iPhone Games Exposed (eBook)

Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars

Dial a Chinese Takeaway?

For just £5.99, you too can enjoy the blistering action of a GTA game on your iPhone or iPod touch. To be honest though, if you own one, spend the extra money on the PSP or DS version to skip the aggravating learning curve of the controls. Still reading? In that case, once you've mastered them (without lobbing your iDevice at the wall) you get the same great game.

Grand Theft Auto, for the uninitiated, is the biggest gaming franchise since Tomb Raider and makes an auspicious début on the hottest gaming machine around, adding a touch of legitimacy to the iPhone as a games system, something more than just the endless tile games and arcade knock-offs.

The Chinatown Wars chapter is one of the many off-shoots from the full-on console experiences, but still offers a fully working Liberty City to explore and a wide range of interesting characters to meet, beat and, often, kill. On foot, or in a vehicle, your aim is to raise your profile from a lowlife to the highlife and complete missions from the many bigwigs that dominate the landscape.

All of your escapades are prefaced with neat comic-style cut scenes that flesh out the story, bringing the gritty reality of the GTA experience to your phone, expect harsh words and some pretty vicious action (the game confirms you're over 17, before you download). Our hero is Huang, a playboy who is flying over from the old country to deliver the family sword to the new boss man. Predictably, he gets robbed, shot and almost drowned within the first few seconds.

So, already a lowly courier, Huang has already been kicked down the ladder a few rungs before you even take control. Walking him about the streets is easy enough, with kick, punch and roll options on the soft buttons. Take a stroll around the back streets or parks and you can find the usual GTA goodies of baseball bats, guns, armour, health and hot dog stands to recover.

Take a bike, car, bus, boat or any of the other methods of propulsion on the streets and you can move around a lot faster, just not necessarily in a straight line. The GPS system neatly shows you where to go, but bikes and cars are hugely over responsive, you can change the view in the settings to see more road which helps, but this is still a gimped control system at best. Spend a good while practising controls before starting off the game proper, especially as bumping into police cars will see you quickly in the nick. Our only tip is to tap the buttons as little as possible

As you stroll, take a look at the city, it is lovingly realised with a top down view, reminiscent of the original games, alive with people and as time passes, it lights up at night and umbrellas pop up when it rains. Taking a car gives you radio accompaniment (create your own iTunes playlist called GTA to have your own tunes in the game). Sometimes the slightly muted colour scheme makes it hard to see where to go but otherwise this is Liberty City as you may well know it.

Touch the minimap in the top-right and you can pick a location on the full map to create a GPS route. Important locations are marked and it gives you a good impression of the scale of the whole game There's also your Badger PDA which keeps you provided with email updates, a list of your achievements (and failures) as well as every other stat in the game. Missions are what you need to complete to gain notoriety, promotion and money.

There are some 50 main missions to undertake, and retake when you get it wrong, plus plenty to do when you're not on the clock. Drug dealing is a good way to bring in the cash, plus there are rampages, street races and other bonuses to enjoy and improve your vehicle skills. On missions there's a lot of conflict, either blunt force or projectile and here too the game isn't perfect. Combat is more about whacking the attack button and hoping your aim and the intended victim coincide, weapons do auto-target but not always brilliantly.

Missions also include plenty of neat touchscreen events, your very first act sees you tapping desperately to shatter the windscreen of a drowning car so you can escape. Later on you need hotwire cars, bypass security systems and throw contraband from a car, all neatly enacted with the touchscreen.

GTA Chinatown Wars is a great deal of fun, packed with atmosphere, it just says a lot about the mechanics that Huang can both run and swim faster than most of the traffic. Still you get a hell of a lot of game for your money and this has to be on any iPhone gamer's playlist.

Positives:

+ Vast world to explore

+ Endless side games to play

+ Cool story, plot and missions

+ Trip Skip saves a lot of journey time

Negatives:

- Too easy to touch the wrong button

- Driving controls are initially a mess

- Targeting could be better

Score: 85%

Reviewer: Geoff Spick

Hero Of Sparta

Argos Delivers

With Gameloft's attempt at dominating the App Store game section with a game from every genre, along comes Hero of Sparta. There's no denying that Hero of Sparta is the film 300 merged with God of War to bring us another loud and angry hero up against the odds and the Gods. Hero of Sparta wears its influences on its sleeve and it really doesn't care. Why should it? It delivers the same frantic hack n' slash action that its role models do and that's fine by me.

You play as Argos, a Spartan warrior who awakes alone on the beaches of Oracle Island. His fleet and army are nowhere to be seen. Argos longs to unravel the mystery and get himself home. What awaits him is a not so epic journey through Atlantis and Hades to battle against countless mythical creatures, including Minotaur's and Centaurs. He deals with the problems the only way he knows how: with his sword, and he's out to make a bloody mess.

Argos battles his way through eight levels of mayhem and carnage. Delivered in third-person with a camera perspective that's seen in God of War, the game mixes fighting, puzzling and platforming, albeit with a main focus on fighting with the other two aspects heavily underused. You control Argos with a virtual analogue stick and two action buttons: Attack and block. The movement and combat are both very fluid and it's only jarred when several enemies are on-screen at once, making it difficult to see where you are and who's hitting you. On these occasions you need to take a step back or unleash a powerful magical blow to bring some order into the chaos.

The enemies emerge very frequently and often in large numbers, meaning you never get a chance to clean your blade before you're slicing and dicing again. More often than not the game will enclose you in these battle arenas and the only exit is to kill every last one of them. This is a challenge particularly if your health and magic are running low, but thankfully downed enemies leave behind a little health and magic for your replenishment pleasure. The problems occur when these enemies just don't seem to stop spawning, resulting in being trapped in battle for a lengthy period when all you want to is progress through the open door.

Of course, this is not an issue if you take pleasure in endless button-bashing sword play and head slicing. Luckily there are a select few different weapons at your disposal, including a bow and arrow, dual blades and a mighty axe. Each weapon comes with its own strength and execution animation. The strength can also be upgraded by collecting red orbs that are awarded by defeating foes.

To add more God of War into the mix, weakened enemies can be finished off with some touch screen quick time sequences, which revolves around pressing the right area of the screen at the right time to successfully pull off an animated finishing move. This is used for the larger enemies and acts mainly as a tool to gain more upgrade points, as well as health and magic. That said, they're a necessity in finishing off the few boss fights that there are and the animations do give that extra bit of 'cool' factor when achieved.

Health and magic bars can also be increased by finding the green and blue crystals throughout the levels. Most of these stand in your path, though others can be slightly more hidden and easily missed. If you do miss them, or you don't manage to upgrade all weapons, then all of this carries over for a New Game + mode, meaning you begin a second play through as strong as you finished the first. The fact that the game will only last you 4-5 hours means you'll no doubt have that desire to play it again, and perhaps on a harder difficulty.

There's no doubt that Hero of Sparta is one of the best action games on the App Store. Sure, it's a little too short, heavily reliant on button bashing and can thank 300 and God of War for its existence, but the excellent animations, fluid combat, and user friendly controls come together to deliver an outstanding action game. One that is certainly worth downloading, if only to give your thumbs some exercise.

Positives:

+ Fluid controls

+ Nice array of weapons

+ New Game + mode

+ Looks great

Negatives:

- Large battles can be confusing

- Lengthy battles can become tiresome

- Too much button bashing

- Needs more puzzles

- Too short

Score: 88%

Reviewer: Martin Murphy

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