Essential iOS games – Part 1 – Galaxy On Fire 2

Galxy on Fire 2's gorgeous fully animated intro screen

Galaxy On Fire 2 is one of my all time favourite iOS games. Although it’s a universal app, I mostly play it on my iPad. There is an option to create a saved game on Openfeint, meaning you can sync your progress between two (or more) devices.

In space, everything is beautiful

The game is a great blend of space travel, trading, fighting and following the main storyline. Early on, I got obsessed with trading and figuring out lucrative routes and I let the main story alone while I trundled around the various star systems building up my fortune and acquiring blueprints for weapons and upgrades. When I eventually went back to the story I already had what would probably be considered almost an end-game ship and armaments.

One of those would be just great. Oh look, I can afford about 6 of them.

Checking my game stats, I’ve put over 35 hours into this game. For a game that can be played on a phone that’s not bad at all, and I am nowhere near the top of the Game Center leaderboards so there are lots of people out there who are obviously putting way more time than that into it.

You too can have a screen full of gold achievements if you're willing to waste 30+ hours of your life on this game!

Here’s a list of things that I think are particularly good about this game, in no particular order:

– Lots of ships to buy and fly.
– Deep and engrossing upgrades and endless fiddling with blueprints, weapon loadouts, different ship strategies.
– Fairly decent main story with an often amusing script and generally good voice acting.
– Rather wonderful graphics.
– Space combat is fun and doesn’t seem to get too repetitive, even after 30+ hours of game time.
– You can dip in and out of the main story pretty much as you please, taking time out to travel around picking up side missions, trading or just sight-seeing around the galaxy.
– Trading can become incredibly addictive.

Approaching a space station on auto-pilot

The recent update with the optional Valkyrie expansion pack has brought me back to the game after a short time away. I wasn’t sure how it would feel, essentially revisiting an old game that I had already played to death, but as soon as I started on the new storyline I was hooked … again.

Completing the original story has some interesting side-effects. This mercenary is offering to pay me for the honour of accompanying me. If only my real career was 1/1000th as satisfying as this game...

Well, there you have it. The first post in a series of posts about essential iOS games. Galaxy on Fire 2 isn’t a cheap game (£5.99 + £2.99 for the Valkyrie expansion) but it’s worth every penny of that, and probably a little bit more. If you’re unsure, there’s always the lite version to try.

Explosions in space are always pretty.