It took me a bit to figure out that FASTAR was an acronym for Fight Angry Squares: The Action RPG, but that is the kind of subtle humor you can expect in this great cartoon RPG for the iPhone.  The easy controls and fun graphics made this something that I, typically not a connoisseur of RPGs, found oddly addictive. And don’t let the cartoon nature of this game fool you into thinking that it is shallow on what it delivers.  The game not only comes with a “Learn To Play” mode, but easy, normal, and hard modes as well as practice/training modes against different color/size boxes and modes with different goals of profit, a Battlemage mode where you can select more than one spell but they cost more, a Showdown mode where you face off against 25 enemies, and a “No Excuses” mode where total game play is listed at 12-minutes.
The game play is pretty simple.  You choose a game mode, select which spell you want (of 9 available), and go out and battle boxes of different size and color.  Some are stationary and it is fairly easy to smite them with a sword that is about as large as you are.  Others take a lot of strikes to “kill”.  Some seem timid and have to be chased down.  Others come across as more aggressive and want to smack you about a bit.  As they do, you loose a bit of your life force which you can purchase in town with some of the coins you earn by dispatching the squares.  If you want to check out the graphics and game play a bit more, I recommend viewing the YouTube trailer.
Options include volume settings for both music and sound effects, color options for different aspects of your character, and four different choices for control.  You can tilt your unit (something I found very intuitive), swipe, use a game-pad, or a one-handed method that is convenient if you want to lock things in a portrait perspective.
If I could make two suggestions to the game, it would be these.  I’d love to be able to mute the music in the game and instead select something from my iPod Library to listen to.  That way I could play while listening to my own music or audio books.  I’d also love to see some incorporation of jumping.  There were several times when I was trying to defend myself from a square attacking me and I wished I could just jump over it and attack it from the back side.  I think something like this that could be triggered by a vertical swipe would be cool – even if it came at a price.
All in all, this $0.99 RPG is simple enough and fun enough that even folks that are not fans of that genre should give it a try.  It is nice to run into a casual game of this type that doesn’t require you to be ambidextrous and well-experienced with overly complex controls and menu systems to grasp.  I found the game to be engaging with just the right amount of challenge to make it something I wanted to come back to.