Crescent Moon Games has unbelievably made a hero out of Rimelands: Hammer of Thor . They’ve done it again with this amazing open world RPG.

Aralon: Sword and Shadow HD (Universal: $9.99)

Aralon is giant game! It’s one of the biggest on App Store. It is long in the sense of a console game, with a giant game map to boot. This RPG will have you playing for days and weeks, if you have the time to complete it.

Presentation

Aralon looks great, and detail with such a big map is amazing. The game world feels so alive, as the sun rises and sets, campfires you can light to cook on, and lots more that will make you really feel the environment is breathing.

Aralon is universal game which means it works in the iPad’s native resolution, for the most part. While the actually gameplay is fully immersed in HD goodness, the loading screens and the navigation menus are not. However, this is a little detail that you can easily overlook.

Controls

The controls are easy to learn and work very well. The thing you focus on, a person, item, or creature will have a yellow ring around it. If you want to focus on something else, tap it. You have a d-pad on left to move. Buttons on the right change given the situation.

Walk up to a friend, and it’s a speech button to talk, go to an enemy and buttons for attack and block are there. In the middle is an action bar where you can choose up to 10 things to carry and use. These can be spells and special attacks, items, and weapons.

Gameplay

When you start the game, first thing you do is design your character. You pick if you are male, or female, then if you are a human, elf, or troll, then if you are a mage, ranger, warrior, or rogue. The gender or race doesn’t really seem to have any effect on gameplay, but class does. Every class have its own skill tree, which you unlock more as you level up.

Mages learn spells, while rangers will learn various ranged attacks. Classes also determine what weapons you can use. Warriors can’t use staffs but use swords and axes. There are lots and lots of weapons and armor to equip. You can equip 10 items what fit in them slots, all add to your attack or defence stats. It’s nice and easy to master and take no time.

You can ride houses in Aralon, which is good as they are much faster and map is large for an iPhone game and might take awhile to move around. There are loads and loads of quests and side quests to keep you busy, and good thing is they aren’t boring quests you see in most games, collect X number of these, kill X number of wolves, but different.

There are loads and loads of quests and side quests to keep you busy, and good thing is they aren’t boring quests you see in most games, collect X number of these, kill X number of wolves, but they are much more imaginative and they vary a lot more in Aralon. You are in the sewers to find a corpse to sprinkle spirit dust to talk to her sprit, next you are making a healing potion, and next you are in a cave fill of gnolls to find someone’s husband.

Suggestions

A direction indicator for a quest you pick as active would be nice, as the map is so big. Let’s bump up the navigation screens and directional arrows to the iPad’s native resolution, and this game can be easily Game of the Year.

Conclusion

Aralon is a massive game, with a massive game world, and will keep you playing for weeks with all the content it has. The story is great (which is hard to find on the App Store), some fun fighting, and lots of gameplay, with deep customization, what else do you want in a RPG?

Kudos once again to Crescent Moon Games for transforming Galoobeth Games’ already epic game into something bigger. World of Warcraft iOS will probably never happen, but this game is the closest you can get to that (at least the questing portion of it) for now.