Awesome Medieval Combat on the Go
I downloaded this new awesome iPhone game called Infinity Blade. I not sure if you were familiar with the free game demo on the App Store called Epic Citadel by Epic Games Inc, but it was a free roaming world displaying the graphics capability of the new Unreal engine on iOS devices, and boy oh boy were those graphics sweet. Infinity Blade is the final game product released by Chair Entertainment Group, although it’s slightly different in the fact that you can’t do any real free roaming around it’s virtual world anymore, it’s a action RPG with the focus on knights, and gesture controlled sword, and shield combat.
Basically you can stun, dodge, block, and activate spell mode using virtual interface buttons, and swing your sword and parry attacks using you finger to swipe in any direction. Magical attacks are activated by activating spell mode, and then drawing the correct corresponding spell on screen to activate it during combat. You need to be quick though, because it’s during combat, so you either need to have your enemy stunned, or time it just right. That’s if you don’t plan on being pummeled while casting, otherwise by all means cast away willy nilly. Sometimes your sword can get locked with your enemy’s sword, and you’ll have to tap your way to overpowering them.
Although the game sounds simple, the gameplay is awesome, and as you level up, the enemies level in relation to you. During my review, I thought I had mastered repelling attacks until I was surprised by a giant troll throwing a head butt, and punching me in the face. When those get added into the arsenal of attacks, the game really started to shine.
The RPG element comes in through leveling, and gear. As you level you can add to your character stats, master equipped items, and equipping new items are essential to your character progression. Your gear will allow you to attain new abilities, or additional stat improvements. Things like extra experience gains, extra gold drop, elemental damage of different variations, and extra stat leveling points.
When you master your specific equipment items through battle experience, you can gain additional points to add to your character stats. So you’re not only leveling your character, but mastering your equipment, and getting bonus stat points for doing so. Plus different magical abilities are gained through certain equipped rings give you the ability to cast spells by the drawing of symbols. So although one item may be better than the other, you may want to take the time to master it, although you can also master items by paying. You do need to own the item though to do so.
The different items available for equipping by your character are listed as such; weapon, shield, helmet, ring, and armour. It looks like they keep it pretty simple keeping the game from getting to overly complicated for a mobile game, but it seems like a good balance between RPG elements, and action. The game allows you to buy items during gameplay, but don’t get too hasty with your gold because you can find great equipment along the way throughout the game.
As you travel through the game via rails, you sometimes stop to make decisions on which way you want to go, although you need to keep your eyes peeled for gold, or health potions laying around on the ground, and make sure you grab them as you walk by, because they’ll be needed. When you stop to make a choice, you can look around to see if there’s anything laying around nearby, but don’t forget to grab items during cutscenes of your travel. You can pick up a few different items like bags of gold, health potions, and chests with hidden loot.
What’s interesting is that the game allows you to play out your character to his death, and continue playing through a bloodline decedent that has all your saved stats. So don’t worry too much about dying, your son will hopefully avenge your death, or so on and so on. Plus if any cutscenes seem redundant, and you have somehow managed to get bored of watching those awesome graphics, you can fast forward through cutscenes, but you may miss items laying around you could grab by skipping certain scenes.
I noticed that the anticipated online multiplayer feature allowing you to play against your friends in glorious medieval combat through Gamecenter hasn’t been implemented yet, although you can compare your number of victories, and achievements.
Now obviously every game has a few bugs when it first comes out, but hopefully those will get fixed quickly with updates soon enough. I experienced a few game crashes, but was relieved when I noticed that I didn’t lose any saved character data, just the fight I was currently in. And I did experience one weird situation where I should have been dead due to a damage over time effect, or poison an enemy put on me with his blade, but when my life ran out, he simply bowed and stopped fighting. I couldn’t hit him back since he kept blocking without taking damage, but I was able to restart the fight through the pause menu. I had to restart it twice though because I forgot to use a health potion before restarting it, and ended up in the same situation twice.
All in all, I would say that this game is well worth the money, and it’s a must have game for any serious gamer, or iOS device owner. And since the game was designed to be iOS universal for iPad, iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, and so on, you won’t have to buy a special version for your different devices. Just buy the one copy, and your set to play.
So what are you waiting for, go out and get it now, medieval combat awaits.
