Infinity Blade [iOS]

Could it be that all of those last  few lame posts were really a build up to this review? Perhaps, perhaps. Infinity Blade, the tech demo of the Unreal Engine for iOS, is one of the most talked about games on any hand held device but does it live up to the hype?

In my mind there is no disguising the fact that Infinity Blade is basically a tech demo that was made into a game. It features incredibly detailed landscapes, yet you repetitively battle across these landscapes. The monsters and people you battle against gain upgrades to their weapons and armour as you go along, yet they use the same models underneath. It features lots of cutscenes that show off how beautiful the engine really is, yet amazingly inside this tech demo lies a great game.

You begin the game as the first warrior to attempt to fight the God King. As you die, or win the game your son will come to avenge you and start a new bloodline. Each new bloodline maintains your stats and items and you keep progressing from there. Each time you defeat the God King he becomes more and more powerful. He is quite a challenging opponent and it is satisfying to beat him each time. As well as being able to defeat the God King the thing that keeps you going in this game is getting new equipment.

The way levelling up is handled is through equipment. Each item that you hold has a certain level of experience before it is mastered. The experience that you gain for each item is also the experience you gain as a character. Every time you level up, or you master an item you gain skill points to add to your character. Once an item is levelled up you need to get a new one to continue gaining experience from it. It sounds complicated but once you start playing you quickly get a hold of what is going on. Some of the weapons and armour you can get look great and this can drive you to fight through just a few more battles to upgrade to the next piece of equipment. Although as you can see in this image some of the items aren't as appealing.

You control the action on screen by swiping at along the touch screen to attack and parry or hitting the dodge buttons or holding the block button. You also have access to a special attack which stuns the opponents for a while and magic. Magic is done by hitting the magic button, then drawing out the magic spell you want to use. It works fine most of the time and is quite fun but I had a few problems with the systems interpretations of my spells. Constantly it would cast a healing spell which is a square "u" shape when I drew a near perfect circle, which is the fire spell. For the most part the attacking, parrying, dodging and blocking work quite well and it is an inventive system. There are a few problems but I'll chalk that down to the imperfect nature of the current generation of touch screens.

Infinity Blade has a few issues that I encountered. I had some problems with the game slowing down other applications and causing them to behave strangely, probably because the game is still running in the background sapping all the power and memory. It also suffers from a sound bug across all platforms. It causes the game to have music but no sound effects. It only took a reboot of the phone for the sound to come back but some people may have to reinstall the game to get it working again. It is a real shame that it has this problem as the music and sound effects create the haunting atmosphere that makes the game seem so brutal, yet enchanting.

It is the atmosphere that really sucks you into this game and I recommend playing with headphones on to enhance it. Once you are engrossed by it, the silly things, like the fact that there are bags of money lying all over this castle, seem to make sense in the grand scheme of things. Of course if you can't find enough money there is always the option of buying more in the store. There are plenty of chests scattered throughout the game and many of the items you can equip give bonuses to finding gold, potions and items. I did find myself running a little low on cash as my items got higher level but there is no need to buy gold from the store to progress. On that note the game is currently retailing at $7.99 AUD.

It has great little features like the speed up cutscenes button (although not for the God King) and the fact that whatever item you last selected in your inventory comes up as the item you are on in the store. This is great for quickly replacing those levelled up items.

Infinity Blade is really an action game on rails with a few rpg elements put in there to keep you coming back for more. It requires focus to play it really well and if action games are your thing then this is a must have. Levelling up your character and trading up to new gear will keep you sucked in till you have collected it all and there is always the challenge of beating the God King as he grows more powerful. Hopefully we will see some patches to not only fix the in game bugs but also the way the game interacts with your iOS device. Until then I am giving it a very solid 8.5/10.