Wings Over Scotland

Is this okay, or really really not very okay at all? I just can’t tell.

“Finally a SNIPER game where you play as a soviet soldier to help liberate the Auschwitz Nazi concentration camp!”

“This app features amazing animations and sounds simulating the events occurred. January 27 1945 at sunrise, behind the successful breaking of the German defenses on Vistula and with the reliability gained to retake Warsaw; Soviet troops are preparing for one the most significant inroads on the German rule: The liberation of Auschwitz; a blow for German troops, and the saving of thousands.”

“Auschwitz was a concentration and extermination camps built and operated in occupied Poland by Nazi Germany during the Second World War. It was the largest of the German concentration camps; consisting of Auschwitz I (main camp); Auschwitz II-Birkenau (extermination camp); Auschwitz III-Monowitz, also known as Buna, a labor camp; and 45 satellite camps. The atrocities commited by the Nazis in this camp were unspeakable and inhumane. The Russian liberation of the camp is one of the greatest moments in world history. Now it’s your turn to fight the evil army and liberate thousands!”

If nothing else, you’ve got to admit the iPod market is pushing the boundaries.

You probably won’t be very surprised to learn that Auschwitz Liberation – Defeat Of The Nazi Empire is a terrible game. To the stirring sounds of another spectacularly inappropriate choice – “The Ride Of The Valkyries” – the first level sees some crude German-soldier sprites glide towards your jerky, tilt-controlled gunsight (there’s no calibration option, so you have to play with the iPod dead level), and vanish out of existence when you shoot them, with a very un-Germanic “Oof” or “Ow!”

(Literally just those. Their vocabulary is two words.)

Scoring 40 hits takes you to Level 2, which sees you outside the Birkenau (“Auschwitz II”) camp where you’re given a few seconds with an even wonkier cursor to lay mines across the infamous railway line in wait for some armoured cars. If you don’t destroy about 10 of them with your 14 mines as they cross the screen (which is tough, as one car can set off half a dozen mines), a last one turns and shoots you.

Level 3 tastefully adds a Christmassy feel with some blobs of snow and troops in Arctic uniform outside the entrance to Birkenau, and makes the cursor all but incontrollable if more than two or three soldiers are onscreen at once. Luckily (using the term very loosely) you can bring the level to an immediate end if a German aeroplane flies across the screen and you quickly down it with your rocket launcher (that traditional weapon of the sniper).

Level 4, set on the Birkenau “ramp” where hundreds of thousands of human beings were selected for immediate murder in the gas chambers, does some odd things with perspective that make the German soldiers look six inches tall, then Level 5 brings you back to the Auschwitz I barracks to kill the game’s “boss”, an unspecified high-ranking officer who runs Scooby Doo-style back and forth across the camp’s pathways.

I took him out with my very last bullet (the only actual “game” aspect of AL-DOTNE appears to be the need to beat all five levels with only the ammo you start out with at the beginning of the first level), at which point you get a deeply moving end sequence – and when I say “deeply moving” I’m lying on a fairly epic scale – and that’s it.

(There are no high scores or anything – the only option you’re offered at this point is “Restart Game”, but your ammo doesn’t get restocked, so if for some unfathomable reason you want to play again you’ll have to quit out to the Home screen and reload the game.)

Th game is riddled with major bugs on top of everything else, and between that and the subject matter it’s faintly extraordinary that this has been allowed onto the App Store. (Lucky it didn’t feature any girls in bikinis, eh?) I can’t imagine it’ll last long before being pulled, but don’t be tempted to give them the 59p even for the novelty value. I did it so you don’t have to.