Guardian of Light is originally a console title, and a spinoff of the usual Tomb Raider series. It was successful on the 360, but on the iPhone?

Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light (iPhone: $6.99 | iPad: $9.99 )

Instead of a third person view, you get a birds eye view of the whole level. But don’t worry, the basic things you love about Tomb Raider are still there: the grappling hook, jumping walls, fighting enemies, etc.

Presentation

Sadly the graphics aren’t really at par. The game is not retina, and does not look very good on the iPhone. Combine the low-resolution textures with audio bugs, and it doesn’t end very well. As for the iPad version, it does look a bit better thankfully, and it seems to have escaped the audio bugs, but there’s something really wrong with it (I’ll talk about this in a moment).

Controls

Sadly the controls fall apart a bit. The game acts like a dual-stick shooter, with the left one for movement and the right one for aiming and shooting, but then the UI around it is a bit cluttered. What’s worse, enemies don’t seem modified to compensate for this UI or anything.

On iPad, same controls, but this time the other buttons (jump, evade, mine-drop) are too far away from the dual-sticks. When you’re solving puzzle that require timing, it’s very difficult, and frustrating to be just a bit off. Sadly the game still feels like it was meant for a controller, which you obviously won’t have.

Gameplay

As I said above, Guardian of Light is an adaption of the Playstation / 360 version of the game for the iPhone. And it could be a very fun game, maybe one of the best dual-stick shooters out there. But sadly, it’s got way too many shortcoming. As mentioned above, graphically the game is horrible on the iPhone, as well as audio bugs. And while the iPad version escapes this, it constantly crashes.

Another thing that seemed promising about the game was the multiplayer experience through Game Center. It’s not good either. We’ve tried constantly to connect, but we could never get it to connect to another player online, and sometimes just crashed on us. As for local multiplayer, it’s slightly more successful, but not by much. There also appears to be no cross-platform multiplayer (iPad to iPhone).

Suggestions

The game feels like it’s got a lot of potential, but that Square Enix might have released it a bit early, un-cooked. If Square Enix could tighten up the game a bit more, polish it, fix the bugs, the crashing, and the cluttered UI, this could actually be a fantastic iOS game.

Conclusion

Despite it’s potential, sadly Square Enix failed to deliver this one. As tempting as it might be, I’m going to have to say to hold off this one until it’s updated.