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In short, Infinity Blade follows a family of nameless warriors as they embark for reasons unknown on a mission to slay an evil king. You start by taking control of a single character who confronts the king and then dies at his hands, creating a seemingly infinite loop of vengeance that will see his son, grandson, great-grandson, and future successors repeat the same fatal mistake. Or will they? Each fallen fighter leaves all of his possessions to the next warrior, enabling you to grow in power, weaponry, and defense as the game continues. At some point, one of the sons will have the right combination of sword, shield, armor, ring, magic, health bar, and experience points—plus your skills—to defeat the king and end the loop. This brilliant little concept makes it possible for you to adventure your way through similar backdrops again and again, with each loop requiring a half-hour or so of playtime, possibly less if you explore less and fight faster.
Chair has structured the game ideally to facilitate adventuring and fighting for whatever time you have. The king is protected by a series of boss-caliber opponents rather than an army of one-hit losers, with each fight taking two or so minutes. Between fights, you needn’t concern yourself with granular movement within the fully 3-D world; instead, you tap on glowing points to move from scene to scene, controlling only your head as you reach each new point. This, combined with deliberately skewed and obscuring camera angles, turns each area into a hiding spot for potions, bags of gold, and inventory items such as helmets, swords, armor, and rings, which can be tapped on when you see them. Some merely boost strength or defense, while others add various magical and related abilities. A poison sword will leech life; a ring will let you stun an opponent with electricity; a suit of armor will also multiply your experience points when worn.
Fights are much better than we had expected. Epic and Chair haven’t tried to replicate the joystick and button arrays of Street Fighter IV or other incredibly successful console games; instead, it gives you dodge buttons on the sides of the screen, magic and special attack buttons in the two top corners, a block button at bottom center, and plenty of space elsewhere to swipe your weapon to your heart’s content. Occasionally, a glowing point will appear on your opponent for a stabbing attack, but most of the action focuses on dodging, slashing, or parrying attacks by following the direction they come from. It feels entirely unlike great console fighters, but it works really well on these devices.
Again, the camera angles and dramatic interruptions at key stages of both sides’ lifebars aid the experience: fights are third-person behind your character but very close in, making great use of the screen, and your goal is to stagger or dodge your enemy’s attack to open him up for a flurry of slashes. A big stagger leads to a brief cinematic, and the final one offers you the chance to rack up extra experience points by swiping as many times as possible in a “finishing” sequence. Sometimes, your foe goes off a bridge or staircase at the end of a fight, and most often, your warrior get pierced by the king’s magical sword before the game awakens to a Groundhog Day-like view of the castle in the distance. In any case, there’s no dead time in these fights; they’re all action, and evolve to become smarter as you keep playing.
Thanks to its comparative simplicity, the experience-building system is more addictive here than in games that radically overcomplicate the statistical exercise of leveling up. You have a handful of categories to bolster with points earned through battle, and you gain separate experience points for each inventory item you use, with the option to use gold currency to either purchase new items or more experience if you don’t want to adventure for them. We’re thrilled that Epic didn’t insert an in-app ATM system to turn these acquisitions into paid purchases, but we’d also like to see a little more ability to actually customize your family of fighters beyond just swapping their gear, and the per-item experience levels are arguably surplusage: even after boosting experience, you’re still knocking off modest numbers of hit points per slice or stab of your enemies, so keeping the focus on acquiring decidedly better weapons is important.
Epic’s 3-D graphics engine, based on Unreal Engine 3, is frankly 75% of the reason that Infinity Blade has received all of its buzz. The demonstration version called Epic Citadel provided a character-free tour through the game’s countryside and buildings, but offered only a minimal taste of what the action would be like, and no clue as to how the engine would hold up when both backgrounds and fighters were present. There’s mostly good news on this point: as discussed in our look at Epic Citadel, Infinity Blade’s environments are outstanding. Sometimes stunningly faceted with polygons. Incredibly textured on even the high-resolution iPad, iPhone 4, and iPod touch 4G, all of which are natively supported for the $6 asking price. The characters are, too. They don’t look real, but they look better than any combination of characters and backgrounds on any iOS game released thus far; the warriors are in most cases textured with distressed materials that look old, worn, and gothically beautiful—just like the castle and its surroundings. GPU-punishing details that could have been omitted, like circular-edged buildings and metalworks, spiraling staircases, and lifelike grass, all are present as if they were effortless to include within the Unreal Engine; special effects receive comparatively short shrift. That aside, only triple-A titles from triple-A developers have a prayer of approaching what has been accomplished here visually.
The compromise is in frame rate. On the iPad, iPhone 4, and iPod touch, the frame rate is consistently under 25 frames per second, and probably more in the sub-20 range if we had to guess. Infinity Blade is fluid enough to feel great, particularly with its ambient audio track and menacing sound effects, which include voice samples every time you return to do battle with the king. Turn off the audio, though, and it’s obvious that the game stutters a little here and there because the developers wanted to pack the game with so much detail. The trade-off’s acceptable this time, but a sequel is going to need to smooth its motion in order to evolve to the next level.
Will Infinity Blade evolve? The developers say yes. A section of the game’s menu system promises new items, enemies, and dungeons are going to be added “soon,” along with a Game Center-aided multiplayer mode. The latter feature will be extremely interesting to see implemented—will it be cooperative, competitive, or both?—but the first three could be great or nauseating. As impressive as this title is right now, we’re concerned that the developers may try to turn it into a cash machine with in-app purchases, such that the “red sword” will cost you 99 cents, and accessing the new dungeons might be a few dollars. The game doesn’t say whether the additions will be purchasable. Finding the right balance between free and paid upgrades is going to be tricky.
If anyone can pull that off, Epic and Chair seem like leading candidates. Releasing this game at a wholly reasonable $6 price point with full iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch compatibility was precisely the right move, rather than fragmenting purchasers into different platform-specific apps with different prices, and though the experience will differ somewhat from device to device because of hardware capabilities, Infinity Blade delivers a fully realized fighting adventure game in any case. It’s astonishing to consider how much better of an experience you get for the price here than with either the $5 Click Wheel iPod Games released years ago, or the split-version, higher-priced apps some developers are trying to sell today. Based on the quality of the game, the impressiveness of its technology, and the developers’ pricing thus far, Infinity Blade deserves to be the most successful game yet released for iOS devices. It receives our exceedingly rare flat A high recommendation, and is worthy of attention on literally any iOS device capable of playing it.
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