Picture yourself exploring the halls of a great medieval citadel. The cobblestone streets are littered with baskets of fresh fruit, the trees sway gently in the afternoon breeze, and the towers of a great keep reach to the blue sky above, threatening to touch the clouds. While beautifully kept, the citadel itself seems to be vacant, yet somehow still full of life. Curious to find the inhabitants, you navigate your way to the centre of the citadel, stumbling upon a beautiful, ornate fountain. You approach the fountain, hoping to taste its fresh waters, when – uh-oh, Bloor-Yonge Station, that’s your stop!
Such a scenario could occur when engaged with Epic Citadel, the iPhone app developed and published by Epic Games as an interactive demonstration of Unreal Engine 3 for Apple’s iPhone. The app – which I’m hesitant to call a game at this point, seeing as how it’s more-or-less a tech demo – drops you in the middle of a medieval citadel, completely rendered in gorgeous 3D graphics, and grants you the freedom to explore. The citadel is completely uninhabited, so there are no characters or creatures to interact with, but the citadel itself is beautiful and full of life.
The visual quality of the demo needs to be seen to be believed, a testament to the flexibility and power of UE3. The stone and rock textures found throughout the citadel benefit greatly from bump-mapping, enhancing them with a host of intricate details. Furthermore, the architecture makes use of normal mapped surfaces, which allow the engine to create details without having to render additional polygons. However, what really makes this demo come to life is the lighting.
Epic Citadel makes use of Unreal Engine 3’s built-in global illumination system, known as Unreal Lightmass, to provide realistic lighting and shadows, and with minimal hardware strain, to boot. The mid-day lighting found in the demo is on par with games such as Oblivion and Dragon Age: Origins, minus the blown out bloom effects used in both. The demo also makes use of real-time reflections, which blew me away the first time I saw them. Using the environment-mapping capabilities of the engine, the floor of the citadel’s cathedral reflects your surroundings in real-time. It’s jaw-dropping.
But as beautiful as it is, how does the demo control? Like most first-person games on the iPhone, Epic Citadel uses analog stick emulation, and as someone that typically hates that control scheme, I can tell you that it worked well. However, I still find that my thumbs obscure too much of the picture, which is even less excusable now that I have such gorgeous graphics to admire. Thankfully, Epic has included a means of navigating the environment that I found quite intuitive, and far less obscuring. If you tap a location on the screen, Epic Citadel will place an arrow marker at that location, near or far, and make your character walk there. While traveling to your destination, you can swipe the screen to the left or right to observe (and admire) your surroundings.
The Epic Citadel demo is very impressive, and a wonderful example of what Unreal Engine 3 is capable of on the iPhone. However, a tech demo is just that, a demo. What will ultimately determine the success of the engine is how developers choose to use it on this new platform. Epic themselves have already announced Project Sword, the codename for an Unreal Engine 3-powered role-playing game they are currently developing for the iPhone. Will it be enough to convince hardcore gamers that the iPhone is the portable platform to beat? We shall see. In the meantime, the citadel awaits!
Richard Mitchell is a video game addict living in Toronto. He has been gaming for more than two decades, and despite multiple interventions, continues to game today. He has an Xbox 360, a PS3, a Wii, a Nintendo DS, a gaming PC, and a life, and does his best to juggle them all. 
You are right, looks very impressive
Looks even better in motion!
My only gripe, with such beautiful textures, scenary etc…it’s a shame you do not have the ability to play it as an RPG or adventure game…would be nice to interact with street vendors, inhabitants etc…
I’m going to assume that Project Sword will be very much like that. I’m guessing that we’ll see an Oblivion-esque action-RPG that uses swipes on the screen for sword slashes, etc. Perhaps even tilts of the iPhone for dodging and such.