Frozen Synapse for iPad is now on the Apple Appy App Store, waiting to be bought for £4.99 / €5.99 / $6.99. None of our business, you might say, and you’d be right. Tablets are a bit like PCs with really nice zoom functionality and wi-fi connectivity that just happens, but even as I write that I realise they’re nothing like PCs at all. Even so, two things are now true:-
a) Any friend in possession of one of Apple’s false idols is ripe for persuading into cross-platform SWAT team antics.
b) Even in a power cut, you can still finish your turn.
Here’s a quote ripped directly from Mode 7’s press release, because they’re funnier than I am:
“I could not be more excited that Frozen Synapse has finally hit the App Store,” honked Joint Managing Director Paul Taylor, as he dangled bizarrely in his harness. “We have dreamed of the day when all of humanity could scream ‘DO YOUR TURN!’ at strangers on the internet from anywhere that has wifi. Today is that day.”
Today, hypothetically, you can start a game in single player or multiplayer on your desktop and finish it on your “sleek little posh tablet, perhaps during a boring family occasion”.
A year or two ago, I fell absolutely head-over-hover-heels in love with Frozen Synapse’s tale of future tech corps at loggerheads. Imagine Syndicate’s premise, but clever. Cleverer still. It had me playing cult-of-personality Guess Who with its characters (are they Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, or both?), and managed to tell a complex, human story with nothing but oblong text boxes and a static map. Oh, and the game itself – a turn-based tactics take on Rainbow Six in which every failure is demonstrably your fault. Heavenly.
Perhaps now is the perfect time to slide into its multiplayer, which I circumvented the first time around out of fear. Will you join me?