Because they were more fun. Even though they were total clones of well known IP, when they were released no one could touch Gameloft's multiplayer FPS offerings. That's still sort of true now, oddly enough.
I restarted the game after the driller bug and got to level 5 now - but does this game really only have 3 weapons?
This game is just missing details that most games of genre have now. Like jumping, rolling/diving, wall grabbing on more objects, zooming, smarter AI, co-op play, and more weapons. This game also has no multiplayer which usually is an awful thing but with such shallow gameplay who even wants multiplayer? I love love love the graphics though and being such a superficial graphics whore will continue to love this game. But if I don't beat it soon I might fall out of my honeymoon phase of loving the visuals and get bored. Regardless if this is like a console game or not though, it's still an ambitious attempt but feels a bit bland. It's like having to eat the best toast ever without butter or jam.
I have decide to pass n this, but I am now playing mc2 single campaign and it is lot of fun. No glitches. Beautiful to play.
@Evilnoob I keep getting killed by some invisible laser after deactivating the 3rd laser. Do I have to start the whole game over from the beginning to get past the driller level? Just trying to make sense of this. An update can't come soon enough.
Ok, tell me a better TPS then ShadowGun on iOS right now. Yeah, it looks like it is time to improve the ShadowGun review.
This is totally irrelevant to the quality of shadowgun. The fact is this game is a very basic 3rd person shooter. It's riddled with crashes, has bad AI, has only one short game mode, lacks a lot of basic futures like melee combat or sprint, and charges a very high price. If this game was on any other platform it would be incredibly mediocre at best. We should hope for more for iOS. Yes, this game shows promise for what an iOS game can look like, but the gameplay just isn't there yet.
The review wasn't even comparing the game to anything. It was just saying that the game is generally abit repetetive (... compared to what other games on iOS offer?) So let's say there are great, fun games on the AppStore, but there are no TPSs on it, so the way you say it, the first TPS should recieve a 10/10 score even if it is the worst game ever, because there is nothing in the same genre to compare it too. (I know this is an extreme example)
Personally, I felt like the review was completely bizarre and addressed all of the wrong things. One of the very few TA reviews I completely disagree with. It's all good though. Get a fix for all of the bugs in a quick update, and work hard on the multiplayer. Either way, MFG made a great game that's going to hit the top 10 very soon at $7.99. Already number 3 for top grossing. It's been a long time since we've seen a "premium-priced" title hit the top 10. Best of luck with everything.
Game Impressions I'll probably not be making many friends in this thread, but here are the impressions Shadowgun left me with: The Good Much of what is good about Shadowgun is undoubtedly very good. Or even better. The graphics are really just as nice as they seemed, all along. I'd still give the spot for best-looking iOS game to Infinity Blade, but all others are left in the dust. The controls are standard but great, the interface small (but not as minimal as I would have preferred, Dead Space-style) but pretty, and the presentation is generally striking. Music and soundwork are good (even if I would have welcomed more atmospheric aural input, to heighten immersion). The character is responsive and animations are great, and a a result, the action is very smooth and appealing. The Precariously Perched on the Fence Between Good and Bad I am less keen on the voice acting than most, it seems. Perhaps Gameloft have left us with a disposition to appreciate just about any voice actor that does not sound like he has been auto-generated by an algoritm for "generic overacting cool and bitter main hero", "archetypical villain with an accent", etc , or perhaps I am just a whiny bitch. But while Shadowgun's voice acting is serviceable (as a contrast, Gameloft's voice work usually isn't ), it is far from as immersive as I would have liked. The protagonist suffer from the usual heroic illness of being too cool to react to external stimuli, and even after crash-landing as a result of being shot down by nuclear warheads, he remains aloof and collected, with little variation in tone or register. In other words, the acting is not good enough to pull me into the world of Shadowgun. (Slade does raise his voice when he is told of the incoming warheads, which left me with hopes for a protagonist with a greater range of emotion. But perhaps surviving a high-speed space shuttle crash unscathed left him with an understandable greater sense of his own invulnerability, and out comes the cool aloofness we would all enjoy if we knew we were backed up by checkpoints and save functions.) The voices of the characters do have, well, much character, even if the acting is limited and lacking. No cardboard cutouts. The hero's vocal chords are not steeped in that forge of harsh, hoarse, cool and neutral, but with a undertone of bitterness, vocal mediocrity from which so many near-silent computer games protagonists hail. In contrast to most voiced iOS fps protagonists, John sounds positively quirky. And this is a nice thing, one that I do appreciate. The Stuff that Will Leave Me Friendless I'm not just having much fun when fighting. Sorry. Madfingah. Combat feels repetitious, more so than the other iOS fps games I enjoy. Throughout much of the game, encounters play out in very similar fashions: run up to and hide behind cover, point targeting reticule at spot just above hidden enemy, wait for enemy to pop up to shoot at you, and fire away. Repeat for next guy. The advanced AI that I was hoping would break this monotonous flow is curiously subdued, and seems to often play second fiddle to pre-set enemy movement paths. As a result, enemies do little to shake up your tactics or patterns, or to break up the monotony of the fighting formula I mention above. The TA review (which popped up while I was writing this post) echoes many of my sentiments (though I've seen little of the crashes and bugs mentioned therein). Thorin describes my impression of the AI well: The game could probably have benefited much from a greater variation in tactical opportunities and player choice in approaches, maneuvers and attack options. Dives, rolls, dodges, being able to run with limited accuracy, being able to shoot inaccurately from behind cover without showing yourself, some form of special abilities/tech attacks (though carefully designed to fit within the setting), or the possibility to make use of the environment (beyond shooting exploding barrels enemies never seem to notice when they duck down next to them) to emerge victorious from encounters could all have had a non-proportional beneficial effect on Shadowgun's combat. There is also a goodly amount of inconsistent or even inexplicable level and situational design (from an in-canon perspective), stuff that works well gameplay-wise, but that could have been designed much better for the sake of immersion and (relative) realism, and still maintain the same gameplay opportunities. Cover is distributed across hallways in a manner which seems to deliberately invite infiltration, which would have been fine if there seemed to be other purposes for the pieces of cover. But instead of being represented through crates, machinery and equipment, etc, most cover pieces are low, standing metal plates, carefully designed to allow one intruder to hide behind. It leaves me with a impression of laziness that contrasts with the overall striking look and graphical design of the game. One boss has a weak point that appears above its head (designated by an even more ultra-obvious green marker, but that might be the result of some never-explained targeting function of Slade's equipment) in between attack waves. This makes little enough sense in terms of gameplay, as this turns the whole boss fight into a large replica of most normal encounters: what safe behind cover, pop up to shoot in between intervalls. In terms of creating an enjoyable gaming world, it is downright silly, Deathstar-exhaust port-style, and pulls me right out of the game. As this weak spot could so easily have been represented in so many other ways, both graphically and functionally, this design seems as lazy as the cover plates. Finally, and perhaps less importantly to many, the game's story fails to capture my imagination. Slade displays little personal motivation beyond the desire to finish the mission and get his dough (and I hope he spends it on better missile detection, instead of new upgrades for his in-ship sex bot), the Doctor seems equally single-minded (not in a dramaturgically colorful manner, but in a narrative-impeding way), the game's setting is explained in a few sentences and suffers for it, and Corta... uhm, the generic female AI companion hovers, uncanny valley-style, between a function and a character (but not in a way that actually makes her interesting, or raises any questions on the possibility of AI constructs attaining true autonomy and human-like cognition). As a contrast, Madfinger's Samurai titles actually had a story that, through its characteristic presentation and the fact that western audiences are less familiar with the concepts therein, did fit the game with a contextual frame and gave the action additional purpose, in spite of being sparse and short. Slade Wants Yer Money For many, Shadowgun is probably worth the price tag just to gaze at the incredible graphics, and feel the warm promise and potential of console-quality titles for iOS (something which Shadowgun is not, but an exciting early step towards). It is a very impressive technical achievement, and even though I only found the actual gameplay enjoyable for the first few levels, it makes me excited for future Madfinger releases. The addition of multiplayer could turn my lack of enjoyment around and upside down and another 360 in all directions. In spite of the lack of combat options and maneuvers, the simple fact that human enemies act the way humans do (completely erratically and randomly ) will probably be enough to break the monotony completely, and bring out the true qualities in Shadowgun's combat mechanics. I'll probably pay the price of the game just to play multiplayer in it. So, in closing, to tie this review together... can we, please, finally have a AI-supported protagonists with an explicit affair with his artificial female friend, instead of this constantly recurring implicit sexual tension?
I am only defending the fact that ShadowGun is another step in the right direction for iOS games. yes, it has problems, there is no doubt about that, but the console game expectations everyone is having are quite unrealistic so far for iOS. In the future, you can have higher expectations.
This, exactly. They need to merit the game for what it's doing for the platform. I know TA is a very indie-friendly place, but really, we don't need another match-3 game getting five stars, while an effort like this is completely ripped apart on unjust grounds. Seriously, you're going to spend half of a frontpage review talking about f**king crashing? I'm using a freaking iPod running the latest software and haven't experienced a single crash.
Games like Where's My Water, Jetpack Joyride, and cut the rope are just more fun and a better value then this type of game on iOS right now. I had hopes that Shadowgun would be the game that changed that, but I am still waiting for that game to come along. Also, its not all that fair to criticize their review if you havent even finished the game. A lot of the problems with the game become more apparent as you get deeper into the experience.
The problem is, that though Shadowgun is a massive step forward in some aspects (mainly the graphics), it is also a slight step backwards in other places. wich in the end just means that it isn't as big a step in the right direction as some of us hoped it would be. Just a thought: could some mod moove most of the recent posts to a new thread?
It's a tech demo though. We're not going to give something an artificially positive review because it has nice graphics, that's ridiculous. So you think we should ignore the fact that the AI is horrible, the game is incredibly crashy, repetitive, and there is almost no variety? Some match 3 games (Dungeon Raid comes to mind) get 5 stars because they're incredibly fun. Hell, I've put more time into Dungeon Raid than I have some full console games that I paid $60 for, and still play it to this day. Once you take off your rose colored graphics-centric glasses, Shadowgun is entirely forgettable, and with a short single player campaign will never have the staying power of a game like Dungeon Raid. I don't know where you're getting this from that we spent half the review talking about it crashing. Did you even read it? Paragraph 1: Introduction, "crashes" mentioned in thesis statement. Paragraph 2: Background of game, introducing main character. Paragraph 3: Discussing how great the graphics are. Paragraph 4: Mentioning that even though it appears to be a Gears clone, it's not as blatant as you'd expect. Paragraph 5: Discussing controls. Paragraph 6: Focused on poor enemy AI. Paragraph 7: The game crashes a lot on the iPad and 3GS Paragraph 8: Deleted save game bug. Paragraph 9: Mentioning how formulaic and repetitive the gameplay is. Paragraph 10: Discussing how the boss fights are the saving grace of the game. Paragraph 11: Listing of pet peeves that Shadowgun plays on. Paragraph 12: Conclusion, crashing mentioned in summary. So, I guess, if you decided to only read two paragraphs of the review then yeah, then we would have spent half of the review talking about crashes.
Better value? That's very opinionated. The point is that by continually only endorsing these $0.99 pick-up-and-play titles, you're ensuring that the AppStore right where it is. Why bother spending an enormous amount of effort attempting to change the gaming scene when you can make multiple casual titles that MIGHT hit it big. Most of the $0.99 titles you see in the top 100 made it there by luck and good marketing choices, including Angry Birds. Games like Shadowgun are the way to go if we want to see any kind of change in the future for AppStore games. Yeah, Jetpack Joyride is fun in short bursts. Hell, the AppStore/iOS is the king of casual games for any platform in history, and you know what, that's exactly how the gaming world as a whole views the platform. I'm not going to disagree that it has its faults; I never said the game didn't feel repetitive later on. I just said that they weren't judging the game based on its merits. We're definitely not there yet; we're not even close to PSP standards from years back, but we're going the right way with Shadowgun and other titles we're likely to see very soon in the AppStore.
