Chopper 2 about to lift off for iPhone and iPad

There aren't too many one-man iPhone development teams left standing.

When the App Store launched in July 2008, plenty of individuals tested their coding, art and music making mettle, but over time, only the committed remain.

That's a good description of Kiwi David Frampton, who under the moniker of Majic Jungle Software released the successful Chopper sidescrolling shooter back in April 2009, selling over 350,000 copies in the process.

Ever since then however, he's been slaving over Chopper 2, which is due out at the end of July for iPhone and iPad in the form of a universal app.

As you'd expect in terms of a sequel, it's a step up in terms of scale and features. This time, the environments, chopper and targets are all 3D objects, although the gameplay remains fixed on a 2D plane.

As before, you tilt your iDevice to move, hover and varying the attitude of your gunship, with machine gun fire and bombs controlled via individual buttons.

In terms of levels, there are four themes - desert, snow, city, hills - each of which contains three locations and each of which is broken down into three missions.

Most of these employ the traditional 'shoot everything up and pick up some friendlies along the way' gameplay.

Others will require you to make it through without attacking any targets though, or escort tanks and other vehicles to the end of the level.

As with the first game, your score on each level will be linked to how long it takes you to complete. The closer you fly to the ground, the faster you go.

OpenFeint is being used to run the leaderboards for each mission - that's 36 in total - as well as achievements and the like.

And demonstrating David's attention to detail, you'll also be able to play Chopper 2 using your iPad as a display and your iPhone or iPod touch as the controller, via Bluetooth.

You can see how that works in the following video.

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