Archetype: An Incredible iPhone-Based First Person Shooter

Posted on July 13th, 2010. Written by Shawn.

One of the first applications I was able to get for my iPhone 4 and it’s glorious Retina Display was Archetype. It’s a simple concept that was able to be expanded upon. It’s a shooting game that uses the touchscreen and has online mode. Sounds like incredible fun, so I had to buy it and see how well it plays. Well here I am reviewing it.

The game introduces you to a new way of playing a shooter that I’ve never seen before. It has a new way of controls, as far as iPhone games go. Instead of having a separate button for movement and another for shooting, you essentially use the entire screen in order to turn and move and then you tap anywhere to shoot. You can use the left side of the phone to move around and the right side to know which way to point your gun. You aren’t limited to just one area where the d-pad is either; the game knows when you mean to look around and when you mean to shoot. Easily makes the game a shooting game that anyone can play.

One new thing that this game has is absolutely no single player mode. There is a small training area of the game, but that’s no real gameplay. You run around shooting pieces of cardboard cutouts and try to do get them all before the time runs out. Cool, but not satisfying. There is multiplayer mode – which makes up for this entirely. In multiplayer mode, you can have Friends and buddies to play with, you can become archenemies with other users and still enjoy the game entirely. The goal of each game is fairly simple: kill the other team. I’ve only been able to test out one mode in which my team’s goal was to kill the other team’s players 20 times and once that was done, I gained a few EXP for killing one guy twice (yeah I suck) but it was such fun being able to play on an organized team.

This app also has something other apps have, but they’ve simplified it. Instead of using plus+ or OpenFeint, this game has it’s own type of Friend system where you can see who has requested to be your friend, recent friends you’ve made, search for different users based on their combat tag, and then you can send emails to recommend the game to other users via email. It’s a nice little perk to the game and will probably be expanded once Game Center becomes available to average users.

All in all, the game is great, simple, and gives you a feel of how well things can be done on the iPhone if properly thought out. The story beforehand is well done and is incredibly deep for a game with no actual story mode. I’ve had countless hours of fun with this game and still continue to play to this very day. With such awesome mechanics put into a game, and incredible art throughout, I can’t help but give this game a perfect 5/5. Well done.

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