Shadowgun is now available on the Android Market, so I went there and picked it up for $4.99. I know, I could have had the free “press” version, but I’ve looked at the game, and I wanted to show some support for the developers. Why? Because the game looks really good, and if you take into account that it was done with the Unity Engine, the result is simply amazing. I like Unity very much, but creating a game with this level of “polish” using a tool like that is not easy – far from it, so Kudos to the dev team.
The “story” takes place in a distant future, in a distant place, where corporations rule and use mercenaries and other “shadow warriors” as enforcers. Those mercenaries are called “Shadowgun”. Just like any good action game, the scenario fits on a smurf’s handkerchief (I exaggerate only slightly) and if you dive into it, the game is really a 3rd person shooter (the camera is behind the hero).There are real-time cinematic scenes that explain the context and upcoming missions. They are rendered with the in-game 3D engine, but using better image quality settings than the actual game (which requires more resources to handle interactivity). Among the effects that I have eyeballed: anti-aliasing, bloom, depth of field… Once in the game, it’s back to a more basic form of rendering, for the sake of performance. There is no FPS counter, but I would say that the game runs at 30+FPS on a Galaxy Tab 10.1, and things can go as high as 60FPS if there is not much going on.
The controls are much more natural than I expected. I still prefer a mouse+keyboard if you wonder
As you can imagine, I was a bit skeptical about playing something vaguely resembling a first person shooter (FPS) on a tablet because the controls appear limited, but in the end, the game creators have done a very good job, of balancing the game so that the “tablet handicap” isn’t an issue. After a few minutes, I wasn’t thinking about controls, but about staying alive.
I haven’t played the whole game, so I’m not going to write an actual review. Instead I’d like you to have it on your radar – you may just like it! Note that on Android, the game is exclusively available for Tegra 2 devices, for now. Madfinger, the development company, plans to make it available to other devices too, but no date has been announced. [Android Market link for Shadowgun, it’s also in the App Store for iOS users]
Filed in . Read more about Android, Shadowgun, Tablet, Tegra and Tegra 2.