I’m just going to go ahead and say it:
Infinity Blade is the best gaming experience I’ve had on the iPhone.
Seriously. You can take your Angry Birds, Fruit Ninja, and all of your lame tower defense game clones and shove them in your favorite orifice because this game makes those look like amateur hour. From the time I downloaded Infinity Blade on my phone last Thursday, all I’ve wanted to do is play it nonstop.
To put this in perspective, you’re talking a guy who has all of the video game consoles, a gaming-ready PC, a Kindle, a Blu-Ray player, Netflix, a backlogged DVR of TV shows, and a sports fan. Needless to say, I’ve got a lot of entertainment that I could/should have been plowing through instead.
Nope, I had to max out my Infinity Blade character first.
The first thing you’ll notice upon booting up Infinity Blade is that it uses the same Unreal graphics engine that AAA game titles like Gears of War utilize. Except for the tiny detail that it’s on your fucking phone. Its jaw-dropping graphics will make you reevaluate your standard for visuals in a mobile game. In fact, if the game were just a non-interactive tech demo (ala Epic Citadel), I’m sure it would sell a lot of copies just based on the visuals alone.
Fortunately, the game isn’t just a fancy tech demo. It’s actually brilliantly tailored for the iOS platform. Rare is the game on the iPhone that isn’t either a) a futile attempt at porting an existing console game to the mobile touch screen, b) a simplistic casual game that would otherwise be a decent browser-based Flash game, or c) a tower defense clone. Infinity Blade is none of those things. It’s one of the first original titles on the iPhone that truly stands up in quality to a PSP, DS, or even a console game. I also couldn’t see it done as well on any other platform, save the DS or Kinect.
Infinity Blade‘s gameplay combines the visceral action of Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! if Little Mac used swords and magic with the addictive character advancement mechanics of a loot-based RPG game like Diablo. (Or for you game historians out there – a little Die By The Sword mixed in as well.) There’s a bevy of items to collect and buy within the game. Whenever you defeat an enemy you will gain experience, but only until a certain point. See, each item you equip has a certain amount of experience that you can draw from. Once you “Master” an item, you’ll have to equip another one or else you won’t gain any more experience for your character. It’s a devious mechanic that gets you constantly swapping out different items.
Swiping on the screen will swing your weapon in that direction. The game isn’t all about swipe spamming like Fruit Ninja, though. Most of the time you won’t be able to hurt your opponent as they will block most of your moves. You’ll have to either block, dodge, or parry a few of the enemy’s attacks in a row before an opening comes up that you can take advantage of.
Blocking is the easiest defense to initiate as all you have to do is hold down the shield icon on the bottom of the screen. You will only have a limited amount of blocks before your shield breaks, though. At higher levels of gameplay, dodging becomes the avoidance method of choice. In order to dodge, you will have to tap either the left or right side of the screen, depending on where the opponent is swinging from. If you really want to get fancy, you can parry attacks by swinging your weapon in the opposite direction that the enemy does. I can tell you that it’s supremely satisfying to parry a series of attacks. It sort of feels like a lite-version of pulling this off.
The last component of combat consists of two abilities that are on a cooldown period. The first is a “special” attack that basically interrupts whatever your opponent is doing, stuns them, and gives you the opportunity to wail on him for a few seconds. It’s awesome. The other is a magic system that depends on what kind of equipment you’re wearing. You tap on the “magic” icon when it’s ready and draw on the screen the spell you want to cast. They’re your typical adventure spell fare: fire, ice, lightning, heal, etc. Luckily, all of the spell symbols are simple and don’t require lifting your finger from the screen.
The game is essentially a series of 1 on 1 battles that never take more than a couple of minutes to complete. It’s perfect, because if you’re gaming on the go, you want something that isn’t going to be a massive time investment. On the other hand, you wouldn’t mind having a bit more at stake in the game than just a high score in a self contained level. Infinity Blade has a limited amount of game environment that you can explore, but it cleverly incorporates a multi-generational bloodline component that keeps continuity going with some changes in enemies and treasure. Without spoiling too much, in other words, your sons and grandsons will be exploring the same castle that you did.
There’s a couple of things that annoyed me regarding the controls. Sometimes I’d feel that my commands weren’t registering properly on the touch screen. It could either be the game or user error on the part of my finger. But there’s definitely moments where I knew exactly what I wanted to do, but could not execute it on the game. Another annoyance I had was actually with the extremely detailed graphics. A few of the enemies have such gigantic models and animations that it can be hard to tell what exactly is going on screen. Neither of these are dealbreaking shortcomings, but they do exist.
Infinity Blade retails for $5.99 on the App Store and is a combination iPhone/iPad app. If you have an iPhone 4, you’ll probably want to play the game on it over the iPad because the graphic textures will look a bit more high resolution on the Retina Display. Unfortunately, the game requires at least an iPhone 3GS or an iPod Touch 3rd generation to run properly. Even if it did, you’d probably gouge your eyes out at how choppy the game would run on the older hardware.
I can’t recommend this game enough if you’ve got an iOS device. Chair Entertainment and Epic are planning regular free updates with more items, enemies, and areas to explore. The first one is slated to be pushed out next week, while the others will roll out in the coming months. They even have a tantalizing Multiplayer mode addition in the works. Awesome original game and great developer support – what more can these guys do right?
