iFPS Online - iPhone Review

iFPS Online is an online first person shooter arena game, that brings battlematches to the iPhone / iPod Touch for those who want some fragging action on the go.
Everyone was excited when ngmoco:) announced “LiveFire” at the 3.0 Keynote so a similar approach to a FPS game seemed a perfect idea, unfortunately the guys at Pick up and Play rushed their release.

iFPS Online puts you in the shoes of a convict stuck on a prison that orbits around earth. Your only chance of survival is to kill all the other inmates after which you get a full pardon. That pretty much sums up the story line because the game was mainly designed for online death matches not for single player adventure mode. Nonetheless there is a single player mode but that is mainly for practice.

The online multiplayer has to modes of connecting you to your friends either through local wifi or online in games set up by other players. There are also two games hosted on the producers servers that are permanently on, where we always fond someone to play against.

When you create a game you have different options , you can select one of three maps that are available , you can set up a kills or time limit if you don’t want it to go on forever. You can also password protect the game you created so that only your friends can join.

The maps on which you can play are areas on space station, you can choose between Sector D , Quarters and the Common. We found Quarters to be the only one playable mostly because it easy to find your enemy because of it not being to cluttered. Also it the smallest map of the tree and probably this is why it lags the least.
Its hard to learn your way around the other two maps because controlling the character in tight, maze like tunnels is frustratingly difficult.

You have at your disposal two types of weapons , the basic blue plasma gun with unlimited ammo that you start with and a red plasma one that has only one shot and is spawned around the map. Both weapons create an explosion effect where they hit ,damaging and knocking everyone around it including yourself. This is positive because it is hard to aim accurately and an area effect helps a lot and negative because on the tight tunnels you can easily end up killing yourself.



Chat system:
When playing a online mach you have the option of sending other players one of five messages that you can preset in the options menu. You can’t create your own messages but only choose between about 40 preset ones , nonetheless there are some pretty funny ones available.

Controls:
There are two ways to control the game, either with double joysticks or with a joystick and the accelerometer. In “double joystick mode” the left one controls movement and firing and the right one controls aiming and jumping. The downside to this is that you can’t do both actions at the same time; for example you can’t move and fire or jump and aim at once.

The other controlling mode looses the aiming joystick in favor of the accelerometer based aim and adds separate buttons for firing and jumping. Unfortunately at the moment the second controlling mode is useless as it is impossible to aim even after calibrating. It would have probably been better if you had an option of controlling movement with the accelerometer and aiming with a joystick.

The biggest concern with iFPS Online is the lag issue. When fighting against more than 2-3 players the game becomes unresponsive and controlling is unbearable, the controls get stuck and frame rate drops .



PRO’s:
- First online FPS game on the iPhone platform
- Beautiful graphics
- Fast and easy to get straight into the action



CON’s:
- Lag issues
- Hard to control
- Only 3 maps that are hard to play on
- Only 2 weapons available that are basically the same

iFPS Online has great potential as it allows you to easily find people to play against bringing the online death match experience to the iPhone. The only problems are the performance and control issues.

PRICE:

It is available at the App Store for 3.99$ , which is a bit pricey considering it’s issues
App Store Link

GAMEPLAY VIDEO: