Gun Bros 2

Gun Bros 2. No, not as awful as it sounds. The gameplay is actually pretty enjoyable. It's a fairly standard two-stick shooter with big muscly guys (bros), big blasty guns, and lots and lots of bad dudes. Your bro is thrust into a moderately-sized arena (a number of new ones unlock as you go) and you have to defeat waves and waves of creepy things, eventually bosses. (But you do have a bro-partner, so it's not so scary.) When you make it through your mission you get some loot, and then you have the option to buy new weapons, upgrade them, mod them, etc., plus you can do the same with different types of military-style armor.

That's the game, more or less: you progress through missions and arenas, get bigger guns, fight bigger baddies, and there's an endless mode, as well. While it's not breathtaking or particularly innovative for either the genre or the platform, it is a good romp.

But here is where I must disagree with Apple's editors and their choosing of this game. With all the thousands and thousands of games in the App Store, why would anyone waste their time with a flawed one, especially when it offers nothing irreplaceable? I know I wouldn't.

And my example, naturally, is Gun Bros 2. Yes, it is fun. And even free. But it lacks polish. That might sound insignificant, but consider, for example, the obnoxiously long loading screens. No, it's not because of the graphics: I've played much prettier, graphics-heavy games on my iPhone with loading times at least half these (see: Infinity Blade). This, of course, is not to mention the fact that the game deleted my data for no apparent reason and is now prompting me to create a new character. I will not.

Even if this is a one-in-one-hundred-thousand kind of scenario, it's too many. This is a massively relevant lesson to developers and iPhone gamers alike: there are way too many games out there to waste your time on something that doesn't work.