Santa Wings: Rudolph’s Christmas Flight

Gotta hand it to Bottle Rocket… they know how to build a quality iPhone app. Santa Wings: Rudolph’s Christmas Flight puts you in the driver’s seat of Santa’s sleigh on a midnight joyride through a snowy moonlit mountain range.

The 3D rendering of the landscape is great, but it’s the little things that make this a pretty kickass holiday iPhone experience. While you’re flying around with your team of reindeer you can listen to four different Christmas tunes, fly with reindeer or without, and switch between “flying” (more responsive movement) and “floating” (less responsive).

The slider on the right of the screen adjusts flying speed, and the little Christmas tree air freshener at the top of the screen tells you how much you’re tilting since it’s easy to get disoriented if you’re hotdogging it on the accelerometer controls. If the air freshener is completely gone from view that means you’re flying upside down! Crashing into the mountains will splatter snowflakes around your field of vision and it also pisses off Santa who registers his displeasure with some unintelligible grunts if it happens too often.

Bottle Rocket even took the time to build an angle adjustment into the iPhone’s settings menu so that you can fly your sleigh from any posture, and if you feel like rockin’ the iPod during flight there’s a toggle switch for shutting off Santa Wings’ built-in music.

There’s no “end game” in Santa Wings… it’s built to fly, not land. With that said, grownups may be briefly mesmerized by this Christmas flight simulator but not for very long. Children, on the other hand, would likely get a lot more out of this app and I kind of get the feeling it was built with them in mind anyway.

Is Santa Wings: Rudolph’s Christmas Flight worth a dollar? Well, that depends. Would you pay a buck to get your kids to leave you alone for 10 minutes? Hell yeah you would! You really can’t put a pricetag on peace and quiet and goodwill towards Mommy and Daddy.

Bottle Rocket also makes a non-themed version of this app, Wings 2: Flight Simulator Experience.

Edit: Tap on Rudolph for a little surprise. Plus, there’s a secret North Pole to be found! I didn’t know this until reading some App Store reviews, but I found it. Can you?