Day 147, Game 147 - Dead Trigger

Last week I bought myself an iPad. It's something I have thought about doing for a while now, but never pulled the trigger on. Well, after saving up $200 in Best Buy reward zone gift certificates, I figured the time was right. Plus, with the all the podcasts and other projects I'm currently involved in, I justified getting it to help out with with everything I'm doing in further establishing my brand in this crazy space known as the Internet.

Also, I'm a tech nerd and love having as many gadgets and toys as possible. I work hard, and I like to play hard. I'm also a gamer, in case you couldn't tell, and why not add another gaming device to my repertoire of systems to play games on? If there is anything this particular blog and project need, it's diversity, right?

So tonight, I'll write about playing a game on my iPad for the first time in this Year of Gaming that I have embarked on. Granted, this isn't the first game I've played on my iPad (Candy Crush may end up being the death of me), but it is the best looking game I've tried out on it thus far. I'm talking about Dead Trigger, and while I think it is usually $.99 in the App Store, it just happened to be free today when I randomly stumbled upon it this morning while browsing. If all awesome games like this were free, my wallet would be really happy by the end of the year, that's for sure.

And yes, this is an awesome game. Well, for the most part that is. The graphics are absolutely stunning, especially on the new retina display of the iPad. Seriously, it's hard to remember that this is an iPad game while playing it, because it looks like it could easily be a console game. There is lighting and shading effects, great textures and rendering - pretty much everything you would expect for a retail game. The zombies themselves look fantastic and realistic as well, except for those glowing eyes of theirs. Unless of course real zombies have glowing yellow eyes, in which case, they nailed it. 

Depth wise, it's pretty shallow and not much to it. Just go level to level, mowing down all zombies in your path until you reach the end or the hoard stops coming at you, using a wide variety of weapons that you can upgrade as you so choose. Some levels are move from point A to point B type of game play, and others are defend your position type, allowing you to set up turrets to assist. The zombies move pretty quickly and efficiently, and remind me a lot of the House of the Dead games in that aspect. Only a few good seconds to get clean shots off, so you better use your time wisely.

One major thing that did bug me - and this might be because I'm not used to gaming on an iPad - is the controls, or lack thereof. It's a FPS, so the left "joystick" on the screen moves you forward and backwards, and the right "joystick" swivels your point of view. But you also have the trigger and zoom-in and reload buttons on the right side as well, which makes looking around and shooting at the same time quite tricky. I've seen those arcade cabinets and peripherals that you can drop your iPad in to in order to add true joysticks to your gaming experiences. A game like this really makes me interested in one of those, to be totally honest. 

Dead Trigger really made me appreciate what the iPad is capable of, and I look forward to finding more diamonds in the rough like this one. But honestly, as much fun as I had with it, all it ultimately did was make me want to play some console games, if only for the controllers. 

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