Ryan Mitchell's Mission Europa on iOS
There's a guy I would like to introduce here because I find that his passion for game development is amazing. This guy is Ryan Mitchell, the designer-artist-developer behind one-man outfit Banshee Soft.
Ryan Mitchell is special because he's an iOS developer making never-seen-before games that I wanted to play the first moment I heard from them.
Ryan Mitchell's latest game on the AppStore is Mission Europa. It's a FPS-RPG. With a lot of loot. It's huge!
Just to give you an idea of how big it is, it has 5 episodes featuring 170 missions, randomized levels, hundreds of items, crafting, spells (including invocations)...
The graphic don't look best of the best but I like them because they are unique, and you might be happy to learn that it runs on most iOS devices.
What is truly amazing is when you learn that Ryan Mitchell made the game 99% by himself, during his free time, over the period of 1.5 year.
Mission Europa is really special because it feels basically like a PC game on the iPhone.
You can customize most of the UI, drag and drop skills in slots, open, drag and close windows. It can feel a bit cluttered at time, but overall, if you are a gamer, it's actually refreshing. It feels like there's none of the usual limitations of usual games that are made to please a very large audience.
Here, you will probably die quite a few time during boss encounters, and you'll have to think a lot by yourself about what is the best strategy to take down enemies. There are melee weapons, ranged weapons, spells, invocations. Equipment schematics can be found so that you can craft pieces of armor (for legs, feet, arms, head, body, etc.)
The minimum gameplay time announced is 50 hours, and I guess there is enough for much more actually, and this is without mentioning the multiplayer arena mode.
You feel hardcore? Then go for it!
Game's official site:
http://www.missioneuropagame.com/
iTunes link:
Collector version
Free version
(if you like the Free version, go for the Collector version. The Standard version is not really worth it in comparison).
A good video review (actually it was a preview) of the game by AppSpy:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zc_BH-pXIZY
Image source: Mission Europa official website.