It seems that the iDevices don’t see much ‘full-size’ development; even well-established companies seem to tend toward bite-size offshoots of their popular series. This is part of the reason I was happy to see Final Fantasy Dimensions pop up, even if the combined price and mediocrity of the game has kept me away from it. That being said, there are some full-size games hiding out there.
A friend- whose indie tabletop RPGs you should totally check out– pointed me at Silversword a few weeks ago, and I’ve been enjoying it tremendously ever since. An original game based heavily on the 1980s-era Bard’s Tale series, Silversword has you controlling a party of adventurers in one of the last settlements on an island colony beseiged by evil forces; as you can imagine, this involves a lot of delving into monster-infested caverns and abandoned crypts filled with the restless dead.
Silversword’s look and feel cleaves very close to its’ oldschool roots; although you’re exploring a polygonal world in a new story, everything about the game strongly resembles the games it’s based on. The class selection, the spell lists, and even the screen and menu layots resemble the games that it’s based on (perhaps a little too much in the latter case, as inventory management can be a bit of a pain on a tiny iPhone screen). That being said, it offers a more modern difficulty level- there are certainly areas where you’ll need to grind a bit or where not paying enough attention will kill you, but it doesn’t quite reach the “one wrong step means death, even right out of the gate!” level of many of the games it’s based on.
It’s a nice, solid ‘full-size’ RPG, and while the price is high for an iPhone game, you’re getting a lot of content for that. If you’re looking for a real RPG on the iDevices, I’m ready to call Silversword a must-buy. Check it out at the App Store here.
– HC
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