Graal Zone+

The inherently connective nature of the iPhone was something of a tease right from the start. It filled heads with ideas that were too tempting to speak out loud; too exciting to even contemplate for fear of building up hopes of an iPhone MMO. Not unlike a lap dancer who won't come out of the shadows, and you're worried that when she does, she'll have a moustache.

So it's no surprise that there was an unseen, chaotic dash in the background of handheld game development to be the first to pin the golden MMO rosette to an iPhone game's lapel, and Graal Zone+ got there first. Unfortunately, when it came out of the shadows and we got a good look at it, it had a big old handlebar tache.

You take control of an unidentified, knife-wielding army dude dropped into the midst of an equally unexplained battlefield. The maps are built on an 2D isometric view with bases, walls, and barricades giving shape to the land. Capturing all of these bases is the objective, done by hoofing it across the map with weapons in tow.

Entering a base is enough to claim it as your own, though maintaining it as the enemy begins to spread certainly isn't easy. Too often, however, these simple mechanics of running between bases becomes a laborious game of chase. In an effort to maximise playing time, accessing a base requires circumventing long walls and barricades, looking for a ladder or gap in the scenery. It's time consuming, but works in favour of defenders who can utilize these bottlenecks to their advantage.

You can pick up a couple of different weapons on your travels thanks to air drops that parachute munitions into the field at random intervals. With grenades, a photon gun, and the introductory knife, you're pretty much equipped for any occasion. Hitting icons lining the right side of the screen activates each weapon – simple enough to be effective, though it'd be nice to know how many grenades or shots you've got left.

The competitive player-versus-player game kicks off in a public hub. Once you've found an active game (represented by a teleporter, of sorts), you can attempt to join the real-time fighting. More often than not, the games with enough online players to make them entertaining are full (or unbalanced), and you're denied access.

The next game along invariably seems quite empty, so there's an almost unavoidable sensation of missing all the action. You're welcome to wait around the hub to get in on a busy match, but that's unlikely to be the kind of entertainment you were hoping for in the iPhone's first MMO.

The consistently low number of players on a map at any given time means you'll be spaced far enough apart that the game becomes a shallow exercise in swapping bases, until you finally meet the enemy or give up the chase. Neither is it uncommon to win a map without firing a single shot, as a quick-footed and lonely Graal warrior can get to bases while the enemy is still bouncing off the walls in the hub.

The game system also suffers from a stuttering frame-rate as battles get going. Crossing paths with an enemy is easy enough should you choose to hunt them down, but once you come face to face their movements are hardly smooth. Other players seem to jump around the map sporadically – the system apparently unable to relay their movements with any kind of continuity.

This means that landing a grenade or photon blast on them is a matter of some anticipation and a lot of guesswork. It's clear from the sporadic, disorderly movements of the other players that the frame rate and control problems are affecting everyone, so at least the playing field is level.

Before the August 10th update, Graal Zone+ used the accelerometer to control the wee-soldiers' movements, which showed promise despite being badly tuned. The upgrade switched controls to an onscreen version of a directional pad in the bottom left corner, while weapons fire is still activated by touching the relevant icon on the right of the display.

While you can, with enough grating practice, train your thumb to hit these small buttons, you'll still find your character veering off diagonally as you accidentally drift onto the left or right buttons while moving up or down. This irksome control system isn't a particularly big deal while traversing the map, but causes some serious irritation when it comes to climbing up and down the narrow ladders or trying to line yourself up with the flickering ghost of an enemy player. A choice between the original accelerometer controls (assuming they were given a decent enough programming overhaul) and the D-pad system would be preferable.

Try as you might, the game is difficult to enjoy due to the course edges around the basic gameplay. There have been a lot of updates, from menus to controls, and it's not difficult to see what Eurocenter is attempting to achieve. Perhaps, if these updates keep coming, they might eventually sculpt a decent online game from the rubble that currently constitutes Graal Zone+. Whether anyone who's tried this version will still be around to play it is a different matter.