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Category: Third-person shooter
Seller: Artificial Life, Inc.
Requirements: iPhone OS 3.0 or later
Compatibility: iPhone and iPod touch
File Size: 100MB
Version Reviewed: 1.0.2
Price: $3.99 (free lite version available)
Age Rating: 9+

Movie tie-ins generally suck when it comes to gaming. They’re often made cheaply, they’re rushed through production to drop on or before the movie release date, and they’re often hampered by restrictions on story and characters that may not be conducive to gaming. In the case of Pandorum for the iPhone, it may be the opposite. Here’s a game that’s likely more enjoyable than the movie on which it’s based.

Pandorum is, at its most basic, an over-the-shoulder shooter like Resident Evil 4. The controls, however, try to be a bit more ambitious. You have a d-pad on the left for moving forward, backward, left and right, and a slide on the right to turn. These behave digitally, so each movement is like a hop instead of a step. Control, therefore, feels clunky and makes combat frustrating. It baffles me why developers don’t just embrace auto-lock in shooters so you can spend more time…you know…shooting, and less time lining up the shot. Worse, the positioning of the buttons often requires you to cover up the screen, and the buttons sometimes get in the way of where you should be tapping.

The developers compensate for the shoddy controls by offering up plenty of health containers. Oh, and insanity inhibitor vials. Why those? Because…well, let me backtrack.

As in the film, your character—Corporal Bower—is trapped on a spaceship in deep space. Bad things are about, and you have no idea why. In fact, you have no idea of pretty much anything, since you’ve lost your memory. The story says you, Lieutenant Payton and Nadia the scientist are amongst the few survivors on the Elysium heading to a new world. But things went wrong, as they’re bound to do, and now you’re fighting off mutant enemies in an effort to restore power to the ship and head home.

So, the combination of fighting for your life on a giant spaceship with little memory of who you are or why you’re there might make you go a little insane. Too much insane, and you die, which seems odd, but who am I to question the Pandorum? All that matters is that control scheme aside, this is a top-notch game.

Pandorum features excellent graphics. The characters are jagged, but that’s expected on the iPhone, and only really noticeable with your character. The enemies move so quickly that’ll you either have killed them or have been killed before you can complain about the way they look. The lighting effects are nice, and the environments are creepy enough to keep you a bit nervous throughout. There are also some really good “startle” moments that could prove embarrassing if you play this in public. I recommend headphones for the full effect.

Pandorum is also notable for taking full advantage of the in app purchase feature. For an additional $0.99 you can buy bigger weapons, a more protective outfit, and even better visual effects, which just seems strange to me. It harkens back to a time when adventure games contained such impossible and random puzzles that they seemed designed specifically to make you call those 900 number hint lines. Will developers start making games so difficult that you can’t finish them without paying extra money for upgrades?

I’m not saying that’s what the developers of Pandorum have done, but the lack of checkpoints and save options in the first release seemed weird. Thankfully, progress saves have since been added, as well as an extended final scene. That sounds to me like they did, in fact, push the game out the door before it was ready, but no matter. That update, at least, was free.

And so, clunky controls aside, Pandorum is a very impressive entry in the shooter genre on the iPhone and iPod touch. I was expecting junky shovelware and instead ended up with an effective horror/survival game that’s big on action, puzzles and scares, and looks great all the while. It’ll startle, impress and frustrate you all at once, and is ultimately a satisfying iPhone gaming experience. You don’t need to see the movie in order to enjoy Pandorum (I haven’t), you just need to have a will to survive and a willingness to be uneasy with what’s going on in front of you.