Modern Combat: Sandstorm
I’ve always been longing for a solid First Person Shooter on my iPhone and never have I truly been satisfied. A lot of the FPS games I downloaded were horrible. Not just the controls but the polish and graphics. The FPS on the iPhone was not something that was looking too good, until Modern Combat arrived. I knew that with Gameloft being the developer this game was going to be something different from the rest, not necessarily different from First Person Shooters in general but different from the ones I had seen on the iPhone.
Gameloft has done a great job with Modern Combat, first off, the controls work great. There are three control options and the only problem I had with them was the fact that all of them worked so good and this made it hard to just choose one and stick to it. I decided to stick with the default control scheme. This control scheme has a left virtual thumbstick which you use to move forward, backward, strafe left, and strafe right. The way you look around, what would normally be the right thumbstick, is by touching anywhere on the screen, the best place to touch is right by the cross-hairs, this is where you get the most accuracy. Then you touch a button located on the right side to shoot. There are other actions like crouch, throw grenades, zoom to cross-hairs, reload, and switch weapons. All of these controls feel great and never once did it feel like I was struggling (like when playing an FPS on the PSP). My only suggestion is to turn the sensitivity the whole way up. This was the only way I could play.
Modern Combat is an FPS similar to the console versions, everything we’ve seen before but nothing we’ve seen on a mobile device. I was playing it on a 3GS so there was no lag at all, everything ran smooth, the graphics looked great. The gameplay has a lot of variety, at one point I was using a sniper rifle to take down enemies on a ledge in an underground passageway, the next moment I was defending a palace from tanks and RPG’s. The gameplay definitely gets switched up and it’s easy to get sucked in. There are 10 levels total and most of them are completed in 15 minutes on average.
Overall Modern Combat: Sandstorm is a must buy for FPS fans. Gameloft put a lot of effort into the game and it came out very polished. Not only is it a lot of fun but it’s a great game to show off to people and say “Yea, my phone can do that.” The thing is though, this phone doesn’t really feel like a phone anymore. With games like these the iPhone is a tough competitor to the handheld gaming market. Modern Combat is currently $6.99 in the app store and I also hear there is a multiplayer mode in the works as a future update.
Check out some footage of the game below:
