iDracula – iPhone/iPod Touch App Review

Considering that I’ve never done a review before on this site and the recent purchase of my iPod Touch, it is only fitting that I begin tackling reviews with this extraordinary device.

Bring on those undead bastards

First off, this app is a bargain and as of writing is priced at 59 pence (99 cents in the US) and I definitely urge you to download it.

I had seen iDracula’s app icon before and it didn’t really stun me or speak out to me, this may have been because I hadn’t seen any of the game-play. Thankfully to the joys of Twitter and Threevue (the much more efficient blogger than yours truly) I was informed of iDracula, so not having dropped some pennies for an app in a few days I chose to delve into vampire hunting.

iDracula is the iPod’s pleasant cousin to COD:WAW’s Nazi Zombies or GoW2 Horde mode, there is no back-story and really there shouldn’t be contrary to a lot of the reviews on the App Store. What you do have are two modes: Survival and Rush.

Survival is your typical start with few; end with thousands of monsters mauling your face off and using your entrails as a scarf deal (or that’s how it works out for me usually.) In Survival you begin with a pistol and several werewolves which can easily be fought off yet gradually more and more will appear, thankfully the dead beasts which you have slain will drop items in the form of ammo and weapons to help with your predicament. The aim of Survival is to obviously survive but you’ll find this easier said then done especially when the little head crab lookalikes start getting faster and the vampire pops up, prepare to run around screaming like a little girl. To aid you you’ll also gain perks which have special abilities such as running faster, weapons pushing monsters back further or more points per kill.

Rush however does not include the perks or different weapons, instead you are launched into a full on attack of werewolves armed with a Gatling gun with infinite ammo. Bitchin’

Now onto the more technical aspects. Considering that you’re going to have at least 25 – 35 monsters on screen at once it’s surprising that there isn’t any frame-rate slowdown and with the quality of the animation it is downright amazing what is on show, all this entwined with impressive sound effects really make this app stand out from the crowd. Graphical, iDracula is stunning with it’s own style of monsters instead of the typical generic cut-outs like many games on the market try to pass off and a good array of enemies keep it fresh.

You’ll be controlling your Vampire Hunter by two D-pad wheels in the lower corners of the screen, the left controlling your movement and the right aiming and firing your weapon. The controls work in a multitude of ways you can either spin them to where you want or use it like a standard D-pad and still get the desired effect.

The only gripes I have with iDracula is in Survival Mode there is no telling when you have advanced a level (not too sure if the perks are level ups) a simple change of music or subtle notification would really help to keep you aware of this, hopefully this will be rectified in any future updates. Also, with the control wheels on both sides it prohibits being able to see incoming enemies which then forces you to use the radar (kinda hard when your slaying like a mofo)

In terms of multiplayer, there is none and I’m thinking it would be pretty hard for a two-player session, but you never know. However in a future update I would very much like to see leader-boards or a challenge feature.

For 59 pence (99 cents) this is a worthwhile purchase, so grab it whilst you can before the update including a new mode, levels, creatures and a weapon, with the update comes a new and larger price tag. Grab it here