Top 5 alternatives to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 on iPhone

This may be a rich and varied industry filled with a wide variety of platforms and genres for every kind of player, but this morning it’s all about one game.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is the most anticipated title of the year, racking up record pre-orders on sites like Amazon and featuring heavily not just in the blogosphere but on news sites, television, and radio. As Sensible Software once controversially observed, war has never been so much fun.

Unfortunately, it’s not out on iPhone. There were versions of Modern Warfare on DS and PSP, since when the iPhone has come up alongside those two as a third major handheld platform, giving us reason to be at least a little bit hopeful that our iDevices will see a version.

But for now we’re going to have to stand out in the cold, gazing in through the window while our home console cousins go off their heads on HD FPS soldier fun.

Don’t despair, however. If you’re travelling or without a PS3 or 360 on which to get your futuristic military violence fix, there are always alternatives.

Shooter: The Official Movie Game
Paramount

Everybody knows that the sniper rifle bits in games like Modern Warfare are the best, so Shooter strips away everything else.

Based on the movie of the same name, the game takes you through several levels of getting people between your crosshairs and driving bullets into their organs. As with most modern sniping simulators, natural bodily movement is your greatest enemy, and you can hold your breath for extra accuracy.

Poor presentation and a steep difficulty curve let this title down, but there’s a sort of logical reason for it to appear in this list: as Jon Mundy observed, every Call of Duty game plays like a shoddy action film, so why not include a game based on a shoddy action film?

WarMen
Frost 3D

The title says it all. Let’s break it down: “War” - conflict, guns, dirt, blood, violence, yeah!; and “Men” - not women, not boys, not vegetarians. Men. And not just men. WarMen. YEAH!

It’s a grunting, crotch-hoisting, tobacco-chewing, trash-talking gutpunch of a title, and the game itself fittingly resembles the great Gears of War series of bromantic home console gorefests, making it an ideal way to take your mind off the unattainable Modern Warfare 2.

WarMen cleverly takes the linearity of GoW one step further for the touchscreen format, making movement largely automatic. In fact, it plays rather like a dirty third-person Time Crisis. It’s only just out, but we’re expecting it to do well.

Brothers in Arms: Hour of Heroes
Gameloft

Dating back all the way to December 2008, this is a relatively old iPhone game, but it still largely stands up to modern scrutiny, and it belongs without doubt to the same species as Modern Warfare 2.

Dropping you in the commercially fertile territory of Europe and North Africa in 1944, Hour of Heroes is a war epic in the mould of previous Call of Duty, Medal of Honour, and indeed Brothers in Arms games on home consoles.

Hour of Heroes is less tactical than its home console big brothers, but it has an impressive variety of set-pieces and the action is unrelenting. Unfortunately, poor controls severely blight the combat, but if you can get past them this is a respectable source of military stimulation.

Resident Evil: Degeneration
Capcom

The bit of Modern Warfare 2 that everybody’s talking about is the infamous ‘airport level’. To protect the sensibilities of those who like surprises, I won’t expand on what that level entails, but if you’re hankering after some handheld airport-based carnage in lieu of the MW2’s shocking sequence, this should tide you over.

A part of one of gaming’s most venerable series, Resident Evil: Degeneration sees you guiding Leon Kennedy through an outbreak of the T-Virus at Harvardville airport, shooting the hapless victims in the face before they can spread it further.

It’s all over a bit too quickly, and there are minor issues with the upgrade system and controls, but this is still a worthwhile, award-worthy addition to the franchise and a great way to kill humans in an airport.

Modern Combat: Sandstorm
Gameloft

With a title like 'Modern Combat', this is the kind of game that your mum accidentally buys you when you send her out for Modern Warfare, and Gameloft has long had an incorrigible reputation for making games that pay homage to key franchises in much the same way as The Bootleg Beatles pay homage to The Beatles.

However, unlike cockamamie, mum-fooling, straight-to-DVD films called things like The Computer Matrix, Snakes on a Boat, and Resident Kane, Gameloft’s homages are typically excellent, and Sandstorm is no exception.

Set in the Middle East and involving a series of hackneyed scenarios that ultimately call for you to kill terrorists, Modern Combat is a tightly paced experience with excellent controls and superb action. If you’re looking for some contemporary military hi-jinks on iPhone, this is pretty much as good as it gets.

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