Gameloft’s pirate-tastic BackStab has weighed anchor in the iTunes App Store. The 3D adventure game had previously served with the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play for a brief (and exclusive) sojourn but is now available for iDevices running iOS 4 or above.
One of the best mobile games we’ve played, BackStab puts you in the boots of one Henry Blake, a once loyal servant of His Majesty’s Royal Navy fighting the Spanish before an unfortunate series of events puts him on the path of revenge. Oooh arrr missus.
It both looks and plays a lot like Gameloft’s reworking of Assassin’s Creed for mobiles, featuring rooftop leaping, sword swinging and button mashing action.
As well as cutting down foes with your cutlass, you can devastate foes with chains of combos or sneak in close for an, ahem, stealthy stab in the back. It’s safe to say that there’s a fair amount of claret in this game.
Thankfully, there are some third and first person shooting bits included to break up the action. In the introductory sequence you get to take fend off a pair of Spanish galleons with a cannon and you’ve also got a matchlock pistol at your disposal for picking off out of reach enemies.
Henry Blake also has the ability to run up and scale walls (again, a la Assassin’s Creed) and evade foes by leaping across rooftops.
You pretty much get free reign to roam across the shores and cities of a Caribbean island, giving the game a sandbox/free roaming feel. It’s a rare treat to play a mobile game that offers such as sense of scope and adventure, but BackStab seems to pull this off effortlessly.
Despite BackStab debuting on the Xperia Play – an Android phone – we’ve yet to see BackStab arriving in the Android Market. You can however purchase an Android version of BackStab HD over on Gameloft’s site – hit up the Android app link at the bottom of this article.
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