TUAW's Daily App: SteamBirds

There are a lot of good strategy games from World War I, and there are some good combat games out there as well. But SteamBirds is an interesting combination of both. It's an air combat game that plays out in a 2D field turn-by-turn, so while you're simulating high-flying air combat, you're actually controlling your planes in a turn-based fashion.

If that sounds hard to figure out, there's an easy solution: just go play the Flash version online, and see for yourself what it's like. It actually works quite well. The UI is great, and it's usually very easy to see what kinds of options you're presented with when coming up with a strategy. Each plane also has some power-up moves that you can use, so if you see that you need to speed up or shield your plane for a turn, you can plan that out ahead of time.

The music is worth a mention by itself -- it's awesome. SteamBirds is a terrific game, and even if you've played through it on Flash, it's worth picking up for 99 cents so that you can play it on your iPhone as well. The HD version for iPad is a little more at US$1.99, but it also boasts smoothed-out animations and more special effects.