Warpgate for iPhone

For iPhone from Freeverse, $7.99

In some strange, unexpected way... my dreams came true

Just last week I was talking about how I bad I want Escape Velocity for the iPhone. I swear to God. Just check the MacGamer Twitter feed. I was all ready to march down to Rochester NY and camp on Ambrosia's front door step until they gave in... and then I received a little something called "Warpgate" from Freeverse. After installing it on my iPhone, I canceled my plans and put away my pup tent.

Those of you who know Freeverse will know that they have been a staple of the Mac gaming universe for a long, long time... and have also made a very successful jump into iPhone game publishing. With their recent acquisition by Ngmoco, they only promise to drive their stake deeper into the iPhone market. It's my personal opinion that many of the best iPhone games you'll see in the next few years will come from their brain trust. It's also my personal feeling that Warpgate is an important part of the vanguard.

Little fish, big pond

Warpgate plops you into the cockpit of a space ship in the middle of nowhere. You have a few modest weapons, a bit of storage space and some good, old-fashioned gumption. The galaxy you're floating around in is under the control of four factions: The true-blue Nation States of Earth, the fundamentalist Ecclesiarchy, the nefarious Artaxerxes, and the arrogant Adelaide. There's also a rabble of grumpy pirates who comprise their own faction, and play a part in the universe (often as pawns of more powerful factions). When you begin, you're a small fish in an extremely big pond of various parties who have clear agendas for the galaxy. And, eventually, for you.

Getting around the galaxy is a bit too much for your ship to do without help, and so warp gates are installed here and there to help you cross great distances in relatively little time. Essentially, you hop from one star system to another via the gates and, once you're there, you can visit planets to buy gear, trade commodities, upgrade your ship and receive missions. While tooling around in space, you can also do some mining of raw resources from drifting asteroids, and later sell them.

Thing is: A big, sprawling world with warp gates isn't a game, which is why you will be approached early on by parties who want you to do some jobs for them. These missions/quests/tasks/whatever are standard carrot-and-stick fare, where you're told to go to X place, do Y thing, and return for Z reward. To be fair, Warpgate does well at giving the missions flavor and variety (in contrast with, say, the starter quests in a game like World of Warcraft, which often tend to be very flavorless). This is, however, the mechanic of how the game advances; do a job, get a reward, get back out there and do more.

The ultimate endgame for the quest lines has to do with reputation in the Warpgate universe. As you do certain missions, you will gain and lose reputation with various factions. As all the available territory in the game is controlled by one faction or another, this puts you in a position where your actions decide which regions are hostile to you and which are friendly. There's a lot of room for you to massage and direct your game experience this way, as you usually get to make choices about which factions you will and won't become friends or enemies with. This also adds to the replay value of the game in many ways, as you can go back and explore forks in the storyline that you didn't take the first time.

Warpgate can only be described as a game that feels like an MMORPG (massive multiplayer online role playing game) but isn't; The huge world to explore, the endless quests to complete, the persistent non-player characters and the "endless" nature of the gameplay where the point isn't to win, but the play itself. While it's a presently single-player experience, I can't imagine a game like this could be made without Freeverse having at least considered the potential for massive multiplayer features, but there's a certain perfection in this iteration. I think that negotiating meaningful player-to-player communication in a game of this type using an iPhone interface would be extremely complicated, so I prefer Warpgate as it is. Still, that MMORPG feeling of exploration, new surprises, new achievements, developing a character as you plumb deeper into the game... it's a lot of fun and lends Warpgate longevity.

Behind the wheel

As I've already hinted, there's no way to discuss Warpgate without giving a nod to a Mac gaming classic: Escape Velocity (and its sequels) from Ambrosia Software. In the late 90's and early 00's, this was an unrivaled Mac-centric classic. Escape Velocity and Warpgate share nearly identical gameplay frameworks and it's obvious that the latter is something of an homage to the former. I don't think anyone at Freeverse would have the marbles to deny it. In fact, I bet they'd probably brag about it.

They aren't identical games, however. Not by a long shot.

Warpgate is, without question, a modern game for the iPhone, which is a modern gaming platform. And it shows. The graphics are quite lovely, both artistically and technically, and I'm particularly taken by how the 3D graphics are both functional and beautiful. The game is lovely to look at, but there's a great economy in how the visual assets are placed so that the doo-dads on the screen are there to help you find your way through the game and not just to make you say "ooh" and "ahh". This is important, as the novelty of shining things wears off after 20+ hours of gameplay and those extras which are thrown in just for show become an annoyance more than a treat.

Though it gets a mention late in the review, no discussion of Warpgate would be complete without appropriate kudos for the positively stellar work done on the in-game controls. This is one of the biggest challenges for a game on the iPhone (which lacks dedicated controls for any of its software) and, frankly, most iPhone games can only manage "good enough". Warpgate's controls shine because they make very elegant use of the iPhone input system. Gentle taps and swipes move your ship around, allow you to cruise, dock, maneuver and interact with the world without having to introduce UI elements into the screen which block your view and require you to hit the screen with great precision (which isn't easy). Instead, Warpgate feels like an iPhone game... and if there was an award for Game Controls on the iPhone, this would be the game to claim the prize.

Ironically, this leads me to one of my chief complaints about Warpgate... and it's odd, because I'm so fond of the controls. What I didn't like was how the camera is somewhat constrained. You can rotate the camera around the X axis (i.e. left and right turning), you can zoom very closely in and very far out, but that's all. This game really needs to rotate the camera on the Z axis (i.e. tilt it up and down in front of you). The roughly 16:10 ratio of the iPhone makes the fixed Z axis rather constrictive. There are times when I wanted to get a look at what's in front of my ship and I had to zoom out to do so when I would have much rather just tilted the camera a little to take a peek. When you get the zoom level "just right" so you can see as much as possible while objects are still large enough for you to select them, it's a drag to zoom out just so you can get a look around.

While I'm on the subject of things I don't like, Warpgate loses big points for the use of music.  It's the same mistake developers make every day: A "song" is not the same thing as a "soundtrack". As a result, the same  Heavens-Parting, Hand-On-Heart, Valkyries-Descending-From-The-Sky overture plays on an endless loop unless you turn it off. It's hard to bash Warpgate too much for this, however, as you can navigate into your own music collection and pick whatever soundtrack you like. This is a great help when you want to let a surly pirate know that, yes, your milkshake does actually bring all the boys to the yard.

You might be wondering why there's been no comment on the Warpgate combat system before now and, frankly, it's because there's not much to say. This is less of a criticism and more of a caveat; Warpgate appears at first to be a combat-intensive game, but it isn't. When you switch into "combat mode" (a discrete mode which is separate from tooling-around-looking-at-stuff mode), your ship is mostly on autopilot and you're only required to hit the "fire" button as many times as the game will allow. In fact, so long as you don't hesitate to press "fire" when the button turns green, your combat engagements seem to be mathematically pre-decided before you even begin. Skill has almost no bearing upon the outcome. Again, this isn't a criticism, as not every game requires complex, in-depth combat systems to be fun. It's not even about how Freeverse could have done "better" in this area but, rather, that they could have done "more". Whether or not that lessens the gameplay value will be up to the taste of the individual.

In through the gate...

It's a trite matter to simply say "this game isn't for everyone", because no game is "for everyone". That having been said, Warpgate nestles comfortably into a niche that no other iPhone game seems to even approach. It's got longevity, it's got character, and it's got a feel which strikes a fantastic balance between several game types. Whatever criticisms can be leveled against it are minor and, for the most part, easily compensated for by adjusting settings or play style. It's a particularly strong iPhone game because, unlike Mac games, mobile games are meant to be played in bite-sized chunks and not for hours at a time. Warpgate makes it easy to pop in for ten minutes, squeeze off a few missions, and then put it away. At the same time, if you want to sit down and put in 3 solid hours at a time, it'll easily rise to the challenge of keeping you entertained. I'd be interested in seeing if Freeverse will release expansions for Warpgate. It'd easily adapt well to downloadable content - more ships, more planets, more factions, etc. Seeing as the key to Warpgate is its ability to keep offering you something new, more is more. As mentioned earlier, a multiplayer element could potentially be fun, but I would hope that Freeverse will resist the urge to add it for its own sake, as Warpgate strikes such a lovely and hard-to-achieve balance between the MMORPG experience and a good single-player game. In fact, it's an excellent example of how old-school gaming (and by that I mean "single player") can be worth ten times what you spend on it.

 Warpgate is scheduled for release on April 8 and can be found on the iTunes App Store