Gameloft brings the most solid iPhone FPS action to date with Modern Combat.
As I mentioned on our podcast, I actually played Gameloft’s hot new title, Modern Combat: Sandstorm, over a week ago at their Uno launch party. It was pretty hard to sit on my hands without being able to say anything for that long. But the time has come to reveal as much as I can tell you about their promising new FPS experience for the iPhone. I don’t have all the details, as they were never emailed out to press. So if I get them after writing this, I’ll post an update. 
Lets start this off by saying that Modern Combat again ups the bar for 3D games on the iPhone. The game looks fantastic. It appears that it’s running off an improved version of the Terminator Salvation engine, but don’t quote me on that. According to the PR rep, the Gameloft developers are very proud of how they tweaked MC to perform well. They showed me. During my 15 minutes or so with the game I didn’t notice any lag at any point. I was 
playing it on a 2nd gen iPod Touch, and we didn’t restart before I launched the game.
I started off running through a tutorial to get acclimated to the controls. These are also similar to Terminator Salvation, with a virtual “nub” on the left to move, and a button on the right to fire. You aim by sliding your finger anywhere on the screen. You can also fire while aiming. There are added buttons for things like switching weapons, throwing grenades, and zooming in. Surprisingly, this all felt really good! Once the combat got hot, I was able to quickly zoom in and out and take down enemies with relative ease. Granted, you can take quite a bit of damage before you die, but this is necessary due to your movements not being as fast as they would be with a controller or mouse.
The level I played took me through a middle eastern town. My mission was to destroy several radio towers in the area with explosives. Although I met up with soldiers a couple times, “coincidental circumstances” had me playing alone, so I’m not really sure what the team AI was like, or if you even go into battle with them. I should mention that, although I didn’t have headphones to hear the audio while playing, I noticed some great voice acting from the soldiers during several parts. The sound that I did hear sounded good, but headphones is the way to go with iPhone games, if you haven’t figured that out by now. The enemy AI was nothing special. I particularly remember them running into my mounted machine gun like sheep to the slaughter during a certain section of the level. Despite them not being all that reactive to situations, they are pretty dang accurate, and it doesn’t take much for them to start firing.
One of the biggest complaints about Infinity Ward’s Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare was the short game length (although I thought it was fine). Modern Combat should be about 3-4 hours long depending on how you play. Obviously, that’s just one run through the campaign. Personally, I don’t see this 
as being a bad amount of initial gameplay for an iPhone game. But we also have to consider that the iPhone and iPod Touch are officially portable gaming platforms, and many high quality DS and PSP games last much longer.
Still, short game life may be forgiven, as the rep mentioned that Gameloft is considering adding multiplayer in an update to the game! This is exciting news, as the current console Call of Duty games are played constantly on-line. If done right, Modern Combat could have the same effect for iPhone/iPod Touch gamers. That would be a good thing.
This is without a doubt the best FPS game on the iPhone by far, although that doesn’t do it justice since we haven’t exactly seen a slew of good FPS games recently. It looked awesome, performed well, and had solid controls. Shockingly enough, Modern Combat: Sandstorm is planned for a release at the end of this month! We’ll have a review for you guys, as well as any new news relating to this title.
