I got my first iPhone last summer and think it’s great. One of the first games I bought for it was Glyder. I loved how effortlessly it gave you the idea of flying. It had several challenging puzzles for you to solve, and I took to the game like, well, a duck to, umm, water?

Anyway, after a while, I stopped playing. Why? Because I solved everything on it. I even solved the entire game without crashing once. Yes, I was that obsessed with it, and it was that much fun.

Why was it fun? Years ago I wanted to hang glide, but for various reasons, never did. I think this game does a wonderful job simulating hang gliding–only better. The controls are intuitive; there’s almost no touch controls, only motion control. If you tilt the phone forward, you fly down and faster. If you tilt back, you go up and slow down. Tilt the phone left or right and you turn.

And everything in Glyder hinges on your flying ability. Throughout the world there are gems floating in the air, and the object of the game is to collect all these gems. There are also different island regions, so you collect all the gems in one area then fly to another area.

And the islands are very different. One has many caves you have to fly through. Another one consists mostly of one big building and you have to fly through the building (can’t land in the building).

It also has challenges, where you land on a colored platform labeled A and must fly to a platform with the same color labeled B within a certain time.

And that’s just Glyder, not Glyder 2.

Glyder 2 is like Glyder (different islands of course), with extras.

The aforementioned challenges act like guided tours where you are shown a series of circles and fly through each one in turn. Arrows show you where each circle is, and going through one reveals the next one. If you make it to the B platform in time, you might get some reward (more on those later).

There are other challenges. These usually take the form of some device shooting things (snowflakes, etc) in the air and you have to capture as many of them as you can in a fixed time. Other times you have to pick things up and carry them somewhere. When you succeed you get a reward.

Glyder 2, like Glyder, requires you to gather gems. But you also have to collect rewards. These can either be different wings or outfits, or could be various artifacts that are needed to solve the game. In Glyder, all you have to do is gather all the gems. But in Glyder 2, solving the game is more complex. You need some things to power other things, and you need various artifacts to power portals, etc. The artifact descriptions are gems of technobabble in themselves. For example, the Quantum Shifter is described as, “The quantum Shifter can link the temporal arc flow to the warp field modulator to enable actuate phase control in the ethereal aura.”

Wings and outfits: in Glyder, there was just one set of wings and one outfit. You couldn’t change it. But in Glyder 2, there are different kinds of wings and different outfits. The wings have different properties. Some are better at soaring high, and others are better at turning. With some, you can collect the energy gems (those shimmering gems that make you go fast) or even updrafts, and release them when you want. I don’t know of any functional difference between the outfits, but you can dress up in many different ways, ranging from ninjas to zombies.

Upside / Downside:

Upsides of Glyder 2: more of the same as Glyder, with new, more complicated challenges. Different wings and outfits give you options.

Downsides: many of the same problems with Glyder. There’s one fixed puzzle. Once you solve it, you’re mostly done. I was able to solve Glyder 2 in a weekend (albeit a very fun weekend). There’s also a bug in Glyder 2 (also in Glyder) where if you set the orientation of the phone at vertical, you’re either climbing really high or diving.

I didn’t buy Glyder 2 when it first came out mostly because I was afraid of the “one fixed puzzle” downside. I waited until it was on sale for a dollar. Would I recommend it? For a dollar, yes. For more, it depends on how easy it was to solve Glyder for you. If it was easy, you might not be happy. But there are a lot of challenges, even after you solve the main puzzle, so yes, you might like it anyway.