Welcome to the future of iOS gaming.
Some fine gentlemen from Unity (game engine developers) sat down with us to show us what has become one of the biggest iOS surprises of this year’s E3: Shadowgun. While at this stage it’s more of a proof-of-concept tech demo than a fully-fledged game, developers Madfinger have crafted what is easily the most impressive iOS 3D game we’ve seen to date.
Shadowgun uses a version of Unity’s 3D engine that is optimized to run on the iPad 2, and the demo we saw streaked by at an amazing 60fps. The representatives we talked to almost chuckled at the idea of this game running on any lesser devices, but the press releases we’ve seen indicate that there will be a 30fps version of the game to run on the iPhone 4 and other iOS devices. Either way, this game will certainly look it’s best on the iPad 2, as a lot of love is going into maximizing the iPad 2′s hardware with the game engine.
As you will hear in our hands-on video below, we could not stop gushing about the visuals in Shadowgun as we played it. If you go and watch the official gameplay demo video that was posted on YouTube earlier this week, it’s hard to believe what you’re watching is taking place on a tablet device. Anyone passing by would assume you were watching the latest Gears of War gameplay footage on an Xbox 360. Yeah, it looks that good. High density light maps, particle effects in smoke/fire, and impressive cloth effects are just a few of the features shown off in the demo. The dynamic lighting on the character models is simply stunning for this kind of platform.
According to Unity, this game will be under development for at least another few months to work on content creation and polishing. As mentioned above, the game will be released on younger iOS devices (and assumingly on Android an other platforms), but will definitely be far superior on the iPad 2. Check out some hands-on footage below, with comments by a Unity developer.
