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Infinity Blade gets beefy update as Epic Games boss hails iPad 2 games potential

Epic Games has released a whopping update for its Infinity Blade game for iPhone and iPad, with bags of new content. We've played the game on an iPad 2 already...

Stuart Dredge
2 min read

Already one of the standout games for iPhone and iPad, Infinity Blade has got a whopping great update with new arenas, enemies and items. But we're just as interested in how it will be adapted for Apple's new iPad 2, having played the game last night on the second-generation iOS tablet.

The update is an essential download for anyone who owns Infinity Blade. It includes ten new enemies to hack into bits, going by names such as the Wood Jester, the Iron Guard, the Plated Sorok and the Piers Morgan. Oh, sorry, not that last one.

There are also six new game arenas and a new 'Dungeon' environment to explore, plus more than 30 new rings, swords, shields, helmets and armour to kit your hero out. Alongside the update, publisher Epic Games has dropped the price of Infinity Blade to £1.79 until this Sunday.

But back to that iPad 2 angle. It's clear that the game, developed by Epic subsidiary Chair Entertainment, has struck a chord with Apple. It made a starring appearance in one of the promo videos shown by CEO Steve Jobs on-stage at last night's launch, and was one of the apps loaded on to the demonstration iPad 2 units at the hands-on session after the event.

We grabbed one of the demonstrators to give us a tour of the device's features, and after FaceTime, GarageBand and iMovie, Infinity Blade was the next thing he fired up, explaining that the beefier A5 processor is ideally suited to rich 3D games like this. Naturally, when we played, the game looked the same, because it hasn't been optimised for the new hardware. Not yet, anyway.

Epic Games boss Mark Rein spoke to VentureBeat last night, and was hugely enthusiastic about what iPad 2 means for this kind of game running the company's Unreal Engine 3.

"It's fantastic for gaming -- you saw nine times more graphical power," he said. "Unreal Engine 3 can already take advantage of every bit of that... More detail, more textures, more shaders... potentially more physics, more enemies on the screen, a wider view of the environment..."

We're excited about this week's Infinity Blade update, but count us doubly excited about the first update post-iPad 2 release. For now, here's Rein in full flow on the joys of iPad 2: