Afterimage Mobile

The Good: Beautiful graphics. Combat feels good. There’s variety in weapons and enemies. Cloud saves work across devices, and you can play the iPad version on Mac. It’s a premium game so no in app purchases or ads or any other nonsense, and you don’t need an internet connection. The Bad: It’s very unoptimized. It will heat up your phone and drain battery pretty quickly, no matter your settings even though it’s a 2D game. This isn’t a game you want to play when you’re not near a charger. As a console port, you really need a game controller to have the best experience. The onscreen controls are surprisingly usable, but only after customizing and testing a few different layouts to make the controls fit my hands better. There’s also some confusing item descriptions and odd menus. Also somehow my main save got out of sync and won’t upload so now I can only really play on one device without losing huge progress.

Let me start by saying this is an amazing game. However, on my iPhone 14 Pro Max even after the update it gets real hot in like 30 mins or less even on the lowest setting. I find myself not wanting to play for long periods in fear of my battery deteriorating. I hope there can be even more optimization in the future. Until then I can’t give it higher then a 3 because I can’t comfortably play feeling the heat from my phone.

Completed the game. Touch controls work surprisingly well, especially when there’s so many. It helps that the game unlocks each button progressively. Only gripe is that attempts to scroll the text frequently interact with iOS app switching, and circumventing that results in accidental dialog skips.