe up on the the iPhone screen, and to crouch you swipe down. Jump over cliffs and spikey obstacles, and crouch the spinning under killer saws. As with real life snowboarding, you also gain speed if you crouch while going downhill in iStunt. There are also some boost zones marked by a purple arrow that will increase your speed dramatically for a few seconds. Sometimes hitting the boost zones is the only way you’ll have enough speed to make it up a steep hill. If you get stuck, you have to pause and restart the game.

You can pinch and pull to zoom your view of the terrain in and out. Having zoomed out view is helpful for seeing what’s coming up in new tracks and zooming in can be good if you are trying to time your jumps to perfection and see your moves more precisely. Speaking of moves, iStunt will give you bonus points for making perfect landings, doing backflips and frontflips.

There is no background music while you play but you hear the calm sound of snow as you ride down the terrains. You also hear groans as you jump and shocked and awed voices after you land a dangerous stunt. Although you can land your snowboarder in a variety of angles, iStunt will give you the most points for a perfect landing. As you ride you catch star tokens to earn even more points by hitting them. Some are on your path, and others require you to make a perfect smooth jump in motion to catch them in mid air.

Pay attention to all signs, some warn you about cliffs, and others give informational warnings as you ride. The yellow rotate signals tell you about sudden slope changes coming up, where you’ll have to tilt your iPhone left or right in order to land on the curved slopes. Finally for some twisted out of this world stunts, iStunt throws in gravity inversion. When you see a yellow arrow pointing down, as soon as you hit it, you’ll hear a sonic boom and gravity changes poles instantly. Now you’ll be falling towards the sky in no time, only problem is the sky has slopes on it, and you have to rotate your iPhone 180 degrees in a jiffy to avoid slamming your head against the slopes in the sky. Keep in mind that the controls will also invert after you land.

When you reach the green flag you’ve finished that level. You’ll see your score and best score, and have the option to play the same level again, or move onto the next one. iStunt uses Box2D, Cocos2D and OpenFeint for online scores. You can play in Stunt Mode to up your score and show off your stunts or in Time Trial Mode to go through all 20 levels in the shortest time possible.

iStunt is a 2nd generation snowboarding app for the iPhone with insane twists and turns, upside down, rotating, anti-gravity stunts that will speed your heart rate and put a smile on your face at the same time. Can you pull it off?

Here is a video demo of the iStunt app on the iPhone

AppSafari review of iStunt was written by Joe Seifi on December 10th, 2009 and categorized under App Store, Featured, Fun, Games. Page viewed 6277 times, 2 so far today. Need help on using these apps? Please read the Help Page.