The more I play, the shoddier it seems. I’ve had the burned out wrecks of cars disappear before my eyes, seconds after exploding. I’ve seen AI drivers trying to drive through walls. All around me textures and objects appear and disappear. Sometimes the tap-to-target mechanism works, sometimes it inexplicably seems to fail. Once I was facing a group of thugs who wanted to shoot me dead, I pressed the auto-target button and my character swung round and targeted my own car. I’ve done a few more missions and, well, I’m all for quick-fix missions on a mobile device and I understand I’m still doing early missions, but even so, a thirty-second drive followed by having to tap the fire button five times to kill a couple of brain-dead goons doesn’t quite cut it.

Some people will make allowances because it’s on the iPhone. I won’t. A game’s a game. If a game doesn’t quite work because of the platform its on, it’s not suddenly a good game.

Gangstar is not magically a good game because it’s on the iPhone. It’s not even a good game because it’s only four quid, though that does help. It’s a good game because… no, I’m drawing a blank. Yet, somehow, through some voodoo, it is a good game. I play it, I enjoy myself. Maybe I shouldn’t try looking so hard.

Anyway, yes, I did a few missions, which were all incredibly simple and easy as anything. The only difficulty comes from driving into walls. I like the driving, but I’ve not mastered it yet. After a while I decided to spend my profits on a sniper rifle. I didn’t find anywhere good to play with it, but I killed a few people. Just because, you know, I could.


Then I stole an ambulance and took a few people to hospital before I lost control and ran out of time with some poor injured bugger still in the back. I guess they died back there. I ditched the ambulance and stole a sports car. Decided to drive around the map to see how long it would take, but ran over a few too many people, so got into a car chase and shoot out with the cops. You know, the usual GTA-type stuff.

Oh and the game has achievements. They’ve been popping up now and again. Here’s one I got for jacking a van.


I’ll have to have a look sometime, see if there are any that look interesting.