The potential of the mobile phone continues to be unlocked more and more as technology marches forward. Already having made the rather sizeable leap away from its original roots as a chunky, clunky call-making and –taking device that were as much radiation risk as communicative convenience, the mobile phone has emerged much better for it as its progress has turned it into a hot little number that makes and takes calls, text messages, snaps and shares photos, stores and plays albums’ and albums’ worth of music, and now also runs sophisticated mini-programs ranging from the work-minded and serious to the fashionable and fun. The era of the mobile app has enabled mobile content providers to find new ways to maximize the somehow-still-latent potential of the mobile phone, as new smartphone platforms such as the iPhone offer myriad possibilities in terms of additional performance.
Perhaps most entertainingly for many mobile users, mobile apps have been responsible for the return to the fore of some of the greatest games of recent and past years. One of those great games is Doom. The perennial favorite of the first-person-shooter genre is back with a vengeance on the iPhone and iPod Touch at a value pf $9.99, experiencing a renaissance with the aptly-named Doom Resurrection courtesy of id Software. Once again you play a soldier on a Mars space station that has fallen prey to hell-spawned zombies and demons, armed only with a variety of weapons and the assistance of a flying robot named Sam as you try to take out as many demons as you can and survive long enough to teach an Earthbound ship. The mobile port tells the story in character dialog boxes, and manages to make it as engaging as it sounds.
Eschewing the free-roaming shooter gameplay of almost all the home video game console and PC Doom games stretching back to the game’s debut in 1993, Doom Resurrection for the iPhone uses an “on-rails” gameplay scheme that essentially limits the player’s input to aiming and shooting. While moving the player through the Mars space station level like a theme park is possibly a necessary evil for the game to run smoothly on the iPhone, purists may miss the roaming aspect. However, the controls actually benefit from this fundamental change as players can focus on the actual accelerometer-powered aiming and shooting as opposed to possibly getting caught up in turning too far, not facing precisely the right way, and so on.
The game offers no sensitivity adjustment option for aiming, although thankfully the default setting works well enough for most players. The controls are fairly simple to pick up as well – a button shoots whatever weapon is currently in hand, another button cycles through the three available weapons, another is a dedicated reload trigger, and another button is just for dodging or taking cover. The variety of weapons – assault rifle, shotgun, minigun and more – blends with the variety of possible kill shots and the variety of monsters you’re up against to make gameplay and replay interesting and engaging. The rich graphics move along at an impressive rate, assisted in doing so by the pre-rendered paths, and while a far cry from console quality are nevertheless good for an iPhone video game app. The same can be said for the sound, which effectively uses music, ambient noise and effects sparingly and capitalizes on the atmosphere set by the eerie silence between firefights. All told, while significantly different from its predecessors due to the on-rails approach necessitated by the available rendering and gameplay mechanics, Doom Resurrection is bloody good fun for $9.99.
Related posts:
- A Worm and Cozy App It’s no great secret to any of us that mobile...
- Rambo on a Stick Mobile content has come a long way in recent years,...
- Mobile gaming enters a new Phaze Mobile content has evolved considerably in the last few years,...
- Glyder 2: More of the same good stuff Mobile applications are among the best things to ever happen...
- New girls on the block! There is a whole lot to love about mobile phones...
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
