Modern Combat: Sandstorm Review for iPhone and iPod Touch

If you’re a fan of the Call of Duty Modern Warfare series for Xbox 360, then look no further. Gameloft has finally released their version of a first person shooter called Modern Combat: Sandstorm for the iPhone and iPod Touch. My first impression? Holy… crap!

Modern Combat: Sandstorm tosses you into the heat of modern combat and battle. You are assigned to “Mission Sandstorm”, where you must eliminate all terrorists and insurgents within the area. The game features 10 missions in Middle Eastern environments including a city, hospital, sewer, ship port, laboratory, training camp, and more. The game opens up with an awesome movie inspired trailer, taking you to the training course in which you must complete before the missions begin. Once complete, you are dropped off via chopper to begin taking down the cellular towers in the area. There are 4 difficulty levels to choose from (easy, normal, hard, and extreme- but extreme is locked initially) and a wide selection of weapons which include 2 assault rifles, sniper rifle, RPG, shotgun, submachine gun, light machine gun, heavy machine gun mounted on a 4×4, explosive and flashbang grenades, and a radiation detector.

My game testing was with an iPhone 3GS. The extra CPU and memory helped load each mission fairly quickly (within 10 seconds) at a full 30 frames per second graphics rate. The graphics and animations of Modern Combat are incredibly smooth, some of the best seen on the iPhone 3GS to date. Blood splatter animations from enemies are also very realistic. The game’s frame rate drops slightly when encountering multiple enemies at once but not by much (at least on my 3GS).

Game controls are crucial when it comes to first person shooting games and as with the others, your fingers will consume a chunk of the screen on either side. Moving your character around is controlled by a thumb stick and visibility is controlled by right finger gesture control (sliding up and down, left and right). Sometimes when I moved around a lot, my fingers got bunched together but the controls are easy enough to regain control and point your character in the right direction. A cool alternative option (possibly in a future update?) would be accelerometer based controls for either moving left and right or viewing.

As an extension to game controls, there is an auto targeting feature built into the game making it a little easier to kill enemies. You do still have to be within a decent range of your foe to kill him though. Loading and reloading your gun is operated by a single click on your gun type, located in the upper right hand corner of the screen. Using the sight (or aim) of the gun is controlled with an aiming icon in the lower right corner of the screen as well. I found that strafing left and right while shooting was the most effective way of killing the enemy, rather than locking onto each target one by one. One missing feature is the ability to run. While you can crouch (bottom left button on screen), the ability to toggle it once more and enable running would be a great feature. Fans of the Call of Duty Modern Warfare series will be driven nuts by this..like myself, as we are used to running constantly on console games.

The game’s soundtrack is realistic with cinematic scenes, military voice overs, explosions, and a “Nintendo 64 Goldeneye 007-esque” heavy breathing sound effect when you’re being shot at, followed by a bloody screen letting you know you’re being shot at.

Overall, Modern Combat: Sandstorm is a very exciting first person shooter game for the iPhone and iPod Touch. As a Call of Duty Modern Warfare console fan, Modern Combat: Sandstorm proves itself as a perfect FPS shooter filler for the iPhone for anyone looking to shoot-em-up offline. Hopefully additions of multiplayer WiFi are added in future updates, as this game will be the next best thing to hit the iPhone.

Tips

1. Strafing left and right while shooting works best while attempting to kill enemies. Selecting each individual target will get you shot at more.
2. Don’t go full retard. You’ll want to remember the great scene “Don’t die on me Foley!” from Tropic Thunder before jumping into battle. Use common sense and don’t run out into the middle of the arena or you’ll be quickly killed.
3. Watch your fingers. If you have larger fingers like myself, you’ll want to make sure you keep them to the sides of the screen. Often I found myself bunching them together in the center and having to readjust in the middle of gameplay.
4. Keep your weapon loaded. Before you go jumping into an area with 10 enemies, reload your weapon. Reload times will kill you in the middle of battle.

Recommendation

I would recommend Modern Combat: Sandstorm to any first person shooter, Call of Duty, action thriller fans that own an iPhone or iPod Touch. While the game is a bit pricier at $6.99, the investment of the perfect offline FPS is worth the buy.

Gameplay Video (trailer from Gameloft)

Photos

Please post your comments, tips, and your own reviews below in the comments area!

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