iRequiem Review - iPhone

It's kind of crazy to think that after owning my iPhone for just over a year, iRequiem is the first game I am reviewing for the iOS platform. Portable gaming in general just doesn't suit my lifestyle, I tend to play most of my iPhone, Android, DS and PSP games at bedtime before I settle down to sleep.

Some of you may find playing a game on a noisy train or bus fun, in my opinion playing games in a nice warm bed with a cup of cocoa is much more comfortable.

iRequiem is an ambitious adult themed game for the iPhone and iPod Touch, Steve Jobs might not want to see blood and guts on the iPhone but I know that you do. The game sees you take control of a mysterious character trapped in the bowels of hell. He wants to reclaim his soul and return to the land of the living, oh and of course he wants to deal some revenge too. 

Now imagine for a moment you were trapped in hell, how would you go about escaping the wretched place? I guess there are only two possible options:

1) Appeal to the Devil's good side by baking him a nice cake

2) Grabbing some serious firepower and shooting the shit out of all of his minions

Now we all know which cake the Devil is most fond of, Carrot Cake. Well known for being the most hideous cake of them all, who in their right mind is going to spend two hours making such a foul tasting concoction when shooting evil monsters is so much more run eh?

iRequiem is a 2D side-scrolling shooter that may remind you a little of games such as Splatterhouse and Streets of Rage. In those games you typically walk to the right killing people until you reach the level end.

iRequiem is a little different because it gives you an area that is around three times the size of the iPhone screen. You can walk all the way to the left and to the right as enemies spawn from either side. You can walk, jump and somersault by using the onscreen directional buttons and tapping on your character.

The basic premise of the game is to survive against the clock and an ever increasing waves of undead creatures and other monsters. You walk from side to side dispatching enemies either up close with hand weapons such as Swords and Axes or from a distance with sexier weapons like Crossbows, Shotguns and flame-throwers.

As you can imagine with a game rated 12+, things are a bit gory. So if you don't like blood and guts then you might want to run away now because every enemy you slaughter explodes in a glorious shower of the red stuff.  Let's not forget magic though, you can perform some very cool spells and Spiritual Rites such as Freezing Enemies by using Mana and Dark souls collected from dead baddies.

Whilst you're busy killing these foes on the ground, strange flying creatures fly above you carrying treasure chests. These chests simply fall to the ground and are collected as you walk over them, inside they contain a random supply of ammo or gold coins. As you'd expect the ammo is very helpful when you're running low and the gold comes in very handy when you visit the shop.

You'll meet Marcus in the shop after every round is over. He'll sell you bigger and better Weapons, Spells as well as a few other interesting goodies such as Potions and Amulets.

When you hear the chimes of a bell ring during a round you'll be able to enter the temple to perform those Spirit Rites I mentioned earlier. There are 5 different rites to choose from and each will last for a short amount of time; my favourite is the Blessing of Shadows.

This rite firstly turns you invisible, then allows you drain Mana as you pass over a corpse and lastly it increases your health whenever an enemy strikes you. Sometimes you will come across a human trapped in a cage, if you decide to release them they will immediately start fighting alongside you and will do so until the round is over, well – unless you let them get killed that is.

iRequiem autosaves your progress after each level which is very handy, this means that when you quit the game you can simply restart from where you left off. However if you run out of lives without reaching a checkpoint (boss battle) then you will lose up to four rounds worth of progress when you restart the game. Now speaking of those Boss Battles, don't be fooled into thinking these will be gigantic screen filling beasts but they are certainly a challenge.

You'll get stocked up with all of your supplies beforehand and your main task really is to find out what its weak spot is and get your attack planned early. It's no good getting your short range shotgun tooled up if the beast can hit you from quite a distance, you'll be better off using a rocket launcher for example.

Okay let's try to sum up a bit. Irequiem is indeed a fun shooter/brawler, the game features over 50 levels in the main story mode and can be played forever in the Survival mode. High score junkies will love the built in OpenFeint and Game Centre integration which is seamless right from the get go. Graphically iRequiem is one of the best looking games I've seen on the iPhone so far, granted up until now I've mostly only played a few of the free ones.

The sprites of the lead character and the monsters are fairly detailed and very well animated, they won't blow you away but it's clear to see that each enemy has been designed with lots of care and you're not just looking at the same blobs with a different paint job each time. The music and sound effects are especially atmospheric and when combined with the awesome voice acting makes the game feel much more professional, if you're a fan of Duke Nukem's witty dialogue then you'll feel at home here.....“Rest in pieces” & “Damn you're ugly” are just two classic lines you'll hear.

The multiple difficulty levels, achievements and survival mode will certainly provide a lot of replay value and I can see this being on the front page of your iPhone desktop for quite a while. I no doubt think they'll be some extra chapters available as free DLC in the future so for just $1.99/£1.20, this game in an incredible bargain. I should mention that the onscreen controls for iPhone games are always a bit funky, it's one area where portable systems such as the Nintendo DS and Sony PSP win out.

For the most part I didn't end up making too many mistakes but when things are busy it is frustrating to hit the wrong virtual button. If you have an iPad then this may not be an issue at all, sadly I don't have one.

Now I do have one complaint, on my iPhone 3G when a lot of monsters appeared on-screen the framerate of the game sometimes got a bit jerky – not only that but when things got very busy I even had the game crash altogether. Now I managed to fix this issue by rebooting my iPhone before playing the game, it appears that on a fresh boot of iOS the game works much better. Despite Apple's best efforts, it's obvious that the RAM and the CPU do get bogged down with background stuff if you keep the phone running for a few days. I'm sure those with an iPhone 3GS or iPhone 4 (or the iPod touch equivalents) will have no such issues. Oh and before any Apple fanboys start ranting, my iPhone is not jailbroken.

It's hard for me to score an iPhone game because I've not had that much experience with them. iRequiem is fun and has plenty of content but the game isn't very varied, if you don't like the genre the game will not improve for you as you go along.

Considering how much game you get for under $2 I would not hesitate in recommending it and therefore award iRequiem and excellent 8 out of 10.

iTunes link
http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/irequiem/id404241333?mt=8