The Unreal Engine 3 on iOS Is The Future of Mobile Gaming

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Ever since Epic Games first demonstrated the Unreal Engine 3 running on the iPhone 3Gs last year, we’ve been wondering just what the creators of Gears of War and the Unreal Tournament series had in store for us when they finally turned their attentions to the App Store.

Yesterday, at Apple’s annual September iPod Event, Epic gave us our first taste of what’s to come: Epic Citadel, a free and utterly gorgeous next-gen app that works as an interactive technology demo of Unreal Engine 3 running on iOS.

The 82.2MB tech demo doesn’t include any real gameplay, per se, but as a demonstration of what iOS is capable of — particularly on the A4 CPU — it utterly breathtaking, offering a fully-realized medieval town to explore. I imagine Epic won’t be able to crank so much detail out of their engine once the bullets and bodies start flying — and they will — but even so, this is astonishing. We are looking at Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 caliber graphics here… on a device that fits in the pocket.

We didn’t think anything could look better than id software’s recent demo of the Rage engine running on the iPhone 4, but Epic’s one-upped Carmack.

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