At 33 years old I’ve been fortunate to witness the whole evolution of the video game. From the early days of consoles such as Atari’s, to my very first home computer (Commodore Vic 20), all the way to XBox 360 and Sony Playstation 3. The journey has often left me speechless, especially when witnessing a true leap in standard. One such moment was when I first played Sonic the Hedgehog, my jaw didn’t return to the stationary position for at least 45 minutes. There have been many since, with the latest being when I downloaded the iPad version of Gamelofts The Dark Knight Rises. My jaw is yet again just returning to normal.
When it comes to gaming on the iPad or iPhone, I have a love/hate relationship. I’ve never really bought into the whole touchscreen gaming thing, as being an old school gamer, my senses struggle to operate controls that simply aren’t there. The lack of a physical d-pad or joystick makes me old brain very confused. So I tend to stick to the board game/puzzle game genre (which happens to be a lot cheaper). This changed however when I took a visit to watch The Dark Knight Rises movie, which was as epic as the game proved to be (see our review of the movie here). Swept up in a wave of cape-and-cowl fever, I decided to fork out the £4.99 and take a shot at an iOS game. The decision, as it turned out, was a good one. Queue the jaw-dropping experience of this years gaming evolution…
The graphics are sublime, and you can barely believe you are playing the game on an iPad and not a more specialised and powerful machine like the Sony Playstation Vita. During gameplay, the rendering is extremely good and the game has incredible depth. The controls, despite what I said earlier, seemed very natural and made the gameplay that extra bit easier to master. I still don;t fully get behind the ‘virtual’ stick and buttons, but its the best game I’ve played using this particular control type. The story sticks relatively the same as the movie story line, with a few modifications made to fit the game play, so fans of the movie should love this. And the most pleasing bit, and very important for any type of game, is that it hasn;t got boring yet and I’m still as hooked on it now as I was when I downloaded it two weeks ago.
The Dark Knight Rises proves that one of the futures of gaming is on the handheld devices we use everyday, and the need for a specialised gaming system is looking less important with every release. TDKR is one for the fan of the movie, fan of action games, fan of shooting games, fan of ANY game. It’s a seminal moment in gaming-on-the-go and should be tried by everyone, despite the price.
Daily Waffle Score – 5/5