Infinity Blade: A Pocket Hack ‘n’ Slash RPG.

I’m pretty indiscriminate when it comes to my gaming platforms. I’ve got every current generation console in my house including one of each of the hand helds. So when I want to play a game that’s got a cross platform release I’ll usually take a look at how each of them are reviewing and choose the highest rated platform. Dragon Age: Origins was a great example of this as the reviews of the console versions were a lot worse than its PC counter part and I can only imagine how the problems I encountered on the PC would be magnified by running it on a console. Still there’s one platform that I’ve always considered second rate when compare to any of the other consoles I have; my iPhone. I’ve still got quite a collection of games on there but apart from Plants vs Zombies none of them could be classed above a simple time waster. That is until I bought Infinity Blade.

Infinity Blade has garnered quite a lot of press since its initial release 3 months ago as it’s the first game ever on iOS to make use of the Unreal 3 engine. The teaser screenshots released by EPIC and Chair showed that the Unreal engine had the potential to deliver much better graphics to the iOS platform, bringing the iPhone’s capabilities up to the level of dedicated gaming systems. Since all the 3D games I had tried thus far on my iPhone had been rather poor I was keen to see how Infinity Blade faired, and I wasn’t disappointed.

You play as the son of an unnamed warrior who has been killed by one of the Deathless, an immortal race of beings that appear to hold control over parts of the mortal world. Your mission is to fight your way through the various enemies that guard the Deathless’ castle so you can avenge your father. Of course you’ll probably not succeed the first time through and you will fall to the Deathless again, leaving your son to avenge you and starting the cycle anew. Over the course of the game you’ll find gold, items and health potions that will help your character along the way and these will be passed down the bloodline to successive characters.

The game doesn’t fail to impress from the get go with the gorgeous graphics filling the screen. The voice acting of the characters is done in much the same way as the Sims, being some incomprehensible gibberish that allows them to just put sub-titles on everything to make regionalization easy, but that doesn’t stop them from being adequately emotive. In-between bouts of combat you’re allowed to look around for items, chests and bags of gold that have been left lying around. You’re not able to walk freely around in Infinity Blade with travel being done by clicking on a pulsing circle to progress to the next area.

Combat in Infinity Blade is probably the most satisfying aspect of the game. Upon encountering an enemy you’re left standing in front of them until you hit the pulsing blue circle to engage with them. Upon doing so you’ll be greeted with a short cut-scene where the enemy shows off how tough they are. You’re then playing a game of dodging, parrying or blocking their incoming swings whilst attempting to hit back with swings of your own. As combat progresses you’ll move around the area you’re in, ensuring that no fight is completely static. You’re also equipped with 2 special abilities, a “super move” which will stun your enemy temporarily and a magic move which can be one of a number of spells which are granted to you through rings.

Like any good RPG the game also has a basic stat system along with a good variety of loot to augment your character with. Initially I thought it was going to be your typical dungeon crawler with all loot gathered from mobs and chests however there’s an in-game store where you can buy new weapons and armor using gold. You’ll want to do this often because as you defeat enemies you gain experience points which are attributed to your weapons and eventually you’ll master them after which they won’t grant you any more experience points. Still I found myself sticking with a few core items well after I had mastered them simply because they made the game so easy, but its quite obvious that the game would prefer you gradually upgrade rather than jump the gun like I did.

After a while however the limited variety in game play does tend to drag a bit, especially when the only challenging enemy is the Deathless and the next upgrade costs half a million gold to buy. You can get around this drag by buying a sack of gold in the store for real money, but that will only stave off the boredom until the shininess wears off your new gear. That’s not to say the game isn’t worth playing at all however as I was truly captivated for the first 5 bloodlines as I attempted to slay the Deathless that had killed my great-great-great grandfather. After that however it’s just an elaborate game of digital Barbie, looking for new items to dress up my character with.

Infinity Blade is pretty good with its execution too with the only problems I encountered being things they could not fix. Initially I couldn’t get the game past the first few loading screens but after rebooting my iPhone it went along without a hitch. Additionally I found the game’s recognition of touches and gestures to be a bit wonky at times, however this is probably more due to my notorious sweaty hands than any fault of the game developers. The iPhone can get extremely warm after a 10 minute bout in Infinity Blade so I’m sure I’m not the only one experiencing this, but there’s little any developer could do to alleviate it.

Overall I was very satisfied with Infinity Blade and the experience it created. Whilst it’s still a far cry from the games I’ve been enamored with on other mobile platforms Infinity Blade demonstrates that smart phones and tablets are quite capable of being used as a portable gaming console, something which I didn’t quite believe it was capable of. Whilst I don’t believe we’ll see any titles that can hold a candle to the releases on a fully fledged console or PC there’s still a ton of potential to be unlocked in this space and Infinity Blade has shown it can be quite profitable even for more traditional game development studios.

Rating: 8.0/10

Infinity Blade is available on most iOS devices right now at the special price of $2.99 for the Deathless Kings upade. Game was played on an iPhone 3GS with approximately 7 hours played.