Silent Scope 1.0 iPhone iPod Touch

April 23, 2009 - Silent Scope for the iPhone is a disaster. Konami's arcade port looks complete and competent on the surface, but within minutes of actually playing the game, I was ready to shoot my iPhone just to make it stop. The game is clumsy and hardly intuitive, begging the question of why Konami even bothered.
Silent Scope is an arcade sniper sim where you zoom in on distant targets and pull off miracle shots to save the president and his family. The game stretches across several locations, such as downtown and a football stadium, with you on a high perch at an incredible vantage point. From your loft, you can quickly scope enemies as they are pointed out via helpful target cursors. Each successful shot adds time to your clock, which screams toward zero.

With your finger, you drag a red sight around the scene to locate enemies. To shoot, you tap the screen just once. To zoom in, you double-tap the screen. Sounds normal, right? Here's the crazy thing: the scope zooms in to the spot you double-tapped, not the location of the red sighting cursor you moved on top of the enemy. That makes zero sense. While zoomed on, use red arrows to locate shooters before they have a chance to fire back at you. Picking off your targets with the kind of precision that made the arcade game such a thrill is impossible here due to the strange tango of lag and over-sensitivity in the controls. Scrolling around a scene while looking through the scope is exaggerated, making it hard to line up a headshot. When you tap the screen to shoot, there is a moment of pause before the bullet is actually fired. So even if you had a headshot lined up or were properly leading your target, you will miss.