The X-Plane series for iPhone has always offered a top quality flying experience. Like its predecessors, X-Plane Extreme delivers once again however this time with long awaited addition of combat aircraft.
As with other X-Plane titles, X-Plane Extreme takes full advantage of the iPhones built in accelerometers for its flight controls. As you would expect, tiliting the iPhone up and down controls pitch and yaw while tilting left and right control steering. This scheme works perfectly and allows for extremely sensitive controlling, which compliments the game's focus on simulation. Several cockpit functions are also under your control, such as braking, managing the landing gear and adjusting the flap.
X-Plane looks fantastic as well. The vast landscape is rendered in high quality 3D including an impressive draw distance for an iPhone game. Each of the 6 planes are modeled after their real life counterparts and offer their own distinctive engine sounds as well. With a focus on long distance flights, it's nice to see the option to play your own music.
X-Plane is the closest thing to sim flying on the iPhone. It takes the thrill of piloting these aircraft and compacts it into a 4 by 2 inch screen, which is a testamont to the devlopers.
Description
X-Plane Extreme is by far the most difficult X-Plane iPhone App I have ever coded.
This is because now we are really getting into the hard stuff: the tricky and demanding propulsion and flight-control systems that make X-Plane so complex.
NOW we are getting into flight-modeling that gets as tricky to manage as X-Plane for desktop, and the results show it:
We have some of the most unusual, fast, maneuverable, or advanced planes ever made... EACH with it's own unique control systems that radically effect the way the plane handles, and how it must be flown. The F-22, B-1, B-2, and SR-71 with X-Plane Extreme are simply stunningly different to fly... much more so than any other planes for X-Plane. As well, we have recently added the B-52 and the X-15! Google 'X-15' to see how these two planes work together.
We start with the F-22 Raptor.
The Raptor is by far the most maneuverable and powerful fighter in the sky... nobody else comes remotely close.
An interesting point of the Raptor is that the thrust vectors up and down to steer the craft.
This lets the plane pitch the nose up and down with full authority even at zero speed, simply by vectoring the thrust.
The F-22 can in fact hang motionless on the engines. But this comes at a cost: When you chop the power, you lose that lift and maneuverability!
Can you handle the Raptor in all phases of flight, from 0 to 1,000 knots, and all power settings from idle to maximum?
We then move to the SR-71 Blackbird.
This is the fastest airplane in the world, exceeding Mach-3, exceeding 70,000 feet.
Managing this airplane is sort of like balancing 3 checkbooks at once: Can you work out the speed, altitude, and flight control to see well over Mach-3 at well over 70,000 feet,
and still make it back to the airport and get stopped on the runway?
Now the B-1 'Bone' Bomber.
The B-1 has almost full-span flaps, spoilers for roll control, and differentially-deflecting all-moving stabilators to aid in roll control.
Despite the huge flaps and multiple roll controls, this huge ungainly bird still has terribly high stall speeds and limited roll rate due to it's high weight...
if you can get this plane around the sky and down in one piece, you are doing well!
We also have a new slider to complement the throttle, trim, flaps, and speedbrakes: WING SWEEP!
Use this in the B-1... but only above 500 knots or you will go down like a lawn dart! You will eat dirt at 400 knots.
The harbinger of the Apocalypse: The B-2 'Jet' Bomber:
The B-2 has.. umm... no tail. At all. No vertical stabilizer. No horizontal stabilizer. And no flaps.
Ailerons on the wingtips split open to add drag on the left or right side of the plane to give yaw-control!
A fly-by-wire system coupled to multiple flight-control surfaces makes this airplane manageable, and really rather nice to fly.
The missile with a man in it.. the X-15.
This plane was dropped from a B-52 bomber like a bomb, and then flown by hand INTO SPACE. Once the plane exhausted it's fuel, it glided back down to Edwards for landing. This high-speed and hi-altitude research refined much of the engineering ultimately used on the Space Shuttle program!
>ALL< of the systems mentioned above are simulated in X-Plane-Extreme for iPhone...
From Zero-Speed to Mach-3-plus, from surface to 100,000 feet, at the engineering-level of accuracy that X-Plane for desktop has... can you handle them?
As well, for the first on iPhone, we have OTHER planes for you to chase around.
These other planes race though the mountains and canyons, supersonic in some cases, with realistic physics.
Can you stick with them?
What's New in Version 9.75
Two interesting new planes:
The RQ-1 Predator un-manned drone, and the U-2 Dragon-Lady Recon plane. Both are really long in the wing, allowing them to climb high and loiter and spy for long durations.
$4.99
