The Week in Games: Dragon Bird

Dragon Bird is another vertical scroller shoot 'em up game, this time from U Mobile. This one's military themed and offers military jets with (albeit non-realistic) interchangeable weapons you can purchase between levels after you've earned some money.

The game is a 2D/3D hybrid and uses a special type of scrolling where the buildings scroll at a different rate than the background and use a stretching technique to create the illusion of altitude as you're flying through the air. It is the same technique used in the Idreams games Sky Force 1 and 2. The graphics overall are pretty good, and the audio is of about the same quality: better than average but not quite exceptional.

Dragon Bird is, in fact, quite a bit similar to the Sky Force games and sometimes there doesn't seem to be much of a line between the two. Assuming no plagiarism was involved, that's not a bad thing at all, since the SF series were two of the best games available on the platform. With the lack of good games out lately, Dragon Bird therefore stands out as one of the better ways of killing time on your Pocket PC.