With more than 10 million monthly players between Facebook and the Mac app store, Cmune’s UberStrike is one of the most popular first-person shooters you may have never heard of. Today’s free-to-play move to iPad and Tegra 3 tablets should make it a little harder to ignore.
It’ll be interesting to see how more discerning tablet gamers react to UberStrike, a highly capable but not very pretty first-person shooter, especially considering they’ll be playing with touch controls against folks doing it up mouse-and-keyboard style. I would think a touch-based control scheme, no matter how advanced, would be inferior to traditional FPS controls. Cmune co-founder and UberStrike chief architect Shaun Lelacheur Sales tells us it’s a pretty close battle.
“We were worried tablet players would get crushed by web players so we segregated servers to protect tablet players. But during recent tests at tablet LAN parties with the agile control scheme we designed, iPad and Android users could hold their ground fairly well! A few more steps in that direction and we will have a truly cross-platform game.”
I hopped on the iPad version earlier today, and found myself in a gigantic map meant for eight players (the game recommends mobile players stick to a max of six for stability’s sake). I saw maybe one of my opponents the entire time I played — this was a really large map.
I did manage to kill that one person twice, so the game shows promise.
Get UberStrike on iPad or Tegra 3 and try it out for yourself.
Leave a Reply