Warner Bros Entertainment have released ‘Watchmen: Justice is coming’ for iPhone. With the film doing steady business here and across the pond, it makes sense that they would bring out a game to coincide with the film’s release. What we weren’t expecting was an ambitious MMO that sees you interacting in realtime with thousands of other players around the world.
Available now for an introductory price of $0.99 (59p), the game features unique avatar creation, in game chat, full 3D combat as well as story based missions through five environments. According to the AppStore description the game is online only, so don’t expect any single player off-line component.
Watchmen, hands-on first impressions
First order of the day is set up your username and password, and after a question to determine your personality you are presented with a generic looking character. You can visit a customisation page where you can kit out your character in various outfits and accessories, these improve and unlock as you level up.
The game then attempts to load (connect) to the online game world. While you wait you are presented with a great ‘in engine’ 3d flyby. It’s very atmospheric with bright neon lights and weather effects such as full reflections in the wet roads and sidewalks, the red light district looks particularly good. Some of the textures are a little rough close up, but overall it looks like a good PS2 game.
Onto the main game and the viewpoint is forced into isometric 3D, presumably to eradicate clipping issues in the distance, and to make one finger movement and interaction easier. But it still looks good.
Unfortunately the connection times for loading the game and travelling to different parts of the city are painfully slow, In fact several times it took so long (over 5 minutes) I assumed the game had crashed and I quit back to the home screen.
When you do finally get in the game you can move around the city by simply tapping where you want your character to walk. If you come across another player you can chat with them, which opens up the standard keyboard. You can also view their profile and more importantly engage in battles.
When battling, the game moves back into full 3D, and presents you in a street fighter style. Fighting is turn-based, and you must select from 3 fight styles, and depending on your timing you’ll deliver your blow. It’s kinda like rock, paper scissors! Knock their health down to zero and you’ll win. You can change you fighting style in your skills menu, with more styles becoming available as you progress, so you can have various kicks, punches and head butts to your disposal.
If you don’t want to chat or fight, you can engage in story quests. According to the tutorial you must visit dumpsters to advance the story, however whenever I opened one the game would say it was empty. This obviously sucks and doesn’t live up to what the game promised when I purchased it.
As well as this glaring bug, the game connection is very laggy and it frequently crashes to the home screen. So for now I’m going to reserve judgement and hold off on a review and see if these bugs will be ironed out. If they don’t get fixed then this game will get a very low score.
My advise right now is to avoid.
