September 13, 2011

OPEN AND CLEAR!

Another iOS game I’ve been playing, one that is pretty fantastic, is Rainbow Six: Shadow Vanguard. It’s a Gameloft joint. I never know what to think about Gameloft. Their games are normally solid, but they’re also normally complete fucking ripoffs of console IP. Still, this one is licensed and it is really great.

I’ve been thinking of the game as SWAT 4 Lite. This game has most of the fun parts of SWAT 4 (looking under doors, planning attacks, clearing rooms, ordering your squad) without all the tedious parts (being incredibly difficult, following police procedure) which were cool to include in SWAT 4, but make it a game I will never play for fun. Basically, you get thrown into various scenarios around the world and your squad of three people (I guess the other three people of the Rainbow Six are backups in case you die? I dunno.) has to infiltrate buildings, rescue hostages, diffuse bombs, and so on.

The graphics in this game look fantastic for iOS. They’re basically of an early PS2 sort of quality. They’re not as pretty as, say, Infinity Blade, but this game is doing a whole lot more than Infinity Blade, what with tracking two companion AIs around with you and all the enemies, so I think it’s really good visually.
The game also has really slick presentation. When you peek under doors, the enemies are having funny or relevant conversations, which is a nice little touch. Your mission briefings and guy in the ear guy does a great job of being a tired veteran of this sort of thing. All of the icons on the screen make basically perfect sense without having to decipher them. (I knew, for instance, what the “Flashbang and Clear” icon meant before the tutorial told me.)

The controls, however, are shit. I’m sorry, but emulating dual analog shooters on the touchscreen just DOES NOT WORK, no matter how much you want it to. You just cannot do any sort of twitch shooting and moving in this game. Luckily, the game knows this, and this isn’t a twitch shooting kind of game. It’s very methodical, with a majority of the kills coming from ordering your teammates, if you’re playing right. They also layer on a fuck-ton of auto-aim, which helps a lot. When I first started the game, I thought the controls would be a dealbreaker, but as I learned that normal FPSing wasn’t the focus of the game, I really changed my tune. They did a good job of making up for the flaws in playing a shooter on an iPad.
The only other control thing that seems a little wonky is the cover mechanics. You can only get into cover at certain points, but the game is sometimes kind of picky about what distance from them you have to be to get into cover. It’s normally not a life-or-death thing: you’re normally getting into cover by a door before you tell your team to breach, for instance. Still, it’s a bit frustrating, and I kind of wish they would have made that as sticky and forgiving as the auto-aim for shooting is, as then you could take a little more active role in taking out bad guys without getting yourself killed, if you were the sort to want to do that.

The game has an EXP system that unlocks weapons a la Modern Warfare, because that’s a thing all games must have now. It’s inoffensive, but also mostly useless. I don’t know. I haven’t switched from the assault rifle I started with, because of course I want an assault rifle. It’s flexible. If I took a shotgun, I wouldn’t be as good as sniping from cover. These unlocks carry over into the deathmatch multiplayer, which I’m sure is pretty bad and I haven’t even pretended to be interested in. The game, however, does have co-op through the story, which is crazy and seems like a feature nobody would use, but I guess for the like 2 people who both own this game and have iPads in the same room or whatever, that would be pretty damn sweet.

I’ve played 5 or 6 of the missions so far, and I really had a lot of fun. I bought it on sale for a buck, and I don’t know if I’d quite bite at the $8.99 I think it normally sells for. But this is Gameloft: next time they have a sale, probably around Thanksgiving, it’ll be a buck again. When it is, you should really consider picking it up. It’s just a really polished, really fun game. I was surprised I enjoyed it as much as I did, and I’m glad I picked it up on a whim.

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