It’s been a long time since I’ve been excited about games on my Sidekick. Recently they released Monopoly: Here and Now, a pretty great rendition of the game, though all the traditional names have been changed (instead of Boardwalk, you have Times Square. Meh) it still plays like the original with a pretty surprising number of options. But enough of that…

I downloaded Axion 3D and I’m like ok great I’m totally setting myself up to be disappointed, since the original action games for the Sidekicks have been about as fun as playing freeze tag with a starving lion. But I took a chance and lo and behold, the game is actually pretty solid! But before I link a preview of it, lets keep a few things in mind:

1) It’s the Sidekick, not exactly a powerhouse in mobile computing. It’s rockin’ an ARM 200 mHz processor, so you’re not going to see Half Life 2 in 1280×720. In fact, you probably won’t even see one pixel from Half Life 2 in 1280×720. So yeah, keep that in mind.

2) It’s going to be Wolfenstein quality, so judge it based off of that. Anything past Wolfenstein (Doom, UT, Quake, etc.) should not be held as comparable titles.

3) It’s the Sidekick.

With that said, take a look.

The Sidekick actually works pretty good as a controller. It’s naturally FPS friendly with it’s dual “stick” controls, the D pad on the left controlling movement and the trackball on the right controlling “aiming”, and when I say aiming, I mean turning left and right.

This game reminds me why the old 2D faux-3D games were a little bit scary…the controls were not as smooth and there are numerous ways to get blindsided by enemies hidden in corners. Because of the game’s limitation, like Absolute Zero for the Sega Genesis, you get scared because you walk into a room, everything is cool, but then HEY LOOK OUT THERE WAS A KILLER ROBOT IN THAT CORNER, HE’S KILLING YOU, DIDN’T YOU SEE HIM!?!? No, you didn’t see him, because of the arcaic rendering of 2D graphics made to look 3D, it’s easy to neglect corners and alleyways because all the drab graphics blend together and start looking like one big wall unless you look at it at the right angle. Ah well.

Overall, the game is pretty great, for what it’s worth. Pound for pound it’s my favorite game for the Sidekick to date, and certainly worth checking out if you have one. Of course, there’s no headshots in the game, which is a bummer.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 15th, 2007 at 10:21 am and is filed under Action, FPS, PDA/Smartphone, Portable, Reviews, Sidekick Game Review, Wireless. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.