ShadowGun

When I got my now dated Android tablet roughly a year ago there were a handful of games targeting its Tegra 2 chipset. Worse yet, those games cost substantially more than most other Android Market games (over $5). So, as fate would have it, I ended up picking up ShadowGun on the iPad first and loved it. It offered a very high quality first person shooter experience that controlled well. I almost let temptation get the best of me and wrote an Android review based on the iPad version, but I resisted, eventually got the Android version of the game when it went on sale, and (finally!) here's the MeAndMyDroid.com review.

ShadowGun's plot is simple and unexceptional. You are a futuristic bounty hunter invading Dr. Edgar Simon's fortress and have to battle past all of his droids and cyborgs. You're dropping in on the outskirts of his fortress and maintain contact with your commanders who feed you information throughout the game. Graphically the game is very sharp and it isn't that far behind modern console quality games. Actually, as more games of this quality appear, it makes me want to get a USB pad hooked up so I can use it instead of the touch screen as appropriate (not that this game supports that).

Everything is controlled by the touch screen with the typical on-screen gamepad on the left and on-screen buttons on the right. The on-screen game pad floats which, as I've said before, makes it much more accommodating. The game has a great tutorial to get you going and the difficulty ramps up at a pace that's just right. You'll start off with the basics of moving and looking around, firing your weapon, using controls panels to unlock force fields, and eventually be killing off a few, easy cyborgs. You'll soon be in the thick of things taking on multiple bots and automated weaponry just minutes into the game.

Before writing this review I did do one final test and that's to download the game on my phone (a single core Epic 4G) and run it through the paces. It installed just fine, but did load/run a bit slower although at an acceptable pace. One thing I was curious about was how well the game, after playing it on tablets, would adjust to the small screen size. Well, it's smaller and I must prefer playing on a tablet, but that shouldn't really be a surprise. It was however fully playable even though it was graphically jerkier. Actually I was surprised that a game of this caliber player as well as it did... at least until it force rebooted my phone. That didn't surprise me. All in all I'd say that if you've got a higher end phone you'll probably be fine, but anything less than a dual core phone comes with a warning.

All in all I love this game. It's a solid piece of work such that if you've got a device with the power to play it then it's a 5 star title. I would tend to stick with Tegra devices (and there's also an enhanced Tegra 3 version available), but it ran better than expected on my feeble Epic 4G albeit with the reboot. 5/5 stars.