And, as is so often true, you’ll probably end up playing it far longer than a glitzy action-fest. Illusion Labs’s Labyrinth 2 HD may not seem like the best game to show off the new iPad, but its clean, well-defined visuals are a surprisingly good benchmark for quite how far the screen has come in this tablet iteration. The game includes 30 licensed cars and 15 locations. It’s among the most realistic racing games available on iOS, with advanced modelling of your car’s behaviour that no arcade-y racer can come close to. If you haven’t yet experienced Real Racing 2 HD, you’re missing out.
Although car and background textures don’t seem to have been given a full update to make best use of the quad-core processor and ultra-high-def screen yet, Firemint has upped the resolution of polygons to the full 2,048 x 1,536 resolution, while incorporating 4x anti-aliasing for that perfectly smooth look. Quick off the starting blocks, Firemint has already updated its brilliant, realistic driving game Real Racing 2 HD to support the iPad’s new Retina display.
It also supports online multiplayer over Wi-Fi, and will stream to an Apple TV box over AirPlay. You’ll do battle with other planes, as well as ground targets. Sky Gamblers is an aerial combat game in which you pilot high-performance jets using the accelerometer built into the iPad tablet. If you want a game to show off the capabilities of the new iPad right now, this is it. As well as making use of the new iPad’s fantastic 2,048 x 1,536 pixel resolution, the game boasts great water effects, HDR lighting, anisotropic filtering and reams of other fancy graphic effects. Released just before the launch, it’s the new tablet’s key “launch title”.
It’s the one game that’s not yet available to download in our round-up, but is certainly worth keeping an eye out for.Īnother great showcase for the iPad’s quad-core processor is Namco’s Sky Gamblers: Air Supremacy. Interestingly, this title is made by Epic Games rather than Chair Entertainment, which produced the last two games in the series. However it may still boast a mainly gesture-based control scheme. Where Infinity Blade and Infinity Blade II were gesture-based one-on-one fighters, this seems to be a more traditional top-down hack ‘n’ slash affair – looking a bit like Diablo. However, it’s completely different from the previous games. Shown off as the new iPad “flagship” game during the tablet’s unveiling, it looks as though once again Infinity Blade will define what the iPad is capable of visually. Here are the ones you should check out, pronto. Several publishers have already released games that make use of the extra hardware of the new model. Matched with the higher-than-1080p resolution screen and Airplay video streaming, both the Sony Vita and current-gen consoles should be scared. The quad-core GPU of the new iPad means it’ll be able to churn out some seriously impressive visuals.