The follow up to the much hyped Metal Gear Solid Touch was Silent Scope.  Silent Scope was a quarter sink for me growing up.  The thrill of staring into the scope of a sniper rifle and actually seeing a magnified LCD screen while aiming for that elusive headshot was something that hasn't yet been replicated since.  Needless to say, I was very excited for the chance to take Silent Scope for the iPhone out for a spin.  But, unlike MGS:T, this game is all forms of fail.

Sure, MGS:T wasn't the most perfect game, but at least you could actually play it.  Konami must have thought that MGS:T was too easy and decided to make Silent Scope a carpentry accident simulator.  After playing for 30 minutes, you seriously feel like running your fingers through a band saw!

You play a police sniper, tasked to take out selected targets.  Each enemy is identified on screen with a red triangle that flashes around them and you can move your reticule around by swiping your finger across the screen.  You double tap to zoom in, and you single tap to shoot.  Unfortunately, that simple mechanism is where the designers failed.  When you double tap to zoom, you don't actually zoom into where you placed your reticule, but rather where you actually double tapped.  Once zoomed in, you will have to adjust the aim by dragging your fingers around the screen with the accuracy of Ray Charles at a dart game.  

Your fly is down!

You can make this work when your targets are stationary or with minimal movement.  But once you throw in the later stages where the targets are often moving in crowds or flying a jet, this becomes neigh impossible.  I played Silent Scope on the Dreamcast and even that wasn't this difficult and all I had was an analogue stick!

Yeah, good luck!

While this game should be no problem for the iPhone to handle, Konami did such a poor job of porting it that they might as well have used stick figures and Java to render the game.  Polygons were clipping everywhere, character models were barely distinguishable between hand and face, and you have constant slow down with barely playable frame rates.  Throughout the play test, my iPhone never crashed but it certainly felt like it was about to with the slide show of screens during the jet stage.  I also rebooted my iPhone prior to launching the game every time but that didn't help.

For $5.99 CDN, this game is not worth it.  Konami should have left this alone and ported something 2D over, such as an old school TMNT game or even a Castlevania game.  Take that $5.99 and go get yourself a McDonald's combo, you'll feel much better than torturing yourself with this garbage.