Incredibly production value, a few frustrating bugs.
Out of the vast selection of free games on the iPhone, they generally tend to lean towards the "fake beer drinking" and "connect the dots" side of the fence in terms of quality and content. If you are expecting that same quality from Aurora Feint as you go into this free game, your mind will be blown.
Hell, it may be blown anyways.
Aurora Feint is the very early version (1.0.0.1 at the time of this review) of a self-proclaimed "iPhone MMO" title. At the moment, there is no multiplayer aspect other than being able to see your friend's current levels and items if they choose to release that information. That said, the single player on this game is incredible.
There are 4 main areas of Aurora Feint: the Mine, the Store, the Tower, and the Smith. The mine is where the actual puzzle game play takes place. In it, you earn crystals that you can then spend at the Store. You also level your character up here by filling up an xp bar of sorts. This unlocks new items to be bought in the Store. When you buy an item in the store (a magic scroll, a tool, etc), you will need to complete a challenge either in the Smith or the Tower to see that item used in gameplay. The challenges in the Tower are very unique to those in the Smith.
The normal game play of AF is pretty standard. Blocks are slowly rising to the cealing, and it's up to you to create rows of three by sliding blocks left to right. There are two things that make this actually enjoyable. First, when you tilt the phone, the blocks (and gravity) pull to side of the screen, and you can move blocks side to side here (which is the same as moving them up and down if the iPhone was straight up... make sense?). This adds more to strategy, and also makes the game a bit easier. Second relates to the introduction of tools in the latest version of the game. These are various power-up blocks that do tasks like blast a large area of blocks away, or setting temporarily multipliers on certain blocks.
The only down side of this game seems to be the various crashing/freezing issues that can occur. After the recent update, I constantly run into these issues, as do many other people who sound off at www.aurorfeint.com. Luckily the developers (just 2 people!) are extremely active in the community, and have already started gather error logs to fix them. They also plan to start seeding new releases to a beta group to keep issues from this happening in the future.
To put it lightly, this game is probably the best free game in the iTunes app store. In fact, there are many players (myself included) that would gladly pay money for a game of this quality. At this point in time, if you own an iPhone or iPod touch, there's absolutely no reason you shouldn't have this game. Cost or no cost!