App Review: Modern Combat 2: Black Pegasus [Video]

It’s hard to set your expectations for a first person shooter on a platform that is almost completely without them. While the genre might be one of the most popular ones around on home consoles, the style of gameplay becomes rather stifled when brought to touch screen only devices. Despite this, Gameloft is attempting to ride the popular name of Modern Warfare, a pretty bold move.

The tone is set quickly in Modern Combat 2: Black Pegasus with a flashy pre-rendered introduction but even when you’re introduced to the in engine cutscenes upon starting a new game you see that some special attention was given here to presentation. Throughout the game you’ll experience cutscenes and scripted events to drive the story forward and break up the action. The story itself is serviceable with dialog that is generally well performed, you’ll also be told to “stay frosty” numerous times, as if the phrase is part of a checklist that games of this type need to include, much like an ice level. As the story unfolds you’ll travel to several vastly different areas, many of which look terrific and show off some of the best visuals I’ve seen on Android, which helps mix up the combat, which can sometimes feel a little drab.

Getting to grips with the controls can be a little clumsy at first, getting used to the sensitivity as well as the actions of: move, crouch, turn, zoom, fire does take a little getting used to but after a few levels you’ll be taking down foes like a pro, although the enemies don’t make themselves particularly difficult targets. For the most part enemies will advance over open terrain until they are in range then start firing, with no real thought to self preservation, in closer quarters they’ll make some attempt to take cover, throw grenades and roll about on the floor, but they don’t put up much of a fight until your faced with larger numbers. The difficulty in Black Pegasus often comes from when you don’t have the opportunity to advance slowly and use cover while you’re being bombarded with large waves of targets and several levels can be extremely easy up until one difficult point, that may or may not be well checkpointed. The lack of inelegance in the AI can make combat rather repetitive on some levels although this is partially offset by the weapon variety and the different locales.

Along with the rather lengthy and enjoyable single player story, Black Pegasus also supports online multiplayer with a variety of different game modes and a persistent leveling system. Even over a regular 3G connection I never experienced any major problems with lag in online games and it is amazing to find that the technical aspects of playing online actually worked a lot better than some high profile console games. The biggest issue with the multiplayer is on a more basic level. When playing the single player story, despite the very functional control method, it doesn’t control as well as a console or PC game and the game deals with this by allowing more time to react and generally being more lenient, however, when playing against other players these same rules don’t apply. Many gunfights are won and lost by who gets the drop on whom as by the time you’ve been hit it’s generally too late to get to safety. There’s also an issue with smaller maps becoming overcrowded and this problem is compacted when playing deathmatch mode and you can simply stand behind a spawn point and just fire away as players respawn. These issues aside, playing matches online can be a great and surreal experience, jumping quickly into an online first person shooter from anywhere for a quick match is a great time passer and it’ll make you wish that more games featured online rather than local multiplayer.

Modern Combat 2: Black Pegasus isn’t without it’s faults and it’s unfortunate that its largest ones revolve around the largest part of the game, but Black Pegasus sets a very high bar for mobile first person shooters and it’s absolutely worth looking into if you’ve enjoyed games of this type on home systems.

When you’re ready, head over to the Gameloft’s store and download this game.

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