iPhones in Space: Galaxy on Fire

German developer Fishlabs has brought their oxygen-rich space combat and trading game, Galaxy on Fire, up to version 1.1.0, which not only improves controls but adds a bland but apparently necessary "difficulty slider" that can be adjusted on a 100-point scale.

At $6 on the iTunes App Store and with a claimed twenty hours of gameplay, it certainly has a fair price-to-cash ratio. Unfortunately, with my iPhone already littered with games that I've only played for a few minutes before letting them shuffle off to the second or third page of applications, I'm on a self-imposed hiatus from new pay-for apps.

And that takes more effort than you might first guess. Space combat is one of my first loves, and a genre sorely misrepresented in recent years, peeling off slightly to the arcady with games like Freelancer—I could tolerate, or even enjoy the mouse-based controls, but found the trading game weirdly sterile—or dauntingly oversimmed, at least in reputation, which kept me away from the I-War series.

What I want, of course, is EVE Online merged with the dogfighting of Freespace—a idealized commingling that is currently unfairly embodied by NetDevil's Jumpgate Evolution, stored in the lazily rotating shipping container drifting through Hope Sector.