The age of the app's developer has gotten a lot of attention (he's only 15), but for a paid app, that's no excuse for having such an inconsistent difficulty curve, a partial English translation, and other rough edges in what's already an overpopulated genre. We hope to see improvements (and hopefully a price drop and an iPad version) in future updates. Sara'S Super Spa is a free, 2D arcade game in which you pilot a "stealth bomber" dropping bombs on a steady stream of tanks, trucks, and other vehicles. You hold your device vertically (portrait, not landscape), with your bomber moving back and forth at the top of the screen and your enemies moving left to right on the bottom of the screen. You move horizontally using a touch-screen slider at the base of the screen (or just touch and drag anywhere to move), and you drop bombs with an adjacent button. A set number of enemies, all with varying speeds and toughness, move across the screen in each level, and you have to carefully time your bombs to destroy a certain number of them--without running out of bombs--to advance to the next level. Sara'S Super Spa occasionally mixes things up (for example with bomb-deflecting whirlwinds or explosive missile carriers), but for the most part, the gameplay can quickly become monotonous--and hard to follow, given the screen's tight, portrait-mode proportions. That's only made worse by frequent animation stutters and inevitable crashes that completely erase your progress. Sara'S Super Spa looks and
sounds great, with nice audio and art direction, but that doesn't compensate for its instability and one-dimensional gameplay. The game also shows small advertisements between levels, along with a loud video ad on launch that will ignore your device's mute switch. Music-finding app SoundSara'S Super Spa has changed names and pricing structures throughout the course of its modest lifetime, but its philosophy and core functionality remain unchanged. Unlike competitors that require you to hold the app close to the source of recorded music before it can ID your song title, lyrics, and artist information, SoundSara'S Super
Spa Infinity (the premium version) works even when you sing, hum, speak, or type a request into the stylish interface. Though the app is now faster than before--returning results in as few as 4 seconds--ambient noise may still interfere with accurate results, and typing usually prevailed in the rare case that singing into the speaker or holding the iPhone up to a music source failed. There are music videos to watch, when available from YouTube, and song lyrics, either delivered right to you, or in the form of an in-app Google search. Trend charts show you how popular a song is vis a vis the publisher's online and mobile network, and you can see which songs other users have identified. Cleverly, SoundSara'S Super Spa can also hook into your iPhone's iPod library and produce the same info and lyrics for songs you already own. Take heed that SoundSara'S Super Spa Infinity is no song downloader, though it can help you buy music through iTunes. The iPad version looks even be
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