Do you have a desire for panic attacks? How about lightning fast reflexes? Do you like cartoony games on your iPhone? Well, how about all three wrapped into one? Space ace is an almost “Arcade Perfect” recreation of the original Don Bluth game of the same name.

The first thing anyone will notice with this game is that it runs very smoothly on the iPhone or iPod Touch. You are greeted at the title screen by several choices. First is “Attract.” This is basically the trailer for the game I guess you could say. It gives you the story in a nutshell and lets you see the cast of characters. After that is “Play”, “High Scores”, “Settings” and finally “Instructions.” All of these are pretty self explanatory so I will go over what actually lies within each. Play you are given three options of your level of difficulty. There is Cadet, Captain, and Ace, from easiest to hardest. Depending on which level you choose you could have only a few situations to go through or more and more as you go up in difficulty.

The “Settings” is probably the most interesting. You get the option to turn on or off the beep that precedes your characters movements, which is pretty helpful but can get annoying. You can also (here is a big one) turn “Infinite Lives” on or off. That is pretty huge, as anyone that has tried this game in the arcade will tell you, it isn't all that easy on ANY difficulty level. You can also choose to have the controls set for a lefty, as well as making the control scheme small, or large. Small gives you the directional pad in the corner, and the “Action” button on the opposite corner. Large spreads out the directions to the center of the side of the corresponding direction.

So how does it play? Well it's a very very fast game. If you can hit all your marks and never slip up on Captain it will probably take you about 10-15 mins to play through. Like I said it runs very smooth. The cartoon never stutters, and the frame rate is very high. So long as your reaction time is fast you should have no problem with this game at all. This game defines the “hand eye coordination” type of speed.

The sound as well is great. Seeing as the game doesn't really require your device to “process” much information at any time everything syncs up nicely and always sounds very clear and crisp.

The downfall to this game is replayability. If you memorize each step, and direction that you need to hit and when, there isn't much for you in a second play through. The difference between the difficulty levels make it a little different. However making the leap from one setting to the next is quite a feat.

All in all the game is a spot on adaptation of the original. From the way it plays, sounds, and the difficulty level, you can't find a better recreation. The price point of $5 seems a little steep given the amount of content. But if you are a fan, you already own it!