Touch Hockey: FS5

by Eric March on October 17, 2008 at 10:12 am

(2 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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App Name: Touch Hockey: FS5
Developer: FlipSide5
Category: Games: Sports

You want some air hockey?  Well, you’re about to get a face full of it whether you like it or not, and you have newcomers FlipSide5 to thank for it.

Don’t worry though, because Touch Hockey is actually good.  Very good, in fact — I haven’t had this much fun with virtual air hockey since Shufflepuck Cafe.  (To be fair though, I still like Shufflepuck better, for reasons that should be obvious to anyone who has ever played it.)

To look at it, it is very much your standard game of air hockey.  Blue paddle against red paddle on the field of air with hockey markings on a perforated board.  But this is air hockey — every inch of it.  The puck makes satisfying clack noises when it smacks against the paddles or the sides of the arena, and a familiar clunk when it drops into a goal — whereupon you’ll hear slightly less familiar cheering and a buzzer indicating a goal.  If you make a particularly good shot, you’ll be treated to a close-up instant replay.

Touch Hockey also lets you do something I’ve never seen a computerized air hockey game let you do: Jump on the puck.  Lift your finger and tap over the puck; your paddle will jump over and land on the puck, allowing you to drag it around and position it where you want, then take your shot.  Awesome.

Pehaps Touch Hockey’s biggest success however is in making such a small screen feel less cramped than you’d think it would be.  Although sliding your paddle around such a small screen can be trying, the game manages to minimize your frustration by packing in a most fine game of air hockey features action whose exchanges can get heated enough that you can almost forget that your goals are only 3 inches apart.

The game is ad-supported, but they’re pretty smart about it: It caches the ads only once, the very first time you load the game (and never again thereafter), and only starts to display them after 5 minutes of gameplay.

FlipSide5 have certainly made a rousing first impression, I’ll give them that; Touch Hockey is beautiful looking, plays silky smooth, and has some cool bonus features.  For that, Touch Hockey gets 5 stars and a bootleg copy of the Internet.

Related Posts:

• Sunday, October 19th, 2008 -- Touch4: FS5 (Free)
• Friday, October 17th, 2008 -- Tic-Tac-Touch: FS5 (Free)

Posted in Games: Sports