Call of Duty: Strike Team ($6.99) was released this past August, and was a wonderful example of how you bring a big-time console franchise played with traditional controllers to a touchscreen platform like iOS. It featured an action-packed single-player campaign filled with all the over-the-top drama and excitement of its console big brothers, but with one very smart addition that completely changed how it played: at any time you could switch between normal first-person view to a top-down view on the fly.
This was important as touchscreen FPS games have typically been hot or cold with gamers in terms of controls, but a top-down view was a perfect alternative allowing you to control your squad with line-drawing gestures and make decisions with the entire landscape in mind, not just what you could see from your character’s point of view. It also added a more strategic layer to the typically run-n-gun nature of Call of Duty games, and the fact that you could switch between the two points of view at will meant that players got the best of both worlds no matter which perspective they preferred.
Anyway, the first update to Strike Team hit in October and was mostly optimizations for newer hardware as well as several other minor tweaks and changes. This week the game’s second update has hit, and adds all sorts of new content to the game. A new Time Attack mode sees you earning more time on the clock for each bad guy that you take out, so the better you do the longer you’ll be able to last. For players who have leveled up to at least 16, a new area is available, the Atlas Mountains, which you can play in both Survival and the new Time Attack mode.
Other new features include the daily Activate or Game Center challenges as well as daily Token bonuses being unlocked for all players, and for those looking for more control, Strike Team now supports the extended version of iOS 7 controllers, which is the dual-stick controller like the Moga Ace Power. Finally, a bug with iPad Air devices has been rectified in this update too. Call of Duty: Strike Team is one of the better iOS games you can buy if you enjoy FPS or strategy games, and it appears that it will continue to get better through updates, so be sure to check it out.
