Developer: Chair Entertainment Group | Publisher: Epic Games || Overall: 5.0/10

Hardware Used: iPhone 5 with iOS 6

Infinity Blade is a game in which you must vanquish a bum in his castle.

How does a bum get a castle? Hell if I know. But this guy who owns his five-room castle full of his sex-slave gimp-dressed “Champions” stand around and jerk it all day waiting for the next adventurous idiot (20 years apart from each) to go through the castle and kill them.

Infinity Blade is everything that is wrong with traditional gaming trying to make its way on mobile platforms. It’s an on-rails dungeon crawler with some point-and-click (or is it point-and-touch, now?) elements to it. It takes the feeling of freedom away from the player since you aren’t necessarily able to explore wherever you like and can only progress in a few paths that all ultimately end up in the same place. As opposed to a traditional console game where you’re able to move by yourself with ease, the designers decided it was best to not allow you to have the frustration of moving in 3D with only a touch screen and completely removed the ability to freely control your character. During battles, all you do is swipe your finger to hit the enemy with a sword, block, dodge, or use your overpowered specials (a stun and various magic spells) that can help you win a battle. Battles break up your combos whether you like it or not by inserting a five second cutscene at every third of the enemy’s health. The camera angle is also changed so that you become disoriented to limit your ability in fucking up the enemy again right off the bat.

The touch screen is no replacement for buttons, and this game makes it all too apparent that buttons are an evolution of necessity – it is easy to know when you push something it will react. However, when you swipe your hand across the screen or push a touch-screen-button the reliability of the action that you actually want to happen is around 85% rather than 99%. My biggest problem with the game is that the touch screen “buttons” in the game are not reactive to my lifeless hands. For some reason I always have trouble conducting enough electricity or heat or jazz in my hands to make something work on my touch screen. Don’t ask me why, it just happens. No matter how many times I smack my finger down on the touch screen to dodge, if it isn’t going to work, it isn’t going to work. The other annoying thing about Infinity Blade is instead of pushing a button and an analog stick to swipe; you have to move your whole hand, wrist, and arm to do one swipe. Essentially, you are playing Fruit Ninja on steroids, and I really wish there were buttons for this game because I’m going to get tendonitis in my shoulder if all games end up being like this.

But I suppose that buttons would make this game too easy as is. You can tell that the difficulty is adjusted to allow for reaction times in swiping. However, once you memorize the animations of each of your enemies (there are probably about 5 unique models in total, with different skins), you will breeze through most of the encounters. You can also use a healing spell, depending on which item you have equipped, which will basically help you cheat. Items are also an important part of the game, as when you master one of the hundreds of weapons and armor in the game, you gain a stat point to allocate. This aspect forces you to progress and not use the same items forever so that you can master more items and gain more stats, in addition to the stats you gain each level.

On the other side of Infinity Blade, you have a game that aspires to be something greater than it is. “Amazing” graphics, notwithstanding, you’ve got a unique experience with Infinity Blade that isn’t replicated very often in mobile gaming right now. I would align the graphics in the game to early-PlayStation 3 quality, but since the image is shrunk down to a 5 inch screen, that would be a bit too much credit. It’s probably more like late-PlayStation 2 graphics shrunk down with cooler lighting. However, the game will make you say “hey this looks pretty cool” …and then you get used to the graphics and it kind of doesn’t matter anymore. Except when you notice that the battery on your phone drains faster while playing than your phone can charge if you have the foresight to have it plugged in while playing.

So, now that that’s out of the way, let’s talk about what makes the game even worse. Once I figured out the point of the game, I actually got sad. The overall, repeating, arc of the game is that you go in as this nameless adventurer guy, fight through battles until you get to the bum who is ridiculously powerful and kills you almost assuredly on your first encounter. Once you die, you see your adventurer’s son appear on the same ledge overlooking the castle that his father did 20 to 23 years earlier. Each tour through the castle and meeting your fateful demise is considered a “Bloodline.”

What this game tells you about the story is basically nothing. What it implies, though, is that there is society outside of the reach of the bum who owns a shitty castle. This society breeds new adventurers so that one day, a hundred or so years in the future, the bum will be killed. So, since these adventurers are somehow forced to father a son before leaving on their journey, he must be banging all of the women in the society to make sure that there is one son before he leaves, so that in twenty or so years, that fatherless child can go and die the same death his father did.

Thinking further about this “society,” you have to wonder about its structure. Is it matriarchal or patriarchal? My personal thought is that the women in this society are propagating this attitude of sending the son of this same Bloodline over and over to their death because they’re mad the bum bought up all the tampons at the general store for his Champions.

These women have deemed this particular Bloodline the only one that can go and fight the bum known as a “Deathless.” The Deathless guy sits on his chair eating chips and his Champions stand in the middle of rooms for twenty years at a time. He only ever gets out of his comfy throne to fight an adventurer who is idiotic enough to go and die by his blade. Pretty weird, if you ask me. Nothing is demonstrated as to the terrorizing the Deathless dude actually does to anyone else in the world, so I have to fill in the blanks. He just sits on his throne and watches Law & Order all the time. Leave the guy alone!

If this society’s only purpose is to destroy this Deathless guy, why hasn’t the Deathless guy got off his ass in the hundreds of years before and after you start playing the game and just fucking kill them? Who the fuck knows. He’s probably a lazy bum, that’s why I keep calling him that. I mean, he doesn’t even improve his living situation. There are literally no cool features of his castle — he doesn’t have a bowling alley, or a game room, or even a bathroom. What the hell are you paying your Champions for? Train them to be plumbers and masons instead of just how to use weapons only once every twenty years. They’ve got to be depressed being sanctioned to only a certain part of the castle and never being able to do anything fulfilling. Can’t he find a better castle? One where these stupid adventurer guys won’t bug him?

Once you are able to fight the Deathless guy and beat him to about a third of his health, he will proposition you to either join him or you can pick up your sword again and fight him to the death. If you join him, you just fight him again, so the game doesn’t really “let you” join him. If you end up actually killing the guy, the Deathless dude will say something inane about “other dangers” in the world being even worse than him. And as if that wasn’t a cop out enough, the adventurer dude is now alone in this stupid castle and has nothing better to do than snoop around. So he presses some weird console on his throne and all of a sudden a 3D Holographic map appears and some weird sci-fi music and other random weird shit happens. I have no idea what the fuck is going on in this game. What the fuck is the point of all of this? All you do is grind XP, master your weapons, gain stats, and swipe your sword over and over at the same five enemies, and then they throw in this mind-fuck for no good reason.

If ChAIR even bothered to put some sort of inkling of a story in this travesty of a game I wouldn’t feel like I was put out to pasture. What the hell is the point of half-assing this story and throwing in some random sci-fi shit that doesn’t belong just to give us a mind-blowing moment or whatever? Just so that they can get us pissing our pants in excitement for the next Infinity Blade game? Get out of here with that shit. The only reason I even downloaded this game to begin with was because it was free. If I paid 9 dollars or whatever it is for this game I would be fucking pissed off right now.

As if endlessly grinding XP and Gold wasn’t enough, they make the prices of this shit so astronomical they “allow” you to buy Gold in the game. 2.5 million Gold-things for 50 bucks or whatever? Doing more research about what you do in the game after you kill the level 50 God King Deathless bum, you are able to purchase the Infinity Blade for 500,000 gold. Using this blade, you can open three or four extra bosses who have levels in the hundreds. So, that’s one reason to keep grinding the game after you’ve “beaten” it.

Yeah, that sounds great. What a load of bullshit. This game sucks. I’m uninstalling it. Eventually.